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Roderick

Is having children immoral?

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I’d like to start a discussion on something that might be kind of dangerous territory. Actually, I don’t know how people will react, but the topic seems to be the sort of thing that is either avoided or frowned upon. At least, I’ve never seen this discussion in any real form anywhere. From the start I want to stress that I’m not out to be insulting or contrary or whatever: you folks are the smartest people I know on the web and I’m looking for an honest, intellectual debate.

The thing that I’m concerned with is: might it not be immoral to have children? Let me briefly describe my reasoning.

1. Life isn’t so great. Wait, that sounds terribly depressing. The thing is, I’m quite a cheerful and optimistic person, but when I look around and see how the world is, and experience the hardships of living in my own small way (knowing that I am among the top 1% of luckiest people alive, ever), I can’t but conclude that life is hard. The thing is, even when you lead the most blessed life imaginable: you are healthy, wealthy, find love and friendship, have caring parents, live in a beautiful environment… you still have to face your own mortality and eventually die. You will lose those you love. You will grow old and decrepit. You will in your lifetime suffer disease and perhaps succumb to it. You will most likely have to struggle your entire life to get by financially and be always at risk of ruination. That doesn’t nullify the good things in life, such as playing video games and finding love and listening to David Bowie, but neither is the reverse true. Life is a struggle. Would I want to do that to my children?

2. Making a child is spinning the wheel of fortune. You don’t know and can’t guarantee that your kid won’t be born with some terrible sickness or disability. Who knows whether they’ll develop any number of wasting diseases in their life? What if their life is full of misery that is completely out of their control? That’s such a frightening thought! I don’t want to gamble with the health and happiness of my theoretical kids. And the older you get, the more plentiful the tales become of the people who got the short end of the stick. I look around and see people suffering every day. Whoops, you got cancer, a muscle disease, a bad heart, suffered an accident and are now in chronic, unbearable pain. If you have children, you basically spin the wheel and cross your fingers it’ll land on something good.

At the end of the day, it boils down to this. I would want nothing but the absolute best for my children. As such, I think they may be best served by not existing at all. I understand that getting children is culturally and to some degree biologically hardwired, and from the perspective of the parents it makes sense to get kids: you are cared for in old age, the idea of starting a family/dynasty, finding a purpose in your existence by rearing new life, maybe you love babies, etc. But from the perspective of the child, nobody asked them to live, and it might even be an unwanted gift.

For the record: I do not hate life or people. I’m not a nihilist. Once life is there, I think it is worth fighting for and one must strive to make the absolute best out of it, not just of their own but of everyone’s. And there are plenty of good things too in life, and worthwhile things. But to create life, which happens solely for the pleasure of the parent (even though the experience may be far from pleasurable at some times!), is a different thing altogether.

I think it’s worthwhile to discuss this and am very interested in the reactions. Please don’t be angry, I’m not attacking anyone here that might already have kids. I’m just trying to sort this out, and I understand that this is all theory and philosophy – and not actually practical in life, because people are not steered by philosophy and morality in any absolute way.

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1. Life isn’t so great. Wait, that sounds terribly depressing. The thing is, I’m quite a cheerful and optimistic person, but when I look around and see how the world is, and experience the hardships of living in my own small way (knowing that I am among the top 1% of luckiest people alive, ever), I can’t but conclude that life is hard. The thing is, even when you lead the most blessed life imaginable: you are healthy, wealthy, find love and friendship, have caring parents, live in a beautiful environment… you still have to face your own mortality and eventually die. You will lose those you love. You will grow old and decrepit. You will in your lifetime suffer disease and perhaps succumb to it. You will most likely have to struggle your entire life to get by financially and be always at risk of ruination. That doesn’t nullify the good things in life, such as playing video games and finding love and listening to David Bowie, but neither is the reverse true. Life is a struggle. Would I want to do that to my children?

I don't have much to contribute to this discussion, but to me it seems like an unnecessary complication to ask whether you want your potential children (whose actual existence depends on your answer) to experience life. Are you, on average, grateful that you exist? Do you want to keep on living? And so on. If you, despite the various hardships associated with life, enjoy being alive, then chances are that your children might too.

Also, reasoning that perhaps something shouldn't exist in the first place because that would mean that it would one day have to perish feels a bit bizarre to me. Equally puzzling is the whole concept of "unwanted gift" when discussing something that, by definition, does not even exist before the "gift" is given. Granting the gift of non-existence to nothingness. Hmm...

