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?
No, not quite. I’m suggesting a non-moral end goal that is the unqualified good—though I suppose, then, that we meant different things by “the sense in which delicious food or a well-executed painting or movie is ‘good’.”
If every good is relative to some goal, then every goal is entirely arbitrary. You then arrive at this absurdity:
“Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is the good war which halloweth every cause.” (Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part I.)
Well, yes, you’re right about the latter. For then we’d arrive at Rousseau’s absurdity:
“Art thou one entitled to escape from a yoke? Many a one hath cast away his final worth when he hath cast away his servitude.
Free from what? What doth that matter to Zarathustra! Clearly, however, shall thine eye show unto me: free for what?
Canst thou give unto thyself thy bad and thy good, and set up thy will as a law over thee?” (ibid.)
This is how Romanticism was the precursor of Existentialism:
“[T]he claim which [Rousseau] raises on behalf of the individual, or of some rare individuals, over against society lacks clarity and definiteness. More precisely, the definiteness of the act of claiming contrasts sharply with the indefiniteness of the content of the claim. This is not surprising. The notion that the good life consists in the return on the level of humanity to the state of nature, i.e., to a state which completely lacks all human traits, necessarily leads to the consequence that the individual claims such an ultimate freedom from society as lacks any definite human content. But this fundamental defect of the state of nature as the goal of human aspiration was in Rousseau’s eyes its perfect justification: the very indefiniteness of the state of nature as a goal of human aspiration made that state the ideal vehicle of freedom. To have a reservation against society in the name of the state of nature means to have a reservation against society without being either compelled or able to indicate the way of life or the cause or the pursuit for the sake of which that reservation is made. The notion of a return to the state of nature on the level of humanity was the ideal basis for claiming a freedom from society which is not a freedom for something. It was the ideal basis for an appeal from society to something indefinite and undefinable, to an ultimate sanctity of the individual as individual, unredeemed and unjustified. This was precisely what freedom came to mean for a considerable number of men. Every freedom which is justified by reference to something higher than the individual or than man as mere man, necessarily restricts freedom or, which is the same thing, establishes a tenable distinction between freedom and license. It makes freedom conditional on the purpose for which it is claimed. Rousseau is distinguished from many of his followers by the fact that he still saw clearly the disproportion between this undefined and undefinable freedom and the requirements of civil society. As he confessed at the end of his career, no book attracted and profited him as much as the writings of Plutarch. [At this point there’s a footnote with the reference: “Rêveries , IV (beginning).”] The solitary dreamer still bowed to Plutarch’s heroes.” (Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, “The Crisis of Modern Natural Right”.)
Yes, I think so. This answers most of the objections in the first chunk of your post, which are all correct: a moral duty to reproduce has some perverse consequences.
But there does not seem to be a tension between judging people who do reproduce positively, and not judging people who don’t reproduce negatively. You’ve made ample case for the latter, and I don’t see my claim of the former as inconsistent with that.
This is pretty close to my position. As pleasure and pain evolved to protect the individual, morality evolved to protect the group, and a “general societal goal of the species continues” is the approximately the modern version of that (I’d say “the collective” rather than “the species”, but that’s a different conversation).
But that general goal has to cash out in individual actions. As you point out, reproduction isn’t for everyone and isn’t always the right thing to do. Nevertheless reproduction bears a special relationship to “the species continues”: the species can continue in myriad ways, but all them require reproduction.
This is a hard claim to evaluate. It’s true that at T_1 the individual does not exist, and so at T_1 they are not harmed by an action that prevents them from coming into existence. But at T_2 there are two possible worlds, W_1, in which the individual exists, and W_2 in which they do not. If they would prefer to exist, then the difference between W_1 and W_2 is harmful to that individual at T_2. Even though they don’t exist now, it does seem like there’s a real harm to a hypothetical individual.
Compare a case where I set a bomb to detonate in a city center in 200 years. The people who will die or be maimed in that explosion don’t exist yet. Still, it seems that I have done something wrong, even though the only harm I do in setting the bomb is to those people who don’t exist (make whatever assumptions assure that the bomb will harm no one for 200 years; the real world is messy but I don’t think e.g. the risk of misfire is why setting the bomb is wrong). Similar to the case in point, no individual exists at T_1 that is harmed by my actions. But here it seems clear that an individual will exist who will be harmed by my actions. But there’s no particular person who will be harmed, and every individual who will ultimately be harmed is contingent on many decisions between T_1 and T_2. But my strong intuition is that it’s wrong to set the bomb. Do you disagree?
