Sorry, I misunderstood your point here, I interpreted the reference to an increasing population as a downside of reproduction. Rereading it, I see it as instead removing a possible motivation for treating reproduction as a moral good (i.e. if population weren’t increasing, we would have reason to encourage reproduction). Is that the intent?
I don’t buy this asymmetry. Why shouldn’t we think of someone who might have been born and lived a good life as harmed by the decision not to create them? It seems accepted that we can harm a person who hasn’t been created yet (drinking/smoking while pregnant; polluting the environment/destroying natural beauty/destroying works of art or culture as a deprivation from future generations). And ‘planting trees under whose shade you will never sit’ seems to be recognized as a morally praiseworthy act in part because the benefits it has for people who don’t exist.
I do think “and live a good life” is doing a lot of work here, and there’s also plenty of room to debate how good a new life is relative to other burdens, e.g. their parents being sad. But if we compare two cases where the average/median/mode happiness (whichever is most relevant) is equal, and one has population X and the other has population X+1, the latter is preferable, right?
I’m not a utilitarian, so maybe my intuitions are off on this – though the intuitiveness of that claim is taken for granted in Parfit’s argument about the Repugnant Conclusion, so it’s well-attested. And if it is correct, then yes: to the extent the increase is sustainable, the faster the population can increase, the better. Does that not follow?
If it does, then the gains from a nudge towards parenting – not a duty per se, but encouragement in the form of a social recognition that reproduction is morally praisworthy – would be that it would at the margin produce additional people.
I don’t think this is that different in practice from the moral diversity I would endorse, and I think that you value it for similar (though probably less explicitly practical) reasons.
In that case, I’m not sure I follow. With respect to “delicious food or a well-executed painting or movie”, I would use ‘good’ to mean something like ‘achieving the desired end’, so food is good if it is nutritious or has a pleasing taste, i.e. it does what food is meant to do.
You seem to be suggesting some non-moral “ultimate goal” that is the end of the unqualified “good”, am I reading you correctly? I don’t think that concept is meaningful – or rather the only meaning I can make of it still seems question-begging, and you’ve rejected that interpretation. A free-floating good of that kind seems to have no meaning, in the same way that the square root of something doesn’t have a fixed value until you say what the something is.
‘Moral good’ is not itself ‘food good’ or ‘music good’ or ‘art good’. It might be ‘politics good’ or ‘evolutionary fitness good’. I don’t think it’s meaningful to ask whether it’s good simpliciter.
There are several reasons I disagree here. As part of protecting the environment, we are protecting it for anyone who happens to come into being. Barrying nuclear war or the like, there will be living creatures on the earth and they in general we can expect. But there is no individual that I am harming by their not coming into existence. Further, then, I think this leads to all sorts of absurdities if we accept this as a duty. It would mean, for example, that every single woman/family should try to have as many children as possible, perhaps with some provisos around income/ability to support them. Otherwise certain specific combinations of sperm and egg/genes are not allowed to combine and become a person. Second, how does a Western middle class person view this? Is it better for them to have, say, 2 kids, or to donate their money to people in poorer nations who would then perhaps have more kids, with potentially shorter, harder lives. But given that the middle class family in the US might not be able to afford 9 kids, an African family subsidized by the middle-class americans, could probably manage to hold a 9 or more kid family through to adulthood. So, that’s more potential right now non-existent people who don’t get to be if they don’t share their money. Further why are we looking at now directly, this generation births? Why not allow people to have or not have children, with the general societal goal of the species continues, being a background value. Over the coming millions of years we can slowly, and via parents who are interested and perhaps on average better due to their interest, have children. Rather than trying to maximize immediate births? Even assuming we have a duty to create the most possible humans, I am not sure convincing everyone to have children, let alone what I think is entailed by your logic, having as many children as possible, is the best long term heuristic. What’s the rush? And might not that rush leads to poorer parenting, greater chaos, greater resource competition and perhaps then wars, with current devastating and future perhaps more devastating weapons possibly used?