I would also like to hear your reasoning behind the creation of life happening solely for the pleasure of the parent.

(NOTE: I don't have and I don't want to have kids for purely selfish reasons.)

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I don't have much to contribute to this discussion, but to me it seems like an unnecessary complication to ask whether you want your potential children (whose actual existence depends on your answer) to experience life. Are you, on average, grateful that you exist? Do you want to keep on living? And so on.

That's what I was just about to add. It's also worth noting that the GDP of the country you live in doesn't directly correllate to happiness of the people living there. You may look at other, poorer, countries and feel sorry for them, but those that live there might be very happy to be alive indeed. Same goes for people born with illnesses and disabilities.

This also falls under the "knowing what's best for someone else" category. I personally don't think you can EVER know what's best for someone else. You may GUESS correctly sometimes, but it's ultimately not up to you to decide what's best. You may hate the idea of having a delibilitating illness, but that doesn't mean someone living with it would automatically wish they'd never been born.

A better solution to all of the problems you highlighted is to try and make the world a better place for everyone who's in it, and everyone who may yet come into it.

I believe that this is, and can only ever be, a personal decision. I'm not sure there could ever be a definitive answer that would satisfy everyone :-/ If you decide that you do consider it immoral to have children, don't get angry with those who believe differently.

Personally, I don't think it's immoral. There are certain circumstances which may make me believe it's irresponsible, but, as a whole, not immoral.

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Personally, I don't think it's immoral. There are certain circumstances which may make me believe it's irresponsible, but, as a whole, not immoral.

I think that's a good distinction. There are a bunch of grounds on which you could argue that having children isn't right (environmental ones, for instance), but the fact that they might suffer, raised by fairly privileged people in a developed nation, is probably the most esoteric I've heard.

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Some people are fairly convinced it's immoral: Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

And this subreddit is a bit off the charts: http://www.reddit.com/r/childfree

Pretty much every religion considers it the opposite of immoral, but my personal opinion is that's a preservation system. Ensuring that you breed as much as possible to give the population of that religion a better chance at thriving, and displacing other religions. And though I think that's a terrible way to basically use breeding as a weapon, it's hard to not think that other people are already using it and it may be the right thing to join in. If you want the future of our species to follow your beliefs more than those of other people, then one way to do that is to breed and train as many disciples as you can.

Personally I'm comfortable not having kids for a long time. They're an insane amount of work, and I'm not sure it's actually possible to prepare for the experience.

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Pretty much every religion considers it the opposite of immoral, but my personal opinion is that's a preservation system. Ensuring that you breed as much as possible to give the population of that religion a better chance at thriving, and displacing other religions. And though I think that's a terrible way to basically use breeding as a weapon, it's hard to not think that other people are already using it and it may be the right thing to join in. If you want the future of our species to follow your beliefs more than those of other people, then one way to do that is to breed and train as many disciples as you can.

Surely this doesn't answer the question though. Saying "it's a preservation system" doesn't answer the "is it immoral" question. It only answers the "why do people do it" question. Certainly people do some things that are moral and some things that are immoral. Having children falls into one of these categories, or both, or neither. So what is your opinion on that?

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Surely this doesn't answer the question though. Saying "it's a preservation system" doesn't answer the "is it immoral" question. It only answers the "why do people do it" question.
What I was saying is that traditionally having children is the opposite of immoral. I think a lot of the things that are considered immoral by religions (like homosexuality) are rooted in the idea that people are shirking off their duty to procreate.

And that I think that's an outdated philosophy.

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Well traditionally all sorts of silly things have been considered immoral, but that doesn't mean they were right about it. The title of the thread isn't "what did people 100 years ago think about the morality of having children," right? Why should we care about what religion thinks, especially if it's an outdated philosophy? Shouldn't we make up our own minds one way or the other?

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Well traditionally all sorts of silly things have been considered immoral, but that doesn't mean they were right about it. The title of the thread isn't "what did people 100 years ago think about the morality of having children," right? Why should we care about what religion thinks, especially if it's an outdated philosophy? Shouldn't we make up our own minds one way or the other?

It is clear enough that Forbin was not trying to answer the orignal question but instead raise an interesting historical point related to the discussion.

