A) Had you not been sterilized, other forms of birth control would not have been used.
B) The people with whom you might have otherwise procreated will not find alternative mates.
C) Had you had children they would have gone on to have billions of descendants themselves.
D) Humanity won’t end tomorrow before any of your descendants can grow up.
It’s possible though far from definite that your choice has reduced the world population by approximately 2 people. I don’t think it’s reasonable to claim billions of lives averted.
I’ll leave it to others to discuss the issues of negative utilitarianism, and whether it’s actually a good thing to eliminate the possibility of more future people.
‘A’ is a challenge to my claim, requiring me to clarify sterilization is different because it is 100% effective while most other methods are less than 100%. Thank you.
‘B’ only challenges my claim if I produce children with my own children. My mates and their mates aren’t agents I can make moral choices on behalf of. I can make moral choices for myself, and I can make the moral choice to have or not have children, making them agents I do make choices on behalf of (including the choice to exist). If I were to then have children with those children, ‘B’ would be true. That’s not going to happen, several times over.
‘C’ and the sentence after ‘D’ might well be true, but ‘might’ is a pretty weak word to bet the lives of (a bunch of people) on. I’m lucky in that I have genealogical records going back over 1,000 years in my family, and that gives me a pretty strong sense that people make a bunch of people. I’m sure I have (a large number) of ancestors, and that number gets even larger when I include ancestors I don’t know about at all, proto-human ancestors, mammal ancestors, vertebrate ancestors… every one of them suffering and dying. My vasectomy throws a spanner in the spokes of that wheel.
‘D’ is an argument that works for or against any claim quite well. The world is going to end so don’t have children, the world is going to end so have children.
I’ll leave it to others to discuss the issues of negative utilitarianism, and whether it’s actually a good thing to eliminate the possibility of more future people.
To claim it’s not a good thing to eliminate the possibility of more future people is to claim there is a moral obligation to produce children. I could be mistaken, but this seems like a reasonable if/then claim. It’s not a claim I make, as I don’t claim it’s not a good thing to eliminate the possibility of more future people.
I’m lucky in that I have genealogical records going back over 1,000 years in my family, and that gives me a pretty strong sense that people make a bunch of people.
To claim it’s not a good thing to eliminate the possibility of more future people is to claim there is a moral obligation to produce children. I could be mistaken, but this seems like a reasonable if/then claim. It’s not a claim I make, as I don’t claim it’s not a good thing to eliminate the possibility of more future people.
BTW, what would people here think of the following argument? If refraining from having children is good/rational/moral/[insert applause light here], then good/rational/moral/[insert applause light here] will do so; bad/irrational/immoral/[insert boo light here] will have more children than them, and (to the extent that badness is inheritable—not just genetically but also memetically) in the next generation there will be a larger fraction of bad people. That doesn’t sound like a good outcome; good actions predictably leading (causally and/or acausally) to bad outcomes means that your ethics system is broken; therefore, the assumption that refraining from having children is good must be wrong.
(I tentatively endorse it, but not with very much confidence.)
Faulty reasoning alert. You are assuming that
A) Had you not been sterilized, other forms of birth control would not have been used.
B) The people with whom you might have otherwise procreated will not find alternative mates.
C) Had you had children they would have gone on to have billions of descendants themselves.
D) Humanity won’t end tomorrow before any of your descendants can grow up.
It’s possible though far from definite that your choice has reduced the world population by approximately 2 people. I don’t think it’s reasonable to claim billions of lives averted.
I’ll leave it to others to discuss the issues of negative utilitarianism, and whether it’s actually a good thing to eliminate the possibility of more future people.
Thank you for your alert!
‘A’ is a challenge to my claim, requiring me to clarify sterilization is different because it is 100% effective while most other methods are less than 100%. Thank you.
‘B’ only challenges my claim if I produce children with my own children. My mates and their mates aren’t agents I can make moral choices on behalf of. I can make moral choices for myself, and I can make the moral choice to have or not have children, making them agents I do make choices on behalf of (including the choice to exist). If I were to then have children with those children, ‘B’ would be true. That’s not going to happen, several times over.
‘C’ and the sentence after ‘D’ might well be true, but ‘might’ is a pretty weak word to bet the lives of (a bunch of people) on. I’m lucky in that I have genealogical records going back over 1,000 years in my family, and that gives me a pretty strong sense that people make a bunch of people. I’m sure I have (a large number) of ancestors, and that number gets even larger when I include ancestors I don’t know about at all, proto-human ancestors, mammal ancestors, vertebrate ancestors… every one of them suffering and dying. My vasectomy throws a spanner in the spokes of that wheel.
‘D’ is an argument that works for or against any claim quite well. The world is going to end so don’t have children, the world is going to end so have children.
To claim it’s not a good thing to eliminate the possibility of more future people is to claim there is a moral obligation to produce children. I could be mistaken, but this seems like a reasonable if/then claim. It’s not a claim I make, as I don’t claim it’s not a good thing to eliminate the possibility of more future people.
Thank you again for your alert!
“That’s the mother of all sampling biases.”
BTW, what would people here think of the following argument? If refraining from having children is good/rational/moral/[insert applause light here], then good/rational/moral/[insert applause light here] will do so; bad/irrational/immoral/[insert boo light here] will have more children than them, and (to the extent that badness is inheritable—not just genetically but also memetically) in the next generation there will be a larger fraction of bad people. That doesn’t sound like a good outcome; good actions predictably leading (causally and/or acausally) to bad outcomes means that your ethics system is broken; therefore, the assumption that refraining from having children is good must be wrong.
(I tentatively endorse it, but not with very much confidence.)
This doesn’t make sense to me. At the very least, one could claim neutrality as an alternative. And discuss quality of life, rather than quantity.