New Carleas: Whatever else the evolutionary origins of morality entail, they create the strong presumption that reproduction is a moral good.
Morality is an instinct in humans; while specifics differ, the existence of some moral system is a human universal. Humans (and some other social animals) instinctively adopt moral beliefs, both about their own behavior and the behavior of others. Humans lacking those instincts, or in whom those instincts are repressed or stunted, or viewed as mentally disabled.
The evidence of moral sentiments in non-human animals in particular suggests that these instincts are not accidental, but evolved: that theyâve been selected for because the organisms who have them tend to be âfitterâ in the evolutionary sense. In social species, moral instincts increased fitness.
Part of this effect is, as âOld Carleasâ points out, the way in which morality creates stable groups. In a social species, the line between individual and society is more porous than in solitary species, so an adaptation that benefits the group might be selected for if it benefits the group even if itâs not particularly beneficial to the individual. Morality certainly seems to help the group, by increasing cooperation and enabling the group to compete against common threats almost as a single organism.
But individual selection still matters â arguably, it continues to dominate. The prominence of morality among humans suggests that it is not only beneficial for the group, but for the individual, i.e. that even within a group, the moral members have a fitness advantage over the immoral members of the group.
This suggests that, under a meta-ethics of functional morality, individual genetic reproduction is one of the ends of morality.
This isnât to the exclusion of other functional ends of morality: the perpetuation of the group, the preservation of the environment in which the individual and the group live, the very broad consideration of various theories of groups election â individual genetic reproduction is not the only moral good.
Nor is it necessarily the highest moral good. The balance between competing functional ends is an open question, to be sure, and given the degree to which morality is a set of shared conventions across the group, significant weight should be given to group interests where those interests conflict with individual interests in genetic reproduction. To be specific, the fact that genetic reproduction is a moral good does not justify asocial behavior in pursuit of reproduction.
But it should be considered presumptively good: certeris paribus, having children is morally preferable to not having children.
Reproduction is a necessity if we want our species to survive, but Iâm not sure I would call it a moral good.
Morality is the collection of principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour, or the differentiation of intentions, decisions, and actions between those distinguished as proper and those improper. As such, it seems to arise from trial and error, and the survivors assume their strategy to be right, proper, or appropriate as a result.
If everybody decides to have no kids, there is no one to learn from the error. If one couple decides that it is less of a problem.
It is considered mentally unstable if you permanently endanger your health or the health of your family and friends. But in most Western societies, you can essentially do what you want in your personal freedom, as long as you donât infringe on other peopleâs freedom or break any laws. It is generally referred to as âcommon sense,â but I wouldnât see it as strictly instinctive. There is an impulse to look for your own good, but good behaviour is generally instilled by upbringing, not instinct.
Animals arenât moral. They can appear to follow a code of morality, but it is often the hierarchy of the pack that is adhered to, which is enforced rather than instilled. They can show emotions like affection and jealousy, they protect the herd â especially the young, and can learn from constantly being with human beings, but it is dangerous to assume that an animal has assumed a moral position. Too often, people who have lived amongst wild animals find that the animals turn on them for whatever reason, mostly when they reach sexual maturity, or feel they are stronger, or if they assume that their mate is being taken from them. A guy who had lived with bears for years had a girlfriend who joined him, and just after they were both found dead, mauled by the bears.
When single organisms are mentioned, single-cell organisms exhibit behaviours that can be interpreted as reciprocal. For example, bacteria can engage in quorum sensing, where they release signalling molecules to communicate and coordinate actions. This cooperation can benefit individual cells and the group as a whole. On the other hand, morality is a complex concept and often involves reciprocal actions, where individuals cooperate and reciprocate to maintain social harmony and well-being, but we must ask: Does the presence of reciprocal behaviour in single cells suggest a rudimentary form of morality in all living beings? How does understanding the biological basis of cooperation inform our understanding of human morality?
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Ultimately, whether procreation is considered a moral good or a basic need depends on oneâs worldview and ethical framework.
From a more secular or utilitarian perspective, procreation can be seen as a basic biological need driven by instincts for survival and reproduction. In this view, individuals are motivated to procreate by evolutionary imperatives to ensure the survival of their genes. While procreation may fulfil biological drives and desires, it is not inherently morally good or bad. Instead, the moral implications arise from how individuals choose to fulfil this need and the consequences of their actions on themselves, their offspring, and society.