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I think the question ties into whether or not you think we have an obligation to hypothetical future people (The obvious downfall of this being that if we act differently, the people who would have existed won't and different people will exist, so anything we do will result in the non-existence of an infinite amount of potential people), as well as the nature of said obligation. Personally, I am more concerned with the general world we leave to said people, and a consequence of this for me is that the concern of overpopulation is the main thing which would prevent me from having children. On the other hand, as Forbin says, it is intimidating as hell to see the amount of people being raised with ideals that I personally see as naive at best and destructive at worst. Naive is (in most cases) fine, and doesn't hurt anyone. My view of religion is that anyone can believe whatever the hell they want as long as they don't push it on others (and that goes for all those atheists who make the rest of us look bad as well), unless and until it becomes a cause of harm through action or non-action, and that some of the beliefs that current children are being raised with promote all of the above is very troubling to me. Further, the parents of these children don't seem particularly concerned with the same kind of thoughts that would prevent me from having children who would argue against them. Rather than fighting this by aggressive procreation, however, I chose to become an educator. As I said, I don't like evangelists of any kind, but in a lot of cases even being exposed to the idea that other beliefs exist and may have a point can be enough for someone (especially a young someone) to realize what aspects of their own beliefs may be dangerous.

Full disclosure: though intellectually, I can't really rationalize adding a child of my own to the world, I've always really wanted to raise a little girl and still hope to do so one day. Can't justify it, aside from it just being something that I want to do with my life, but I still hope to. I may go the adoption route, and honestly it's probably more "moral" or whatever than adding one more baby to the world, but something about the idea of going to a place and choosing a child puts me off. I know it's a shitty stance to have, especially given how badly so many of those kids need loving families, but something intangible about it bothers me. My brain tells me it would be the right thing to do, especially given my own concerns about adding more people to the world, but my gut doesn't like it for some reason. Maybe that's just some internalized shit from my childhood rearing its head up, I don't know. Probably. Lots of time to figure that out though. I'm only 25 and starting on my first real career path. Thinking about my own child-raising is quite a bit away.

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I may go the adoption route, and honestly it's probably more "moral" or whatever than adding one more baby to the world, but something about the idea of going to a place and choosing a child puts me off. I know it's a shitty stance to have, especially given how badly so many of those kids need loving families, but something intangible about it bothers me.
Do you mean that you feel like you're giving an unfair advantage to a certain kid because you're making a conscious choice based on personal preferences rather than a genetic dart toss? Because while I can empathize, I personally would rather see kids chosen to go to families that are prepared to deal with their specific problems than get born into a family that's not prepared to tolerate who they are.

While I think that the ultimate answer here is that we should probably more concerned about making the future a better place for everyone's potential children, it's becoming increasingly obvious that we're expanding at a rate that we simply don't have the resources to support. Check this shit out:

OwjJj.png

Terrifying.

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That guy seemed like he wanted to say religion wasn't important, but I think that prosperity factor is also representative of people being less orthodox. Access to "family planning" as he calls it, and women joining the workforce are both significant factors that are limited by religions.

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Thanks so far for the contributions, people, and animated GIF Maru. The reason for posting this is that my thinking on the matter has grinded to a halt at the train station I put down in the first post, and I hope that further ideas will jumpstart the locomotive.

I had kind of predicted that this conversation could quickly evolve into two things: one being practical reasons not to have children (such as overpopulation and dwindling resources), the other a discussion on whether having children is a "selfish" thing, which Nappi briefly touched upon. Both are interesting discussions, but they have little to do with the inherent (im)morality of having kids. I'm not looking to convert, nor am I saying I will never have kids myself. Just want fresh ideas.

Thunderpeel: when you say that you can't know what's best for someone else, that only illustrates how much of gamble you take by forcing existence on someone. You don't know whether they'll appreciate it in the first place. Once you do, it's too late to do anything about it.

Nachimir: I am all too aware how blessed our lives are here, but no amount of luxury and comfort can alleviate certain kinds of suffering, which are real and universal: experiencing pain and anxiety. Those aren't first world problems, anyone can have them.

Miffy: I understand that evolutionarily speaking, the idea of not procreating is a short-lived one: exactly one generation ;)

TED: Great talk on children. So, this Hans man uses statistics to predict a population of 10 billion and no more? That's a surprising, and new, number. I'd be very happy if that turns out to be the case!