Do celibate people have to give birth/be parents? If a woman does not want to have a baby, aren’t we in a sense making moral a kind of rape? Not the violence aspect (necessarily) but the treating a woman who will not have a baby as immoral? I realize no one has suggested a law enforcing this - I hope - but I think the problem with the law, highlights the problem with the moral. Seriously, I don’t think a woman who doesn’t want to have a baby is immoral. How do we dare evaulate her motivations, fears, hopes, values and decide this is an immoral act.
What do we think of masturbation? Each ejaculation in any case, would be pretty much eliminating all those specific currently non-existent people. Yes, that person might go on and later have other children. But how could he be allowed to deny the possible souls he has now elminated from the possible gene pool? He is killing them, according to the analogy. I think there’s an asymmetry, as you put it, there.
Cloning is on its way. Do we decide that having lived once at some point in enternity is ‘enough’ or do we consider someone not setting up for their own cloning, or the cloning of, say, a child who dies young, as going against duty? What use is the having once lived to the potential clones? Nothing. How many clones fit the duty and one can say, well, I made enough clones, so the possible humans I am not making, too bad for them?
Some lesser issues. No one would be allowed to get a vasectomy. No one could get their tubes tied. It seems to me many hobbies and career choices would be considered immoral.
A concert violist is an extremely demanding (time and energy wise) career. Of course many have kids, but it would sure cut down on the number. They aren’t going to have kids like farmers might in the middle ages or it would be hard to keep the career, especially for the women concert violinists, unless their husbands are willing to take over all after pregnancy work, and the women have extremely bounce back physiologies. Any interests and careers that put a damper on giving birth (and taking care of the children) would then be immoral, unless you could prove you are having as many kids as possible anyway.
Monogamy might be a problematic lifestyle choice. While the woman is pregnant - if it is a heterosexual couple - the man could be producing children with other women who do not have mates?
I have a sense also that this ends up being quite sexist, unless we have test tube wombs that is. That women will end up, as they often are now, blamed for not wanting to have children vastly more than men, given how it generally ends up in terms of career interference, time away from other things for women and their necessary role in pregnancy so far.
Gay men - are they immoral if they don’t donate sperm to single women, lesbian couples, etc.? What kind of parenting is expected? I think I asked before, should bi people be considered acting immorally if they fall in love and stay with a same sex life partner?
If I haven’t had much luck with women or men as a hetero, should I stay with someone I don’t really like in the hopes that I get to procreate?
What are the effects of all the strange judging of people that is entailed by this duty to procreate? What side effects does this have? How do we track these? How do we track the effects of more people having babies and more babies? These effects may be hard to track, but they are there. We often pretend that the hard to track stuff isn’t there. We can’t track it, so we don’t have to consider it.
I think there are other absurdities that are entailed by this duty, but I’d better stop here.
I think 1) I don’t want a society to have the right to even investigate this in a way to come up with an answer that might be right. IOW I think we would have to start tracking some of those very hard to track variables and I think this is heading into state-surveillance at dystopic levels. 2) I have no idea. Remember that the attitude aimed at people will be present in such a society, not just the extra person.
I think there are very good deontological reasons not to start judging people for not having babies. Who do those judging think they are? Ánd aren’t there intuitive reasons one might know, without being able to prove it, that one is unfit to be a parent, yet fit to contribute to society in other ways?
OK, not a duty, and then hopefully one isnt’ considered immoral if one doesn’t have children. Perhaps we are not so far apart. But I don’t by the symmetry of murder and not doing what might let a nonexistant being have a life. I think that kind of morality is something one can demand of a deity, but not of individual humans or evens societies. Further I have concerns that if this was accepted as a sound moral judgment, the long term effects might lead to even less human beings coming into existence.
How do we feel then about evolution?
In a million years, should humans survive, they will be, likely, moving away from certain genes and toward others. So who types of humans will not be getting born anymore. Do those future civilizations have an obligation to store homo sapien dna - as much as possible - so they can, for example set up solar systems with homo sapiens even when they have now evolved into something else?
Do we have an obligation to go back in time? Once we have better gene splice tech are we obligated to try to give birth to any possible sentient being? Mixing human and animal DNA to come up with individual who would never be born through natural means, but that’s no reason to do what is equivalent to murdering them?