Somewhat tangentially: there are questions of personhood inherent in morality. Maybe we don’t need the 200-year-bomber intuition pump: it may not be coherent to claim a continuity of personhood through much shorter time scales. Suppose there is a deeply disabled child with little mental function, and I have developed a treatment that will cause them to rapidly develop the missing neural hardware, so that shortly after the treatment they will have mental ability similar to other children their age. If they don’t receive the treatment, they will never know, because they are incapable of knowing. If they do, they will understand what was done for them and be very happy that it happened. Do I not harm that child in depriving them of the treatment? It seems only by reference to the W_2 child, the post-treatment version who can appreciate what has happened, that we can say that the W_1 version was harmed.
I’ve implied that thinking in terms of the collective avoids this, but your points about evolution suggest otherwise: we still have the question of whether the species that descended from humans a million years from now is part of the present collective, and how to deal with the many contingent collectives that we might evolve into. I do think that the physical and informational continuity between now and then matters (as it seems to matter in the case of the disabled child), but I admit not having given it enough thought.
I think this is false. The goals of eating and of avoiding pain are not arbitrary. They’re the kind of thing that defines the concept of a ‘goal’; claims about goals are claims about [things like hunger, pain, etc.]. And morality is that type of non-arbitrary goal. Like hunger and pain, it is an innate motivation that evolved because of how it made our ancestors behave.
Goals that use these innate motivators for different purposes, e.g. good food that is delicious for the sake of being delicious, are arbitrary. But to treat those arbitrary goals as equivalent to the non-arbitrary goals for which they evolved is to make the concept of a goal incoherent, and claims that assume that equivalence are meaningless.
I think this is a different situation. That act will harm people. The harm is coming, later. Beings that will be existant will suffer harm and/or have their lives cut off. The chances are somebody will live there. And those people come into reality and are hurt. Someone gets harmed. Someone will get harmed. And in the scenario that is also my intention. The intention is to kill living humans, later on, and they will experience this harm.
And I think this still leads to absurdities around then having to have as many children as possible, with knotty issues about how close or past the poverty line one needs to go, for example. When can one say, I have had enough children. I saved as many not yet existant people from not getting to live.
I realize that you suggested the difference between it being immoral not to and being moral to. That perhaps we can view it as praiseworthy to have (more) children and not blameworthy to not have. I think that in terms of guilt and shame, these end up very close to each other.
That a person could well end up viewing masturbation, again, as shameful, given that each instance of masturbation in a male would be condemning 200 million or more people to non-existence, or the lack of s shot at it, because those genetic patterns will, most likely, not come up again. Of course, most of those potential humans would likely never have been born, but perhaps one would, so they all had a, now taken away, chance. So, that one, a potential person we can’t know the genetic make-up of, was harmed by that act of masturbation, but millions had their shot taken away.
Of course, I realize that the above - and some of my former arguments - are, in a sense, appeals to incredulity, but I am sort of hoping we’re all incredulous, so that actually I am appealing to a near-universal homo sapien preference not to think that way on good intuitive grounds.
Speaking of intuition: It also strikes me that there is a kind of hubris in treating this has harm and our responsbility to deal with. Here we are, already, in this absurd universe with a problem that really only a deity could solve. Not all possible homo sapians will be born and that’s not our fault. Most humans will be harmed, if this is harm. The vast majority is harmed.
But the fact is that we can’t even manage to live without directly or indirectly causing harm to the living - through the actions of banks we have our money in and their investments and influence, through corporations we buy products from, through the policies of our government, through questionable actions by our employers, through the use of our tax payments and so on, through our priviledge of being in the West. Here we are in a situation where it is impossible to eliminate the harm of our actions on the living and we could already spend all our time trying to discontribute to it, to minimize it…
and then, now on top of this, there is a moral obligation to create (as many as possible?) future humans so that we are not harming them by not bringing them into existence. And given that one can argue that having even more babies may well exacerbate our direct and indirect harm on the living, it seems a very messy argument at best.
My gut reaction is that this is not taking our relative powerlessness seriously and it smacks of a kind of Jesus-complex, or really a God complex.
And then I am uncertain what the effects of this obligation would actually be, given the incredibly complex and probably very hard to track effects of everyone thinking they should have more children or even that it is generally praiseworthy to have more. I am not sure how one would go about mounting a clear consequentialist argument that this would make things better. It seems to me it might makes things worse. One could mount a deontological argument, I guess, but it seems to me any such rule is better aimed at a deity or a future singularity AI that can fiddle with DNA endlessly and make every possible homo sapien and has the resourses (to make their lives decent).
If I reach the point where I can manage to not have any indirect and direct harm on currently living humans (and animals perhaps, ecosystems?) then perhaps I will reevaluate. If I am given superpowers or I come into a billion dollars, I might also rethink my relationship to the potentials of my sperm and the not presently existant humans they each might be half of genetically. But right now I think I have enough on my plate to consider being responsible for bringing more babies into the world or feeling guilt that I am harming non-existent people.
Even thinking that the guy or gal who manages to produce 8 children is deserving of more praise than someone else with less or none seems like a bizarre stretch to me. What are the effects of that? How do we weigh the effects?