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Miffy: I understand that evolutionarily speaking, the idea of not procreating is a short-lived one: exactly one generation ;)

This is the part that I find the most perplexing in the idea that having children may be somehow fundamentally immoral. If following a certain moral code, almost by definition, leads to the extinction of the whole human race and with it the collapse of the entire moral system, then what is the point? Especially when much of our core moral code (at least seemingly) stems from the question of survival as a family/group/tribe/civilization/species. A hunter-gatherer tribe of stabbers does not survive for long. Neither does a society of incestors. Or a childless civilization.*

I'm not saying that all people have moral obligation to have children — they don't — but I find it hard to see how having children could somehow be inherently immoral. I also completely agree with Thunderpeel and Nachimir, having children may still be irresponsible in certain cases.

Thunderpeel: when you say that you can't know what's best for someone else, that only illustrates how much of gamble you take by forcing existence on someone. You don't know whether they'll appreciate it in the first place. Once you do, it's too late to do anything about it.

I still have issues with this part as well. It is not a gamble where you first roll a dice to see how the child's life will turn out and then check whether not existing would have been a better solution. It simply does not make sense to me to compare "a good life" or "a bad life" to non-existing, because non-existence is not a zero in the happiness scale (how would you even define this scale, by the way?); it is an uninitialized value.

You seem to really stress the gambling aspect of this thing. It is not as if you are placing a newly born child on red and spinning the wheel. First of all, vast majority of people I know (or knew) enjoy being alive, to the extent that they haven't committed or tried to commit suicide. In fact, most of them seem to be generally happy with their life, despite the various hardships they may have faced. So I would say that you are not taking a fifty-fifty chance — far from it — at least here (or there for that matter). Second and more important point is that you can't really gamble if you have nothing to bet with. You are not some monster that places your own child on the table when chances are that his/her life will turn into a nightmare as a result. The child does not exist, remember. You don't have the chips.

I hope this did not sound too aggressive or anything. That is was not my intention. I'm just puzzled by the idea and would like see you explain it a bit more.

* I think the point is a valid whether or not you believe in the evolution of morality.

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Aha, this is interesting. You reason from a utilitarian perspective: it is moral to have children because it benefits society as a whole, by sustaining it, or families for that same reason. But what if you consider the issue from the point of view of the child? Morality may have evolved as a survival tactic, but in our current society the individual has long since taken center stage. Is it moral for a child as an individual?

Nappi, your emphasis on how happy people are generally is a good one. Perhaps my views on it are skewed and I see the world as a less pleasant place than it is. I always knew you were a positive person! 50/50 wasn't in my mind as far as chances go, but I may have overstressed even the small chances of horrible things happening. They still can happen, though, and since you never know, no matter how small, you are gambling.

Purely academically, I disagree with you on betting with nothing. The child exists as soon as you make it, because that is the aim of the endeavor. You are betting with a life that you create on the spot. How is that nothing?

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Aha, this is interesting. You reason from a utilitarian perspective: it is moral to have children because it benefits society as a whole, by sustaining it, or families for that same reason. But what if you consider the issue from the point of view of the child? Morality may have evolved as a survival tactic, but in our current society the individual has long since taken center stage. Is it moral for a child as an individual?

Nappi, your emphasis on how happy people are generally is a good one. Perhaps my views on it are skewed and I see the world as a less pleasant place than it is. I always knew you were a positive person! 50/50 wasn't in my mind as far as chances go, but I may have overstressed even the small chances of horrible things happening. They still can happen, though, and since you never know, no matter how small, you are gambling.

Purely academically, I disagree with you on betting with nothing. The child exists as soon as you make it, because that is the aim of the endeavor. You are betting with a life that you create on the spot. How is that nothing?

I was not really considering this from the point of view of the benefit of the society or family, though I agree that it may have sounded like that. My point was it does not make much sense to consider perhaps the most essential part of all life fundamentally immoral. True, if we stopped reproducing, then in a hundred years or so there would be nothing immoral in the world of men (and women) simply because we would all be extinct. Where is the point in that? As for the individual level, if it is truly moral to not have children, then who are you being kind to? The nothingness? Certainly not the child.

As far as looking at things from the child's perspective and betting with nothing goes, perhaps I simply don't understand the concept of your actions being harmful or immoral to something that only exist after that action (or continues to not exist if you do "the right thing"). Is a "bad" life really worse than the void? How can you even compare these things? Only the angstiest teen can say something like "I would have been better off if I had never existed at all!" As I see it, that statement only makes sense if you believe in some sort of repository of souls where you just wait to be born. As a concept this seems completely unnecessary to me. "Silly teen, of course you would not have been better off, you would not have been anything at all. There wouldn't have been a you."