Some ethical and religious perspectives view procreation as a moral duty or a positive good. In these views, bringing new life into the world is seen as participating in the continuation of the human species and fulfilling a natural or divine purpose. Proponents of this view often emphasise the value of family, parenthood, and the bonds created through procreation. They may argue that raising children contributes to societyâs well-being and fosters personal growth and fulfilment.
What Iâm calling âfunctional moralityâ is the meta-ethical idea that morality is the product of an evolved instinct in humans, rather than a fact the exists outside of humans to be discovered in the world. It is secular by supposition, and realist and pluralist as a consequence.
Itâs realist because there is a ground truth: evolutionary fitness. It inherits all the uncertainty of that concept, but it is nonetheless a ground truth.
It is pluralist because the specific moral systems that flow from the instinct vary. The instinct is for 1) certain basic subjective moral sentiments like âgoodâ and âbadâ, and 2) a developmental scaffolding that leads those sentiments to be attached to certain social behaviors. The specific behaviors differ by the specific constraints of the group, as well as by the random walk of cultural evolution; the developmental scaffolding only causes the group to settle on a set of norms and expectations about how to behave.
Because it is evolved, it necessarily exists or existed, in at least a rudimentary form, in non-human animals â for example, the pre-human animals that evolved into humans. It doesnât exist in all animals, and it doesnât mean that animals that have it will have a morality that includes humans as moral patients. But we can see rudimentary morality in social animals, particularly our close animal relatives. Behaviors that suggest animal morality include: reacting angrily when they are paid less for the same task; refusing to electrically shock another animal to get food for themselves; risking their lives to save a pack mate â or even an animal of a different species.
We might say these behaviors arenât âmoralâ, because they are somehow self-interested, but human morality too is often self-interested, as when doing the right thing avoids punishment or social repercussions. If we say that nothing that animals do is moral, we would also need to exclude many human behaviors that are usually understood to be moral.
If human morality looks more complex, itâs because the human ability to abstract â and to believe in abstractions â is significantly greater than in animals. As we can feel pain when our favorite sports team loses, so too can we associate moral sentiments with symbols and myths.
And this goes in the other direction as well: you mention single-cell organisms, and I donât think thereâs a problem with identifying something in common between the reciprocal behavior of those organisms and the more complex reciprocal behavior we call morality. Cooperation is often a good evolutionary, and morality is just one of those strategies. Where little more than chemical reactions are enough to trigger cooperation at the level of single cells, in more complex life we see more complex behaviors, and in its most complex form in humans we see group consensus building around abstract moral principles.
But the principles should be constrained by the meta-ethics.
To take an analogy, pleasure and pain are also evolved instincts that increase fitness: calorie-rich foods and sex are pleasurable; physical damage and social rejection are painful. But because we can understand this, we can also understand that, though surgery hurts, we shouldnât avoid it; and though drugs feel pleasurable, we shouldnât overindulge in them.
The argument Iâm making here is that a moral principle like antinatalism is similarly a mistake. Though it feels like itâs âgoodâ because of the complex social and cultural abstractions that justify it, it undermines the pursuit of evolutionary fitness on which the very concept of the good is based. Reproduction must be a moral good at the margin, because thatâs where the rubber meets the road in evolution.
Who are you to halt 1000âs of years of ancestry and progress to bring you into being? And for selfish reasons no doubt. To âprotect your environmentâ or ânot being readyâ.
The worldâs population is fine, thereâs plenty of land still. Sounds like Bill Gates population control bs propaganda. Go to Klamath falls Oregon and you can see all the open land yourself. Go do the drive from Oregon to Nevada and see, tons of open land.
If we want to decrease carbon footprint maybe we could figure out a way to farm while decreasing emissions, has nothing to do with population and more to do with HOW we do things.
That is not a good view to take. Let me try to explain why.
Many people do not and will not ever procreate. That is normal. In any given generation only a percentage of people will participate successfully in the production of the next generation.
