Is this true of instrumental moral goods? It seems not, since it seems consistent to hold that something is an instrumental moral good in moderation but not in excess. I lean toward reproduction being an instrumental moral good, but I’m still uncertain about that.
Even if it’s an ultimate moral good, “as possible” can do a lot of work here. It depends on what counts as “reproduction”, something I haven’t discussed, (though I now realize this issue was implicit in some of @GaryChildress’s criticisms as well). If reproduction only counts if it produces people who are themselves capable of reproduction, that would put significant limits on how many children a person could have, since each new child competes for resources with the last and therefore decreases the likelihood that each child will live to reproduce themselves.
It would also address some of the other issues you and @greenfuse raise around overpopulation and environmental capacity, since creating new humans in numbers that threaten to collapse earth’s ecosystem would not be “reproduction”. That seems a bit convenient, but it fits with the motivating moral framework of functional morality, which is concerned with the integrity of the group.
This topic was motivated in part as a response to the moral arguments of antinatalism; how do we deal with a case where different sides of a question disagree with whether the question is moral vs. amoral, or instrumentally vs. ultimately moral?
Your policy questions about how to balance societies’ and individuals’ interests in reproduction are interesting and I’d be interested to discuss them more, but I think they’re beyond the scope of this topic.
I’m not sure I understand this distinction, possibly because I do see moral good as continuous. But in that case, we may only disagree as to where reproduction falls along the continuum; is it productive to rank moral goods?
We should be cautious with this kind of question, as it can be question begging with respect to the nature of morality.
My claim isn’t exactly that ‘means to genetic survival’ is what ‘good’ is, but I’ll use it to illustrate the point: if we define it that way, we can rephrase your question as, “Is a means to genetic survival itself a means to genetic survival?” I don’t think that’s the question you mean to ask, and I take from your final sentence that you think morality has something to do with subjective experience. So it seems question begging: there’s an implied premise that good isn’t means to genetic survival.
This is well said, and sums up a type of criticism that required a moderation of the position, i.e. that having children can’t be a duty, it’s just better all-else-being-equal. Individuals may choose to do different good; their choices should be considered on net. But in tallying the net of someone’s moral life, having children is in the positives column.
It can still be bad to be mean to your kids, and good to adopt. They’re just separate acts. A doctor who works in refugee camps is doing something good, and anyone who decides not to be a doctor to refugees forgoes a certain good act, but may choose other good acts in its place.
One response is what I said in my response to @Prismatic567 above: if increasing population will collapse the ecosystem, then there is a greater harm outweighing the moral good of reproduction.
But I’d also challenge the idea that overpopulation is a problem. Population is increasing, but the rate at which it is increasing is falling, and it is projected to level off this century at ~10 billion. That’s a lot more people, but it’s not a significant portion of the planet’s biomass.
And maybe you’re worried about pollution, but new humans aren’t the primary source of pollution, that’s driven by increasing wealth in the developing world. Fortunately, energy use per person in the developed world has been falling for half a century despite the digital boom, a trend driven by technological advancements that is likely to continue, so a 25% increase in population will be more than offset by increases in efficiency (even setting aside energy production is getting cleaner).
(most of those links are to charts; the only exception is the one about biomass, and there’s a good chart halfway down the page)
I agree with this as well, I said some things to that effect another thread, where I compare moral diversity to environmental diversity to argue that a society with different and competing moral systems is likely to be more resilient than one where everyone has the same moral system.
I think that’s consistent with a metaethics of functional morality. It’s less consistent with a claim that a particular act is a moral good in all moral systems, as I make here. But just as murder is wrong in almost all moral systems, it could be that reproduction is good in all consistent moral systems. That has an appealing symmetry.
“Moral good” is a little redundant, though it does distinguish the moral sense of the word from other senses, e.g. the sense in which delicious food or a well-executed painting or movie is ‘good’.
I think if I’d called this topic, “Reproduction is Good”, it would have gotten a very different response.
I agree with this. Functional morality just adds the observations that ‘mental attributes we are born with’ are also known as ‘instincts’, that instincts evolved because they helped our ancestors survive and reproduce, and so we can know morality by considering the function that the moral instinct played in helping our ancestors survive and reproduce.