I find it very hard to explain myself properly, but I guess that is okay. I don't take this discussion too seriously. :)

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Nappi's reasoning sounds pretty right - I think it's TREMENDOUSLY over pessimistic to say that giving birth is bad because someone's life might suck. People overwhelmingly want to live, even if you think their life sucks, and hopefully for most of us, even if bad things happen to our children, we're at least situated in a society where the chances of things going so horribly wrong that the kid wants to die aren't very large at all. No matter how awful you think the world is, you're clearly still alive, and if you don't think it's bad enough to kill yourself then I'm not sure why you'd want to prevent others from living.

Leaving aside the other complications that people have brought up, I'd like to introduce one problem with Nappi's line of reasoning which has to do with obligations to future generations, which miffy touched on. If bringing people into existence can't harm them as long as they end up leading reasonably good lives, we seem to be committed to the idea that our descendants a few generations down the line won't have any reason to be mad at us for any environmental damage we've done, or anything else, really. This is because if we make any big decisions as a society one way or another (stop global warming, continue global warming, deplete the ozone layer, keep the ozone layer there, etc.) this is going to have pretty big ripple effects. Specifically, the children who will be born in the future won't be the same in both cases. Different policies will cause different children to be born - people will have sex on different days, choose to have more or less children, meet different people and marry different people, etc. In only a few generations (probably not very many), there are going to be almost no people who can say "my life is worse because of what previous generations did." Why? Because if previous generations had done something different, that person would not exist! They wouldn't have been conceived - their parents wouldn't have met, or they would've had a child at a different time, or whatever.

Think about the Holocaust, for instance. If it hadn't happened, I wouldn't exist. My father's family came over here to get away before the Nazis got them. So even though I'm missing a good chunk of my family tree thanks to Hitler, I can't call him up and say "hey, Hitler, you jerk, you've made my life worse!" Because if Hitler hadn't done anything, I would never have existed.

Or take my asthma. Maybe I'm asthmatic because when I was born in LA, the pollution was bad. But I can't go back 50 years and tell the people who polluted "hey, you gave me asthma! My life is worse!" Why? Because if history had been different (maybe LA passed a bunch of ordinances, invested in public transit, whatever), it's basically impossible that I would've been born. My parents likely would not have met in LA in the way they did (it would be a totally different city) and even if they did, enough of the specifics would be altered such that I wouldn't have been conceived at the same time, born at the same place, etc. There's no "Tycho without asthma" possibility - it's either Tycho with asthma or no Tycho.

So, if Nappi is right to say that "as long as your life is at least not horrendously awful, it's not wrong to bring you into the world," and if certain things we're doing now (like causing global warming) are necessary conditions for the existence of people a few generations down the line (as they almost certainly are) then those people seem like they won't have a leg to stand on to criticize us for fucking anything up, at least insofar as those people want to claim that we've made their lives worse. Because we haven't - we've made their lives POSSIBLE, which at least according to Nappi is good or potentially just not bad.

This is called the nonidentity problem and if you have a good solution then you should let a philosophy journal know because you could publish an article or something.

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Oh man, Tycho delivers! Allow me to respond at the next convenience that isn't New Year's Eve. This is going in all sorts of amazing, correct directions. Also, I feel increasingly shallow, coming into contact with the level of philosophic thinking here.

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Tycho's argument doesn't address the issue of the future though. When it comes to the past, it doesn't make a difference now whether their action were moral or immoral, because they happened and we can't change that. If we could accurately predict how history changed, which I doubt we ever shall, it wouldn't matter. Regardless, I think it's pretty egocentric to say that because a change to the past would result in a present that doesn't include you, that it can't be a change for the better. Projecting that same philosophy into the future strikes me as naive and counterproductive.

Procreation is a weird thing. You can philosophize any point you want, so I'll just say I don't think an individual person or family necessarily has a moral limit to the children they should have. As distasteful as I find them, I don't think the Duggers are in the wrong. Let's just say that it can be irresponsible, but it's morally neutral. If anyone has a moral duty to birth control, it's policymakers, who need to create an environment that encourages the ideal birth rate. I imagine it's pretty tricky, since low birth rates are economically dangerous long-term, while high birth rates are environmentally dangerous long-term. I'm glad that's not what I do.