Populations cycle up and down, depending on the carrying capacity of the environment. Humans are funny in that we broke the wheel of evolution, or so we think. We may reach the carrying capacity in certain locales that are very saturated with people crammed into small spaces, but generally the earth is pretty empty. Lots more people could migrate to open spaces and the earth could theoretically sustain 10x or 100x the current population of humans. Of course technology will play a part in that, things like energy and food and waste disposal etc.
Some people will have kids, some wonât. The tragedy is on a personal level. Imagine: you, and every other human alive today, is the beneficiary of countless generations of ancestors successfully procreating all the way back to the beginning. Each living person could trace a family tree back to the beginning, thatâs how it works. The closer that tree gets to you in the present moment the more it starts to look like you, approximate you genetically and phenotypically. Imagine you are the only kid of your parents, and you donât have kids. You just killed their legacy. That is a personal tragedy for you and them, perhaps for several generations of their ancestors in so far as they didnât yet have other tree-branches. But go back far enough and it doesnât matter. Now, go far enough in the future and it also doesnât matter.
In the end, things level out. The species will be fine. Until it isnât. But you having kids or not isnât going to alter any long-term outcomes. So long as you can either deal with, manage-compensate for, or be ignorant of the personal tragedy to yourself and your parents and immediate family line that is your own personal failure to successfully procreate, itâs all good. Trust me, plenty of other people are going to fuck and have kids. Humanity will be ok. Until it isnât. But you or me ainât gonna alter those more final outcomes with our own particular families or lack thereof.
Now on another note, smart people should have kids since itâs mostly dumb people who are having kids these days, at least in western countries (or should I say, as applies to white people). Then again âwhiteâ people (European ethnicities) have seemingly decided to suicide themselves. Not sure what to make of that, but eh. It is what it is.
Now of course the idea of not having kids because of âmuh climate changeâ is retarded. Anyone who thinks like that is certifiable and would benefit from a lobotomy. Such nonsense has nothing to do with my own ideas on this topic. Human life is sacred, all sentience is inherently valuable, abortion and other forms of murder are immoral, having kids and families is good. Beyond all that, it you personally have kids or not is just up to you and your circumstances, and wonât really affect things long-term in any way you could possible foresee or plan for one way or another. Itâs a personal ethic involving you and your immediate ancestry. But each generation purges many family lines, while other keep expanding and branching in new and unexpected ways. Thatâs life, itâs not really a teleological process so much as an ex post facto âwhat happens, happensâ adaptation-process.
Hell, you could probably contribute more to humanity and the survival of billions of people in the future by writing some kick ass philosophy books or doing some otherwise noble acts, than just having a few kids. All things being equal of course. Donât get me wrong, having kids is awesome, families are very important and the basis of meaning and morality in the world. But the whole idea of everyone being morally obligated to have kids is an oversimplification at best.
Reproduction/survival is good if it treats the other (who has the same basic features of selfness) as self, and bad if it doesnât. It is neither morally good nor morally bad in and of itselfâit is a neutral good.
Regarding human reproductionâs impact on other species: We are only considered responsible as far as we are aware. If you are aware that a creature from another species elicits an empathic response (or a âlike me, or like my kindâ conclusion) from you, you must treat it as self at that level of empathy/conclusion.
So I am justified in squishing potentially or actually poisonous spiders who have shown me no sign of sentience. I am not a researcher who can utilize their poison for human/sentience health purposes.
Having childrens doesnât make you a good dude, though in another way I mean you gave a number of persons the indescribable gift of, you know, existing, so thereâs that.
What makes you a good dude is making a home for them. Thatâs the difference between someone that did something (almost unspeakably) good once, and a good dude.
Extinction would happen regardless of human interaction and has been for a long time, this isnât concrete proof that reproduction or human life in general is a bad or not morally good thing.
Some of the reasons why I view reproduction as morally good.
A. We cannot solve problems with the same minds that create them, something Einstein had stated. (Evolution and new thought is necessary.)
B. Preservation of genetics (not as good if only ignorant people breed and spread their lack, context matters.)
C. Can lead to negative mutations being selectively bred out and advantageous mutation to continue.
Iâm not sure I agree. First, just intuitively, I donât see any reason to take morality to be a binary. There seem to be moral obligations and prescriptions, and things that are morally good or bad that are still morally non-obligatory or permissible. An example might giving all of your money to charity, which most people would see as morally praiseworthy, but few would say is obligatory or that anyone who doesnât do it is âevilâ.