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It can definitely be a change for the better, but it can't be better for YOU. Or for ME. Or... for anyone? Once enough time has gone past, there is nobody alive for whom a change in the past could be worse or better, because their existence depends on it, but that sounds paradoxical, because wouldn't, for instance, reducing pollution be obviously better? That's why we have a problem - it's egocentric if we only look at ourselves, but the thing is that EVERYONE can look at themselves, and the problem generalizes.

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I think when you're talking about a possibility space, it's pretty silly to talk about whether you'd exist or not. If there's a world-changing event, which completely changes who will be born but not the net number of births, the difference is irrelevant. You're talking about an infinite set of possible people, and arguing that one particular finite set is more valuable because they're the ones that exist in a given timeline (namely, ours).

Let's just pretend that everyone is a reincarnation and that our individual existence is inevitable and sidestep that whole discussion.

Once you get that out of the way, there are some things you could look at to judge if a given timeline is better:

Rate of violence and violent deaths

Health (mortality rates, age expectancy, people living with curable diseases, people living with untreated chronic conditions, rate of SIDS, &c.)

Human rights under law

Human dignity in society

Political stability

Homelessness

Standard of living

Literacy and scientific literacy

Happiness or contentedness

Scientific progress (did one timeline make more meaningful discoveries than the others?)

Environmental health (green spaces, pollution, biodiversity, ozone levels, &c.)

&c. &c. &c.

Arguably, the future that has all of these better than all other futures is the better one. If you lived in a smog-ridden LA, and were at the age of having a child, would you strive for a future with a smog-free LA where your children wouldn't develop asthma, or would you go for the one that has Tycho in it? We don't have the liberty of knowing which future will have Tycho Redux, so it's entirely fair of us to strive for the ones we can, with some objectivity and some certainty, reckon are overall better for everyone, instead of just being fatalist and assuming that whatever we leave behind, the future will be grateful to live with it because otherwise they wouldn't exist.

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I'm not arguing that one possibility space is more valuable because it exists in our timeline. I'm arguing that from the point of view of someone existing in the world, there is no way to say that their possibility space is worse than it could've been, because if the possibility space had been different (better?) it wouldn't be better for them. They wouldn't even exist! Surely that would be worse for them, and for everyone else in a similar position.

Obviously a future with happy stuff is better than a future with bad stuff. But who is it better for? Is it better for the people in the happy future? Well, no, because they could never have existed in the bad future. Is it better for the people in the bad future? Well, no, because they don't exist. So who is it better for?

If we pretend everyone is a reincarnation and that our individual existence is inevitable, then yes, that solves the problem. Do you believe that we are all reincarnations and that your existence is inevitable? If your existence IS inevitable, and if we ARE all reincarnations, then the question at the heart of this thread, "is having children immoral," is complete nonsense. All existence is inevitable. We cannot refuse to have children - they will inevitably exist. They are reincarnations of previous people, even! So you've solved my question, and also this thread's central question, but the cost is perhaps a little high. I don't know how many other people here believe that existence is inevitable and that we are all reincarnations.

You ask whether I would strive for a smog-free future for my child or not. Let's imagine that I say "eh, that sounds like a lot of work" and I have a child in smoggy LA. My child gets asthma. One day my child comes to me and says "dad, you jerk, why didn't you work towards a smog free LA?" I replay "hey, buddy, I know your asthma sucks, but look at it this way: if I had spent time campaigning to clean up LA, I wouldn't have had a kid until years later. That kid wouldn't be you. It would be a different kid. You're happy you exist, asthma and all, right? You wouldn't trade your life for nonexistence, to be replaced by this other kid I'd have later, right?"

What could my kid reply?

I know it's obvious and intuitive that a better future is BETTER than a worse future, for everyone, and that we shouldn't just be fatalists and assume that we can do whatever we want. THAT IS WHY WE HAVE A PARADOX ON OUR HANDS. If it weren't obvious that a smog free LA were better, then we wouldn't have anything to wonder about, except some weird questions of identity that would be largely irrelevant. But we DO know that a smog free LA is better, and we need some way to explain that AND to explain the equally appealing idea that it is better to exist with asthma than not to exist at all. That, at least, is what I suspect Nappi would claim, and it seems to me like the most reasonable position to take in response to this thread's central question. But it gives us a puzzle which seems to require solving.

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