Similarly here. After all, even if someone has reproduced, similar arguments can still be made that they should reproduce again. And again.
But in particular, functional morality doesnât seem to imply a moral binary, not least because of the significant uncertainties in what will increase fitness and over what timescales. Something can increase or decrease fitness in degrees, or increase it while leading it towards an evolutionary dead end. As I say, reproduction is a moral good at the margin, it is not the only or highest moral good.
I strongly disagree with this. Itâs perfectly consistent to say that something is evil and punishing that thing is also evil. An obligation to punish evil is an independent moral claim.
The worldâs population is plateauing and falling in most of the developed world. The global fertility rate is 2.39 and falling according to Our World in Data:
Thatâs compared against replacement rate of 2.1, which the US and Western Europe are already well below.
And carbon footprints are going to increase much more due to the developing worldâs rising standard of living than by the marginal child born in the developed world. Per capita carbon emissions in the developed world are falling. But new people help make the technological advances that drive falling carbon emissions.
What percent of that is due to overpopulation, though? Humans drove plenty of species to extinction with very small populations (see the mass extinction of megafauna in Australia and the Americas).
If youâre arguing that humans should just go extinct, I disagree, but that seems to be the only way to prevent us from driving other animals to extinction.
Self/other could be consistent with functional morality. How does self/other deal with hypothetical selves? I am glad to have been born, donât I therefor have an obligation to give that gift to others by reproducing?
Reproducing and then parenting so badly that you create someone who is a net drain on the group seems to be immoral. Because, from a functional morality perspective, morality exists in large part to make cooperation easier, and giving children a good home makes them better cooperators, giving children a good home is also a moral good, and seems decisive in deciding whether a particular act of reproduction is a moral good.
Jesus did, in the context of excess wealth when there are poor. Thatâs why the rich man (letâs say he had gained the whole world) walked away hanging his head (dejected/lost). Where your treasure isâŚ
What is the context into which the self will be conceived? We are responsible as far as we are aware. We cannot tell the future, but as far as we are able to see how things are happening now and forecast based on past experience, it may not be the most favorable context in which to conceive a child. That does not necessarily mean that we donât do it. But do we have the tools, or know others who will help, to equip them for the circumstances? Not by compulsion, mind you â and not in a way that enables (codependently) a child who knows enough to equip themselves.
It looks to me though as if your use of âmoralâ here is superfluous, which is my problem with all these materialistic substitutions of traditional subjects. What would change if you bypassed âmoralâ altogether and just said âconducive to survival.â You seem to be saying that moral goodness and survival fitness are equivalent, and since the second more clearly states the actual purpose, it kind of makes morality redundant.
In other words, you are saying morality is an illusion developed evolutionarily to foster survivability. So now that you evolved to figuring that out, the illusion becomes meaningless. Philosophically, you did nothing. All such Darwinian supposed explanations equally explain nothing.
The mass extinctions and loss of biodiversity, the pollution and all of that, is caused by huge corporations. Not by âover populationâ. Corporations being greedy and not giving a shit if they pollute or cause extinctions and biodiversity collapse.
This is a trick they always play on us, they blame us âyou and me, the little people, the population at largeâ for these problems when in reality it is they, those super-rich in charge and who own and control the billion-dollar companies that makes these decisions to pollute, include toxic ingredients in their products, not test for safety, and mass-produce cheap throwaway crap products with in-built planned obsolescence.
You and me arenât causing environmental ruin. Those with multiple mansions, personal jets, billions of dollars in wealth and control over huge international corporations are. But they also control the media, NGOs and government officials and so they spin the narrative that itâs all our fault.
In truth the entire human population of earth could fit in the state of Texas, with everyone living in regular 4-bedroom homes with a yard and garage. The earth is huge. Overpopulation has to do with density in certain areas that are poorly managed, thatâs it.
Iow, if you are going to say something is good, you have to explain why. Saying it is an evolutionary illusion does not let you off the hook, as it negates itself.
If you want, you can make the argument that making babies is morally good because it helps humanityâs continued survival. But already you can see how clunky that argument is when posed directly like that, with honesty.