We find it justified to take children away from parents who we consider “guilty”—adults who can take on such a serious duty, but who then make decisions which fail to fulfill that duty. Neglect and abuse are considered to be the result of such decisions, while poverty is considered to be (often? always?) the result of bad luck. Teen parents aren’t considered candidates for this level of guilt for the same reason that their partners might be considered candidates for statutory rape charges—it’s presumed that teens are too young to be making mature decisions about sex.
If you really want to step into all your opponents’ shoes, you need to consider that some of their models of the world aren’t just “zero meritocracy”, they’re “moral anti-meritocracy”, i.e. “rich people got that way by being more willing to step on poor people”.
Specific policy implementation details might be seen as less offensive than the policy they’re intended to promote. E.g. a progressive who currently considers you a eugenicist monster might nevertheless already be your ally for a few practical purposes, like subsidized access to birth control, and you might be able to talk them into others, like switching the estate tax exemption level from a per-estate to a per-inheritor amount.
Neglect and abuse are considered to be the result of such decisions, while poverty is considered to be (often? always?) the result of bad luck.
The bigger difference is that neglect and abuse are carried out after children are born, while poverty is usually there before they are born. Prospecitve parents are much likelier to correctly predict they’ll be bringing up poor children, than that they’ll be bringing up neglected or abused children. And for the same reason, it’s much easier for society to predict who’ll be a poor parent, and disincentivize them, than it is to predict who’ll be a bad parent.
So if people really carried about bad decisions vs. bad luck, they would blame poor parents for deciding to have predictably poor children. Instead people seem to reason that both poor and rich people have a right to raise children, which mostly overrides the desire of those children to not have poor parents.
The anti-meritocracy scenario is a third distinct one, good catch. In that scenario one would have to weigh the evilness of rich people and its likely effects on how they treat their children vs. the positive effects of greater material wealth on the children and how the goodness of poor people factors compared to their material deprivation. Also noteworthy is that in an anti-meritocracy wealth may actually corrupt due to social networks.
Overall I should emphasise that I’m not promoting the policy, but that I found it an interesting case where it seemed my moral intuitions confliced with both utilitarianism and my virtue ethics. I was more hoping to creating moral thought experiments rather than figuring out which one best describes the real world. Maybe I should have disguised “rich” and “poor” with two other groups and made the utilitarian analysis there, but then I suspect people would just outright accept the utilitarian solution proposed in each of the scenarios. At least that is the impression I got from how the community reacted to more concrete examples of dustspecks vs. torture compared to the abstract case.
Overall I should emphasise that I’m not promoting the policy, but that I found it an interesting case where it seemed my moral intuitions confliced with both utilitarianism and my virtue ethics.
Which virtues are you using for your virtue ethics?
An explanation, then a couple thoughts:
We find it justified to take children away from parents who we consider “guilty”—adults who can take on such a serious duty, but who then make decisions which fail to fulfill that duty. Neglect and abuse are considered to be the result of such decisions, while poverty is considered to be (often? always?) the result of bad luck. Teen parents aren’t considered candidates for this level of guilt for the same reason that their partners might be considered candidates for statutory rape charges—it’s presumed that teens are too young to be making mature decisions about sex.
If you really want to step into all your opponents’ shoes, you need to consider that some of their models of the world aren’t just “zero meritocracy”, they’re “moral anti-meritocracy”, i.e. “rich people got that way by being more willing to step on poor people”.
Specific policy implementation details might be seen as less offensive than the policy they’re intended to promote. E.g. a progressive who currently considers you a eugenicist monster might nevertheless already be your ally for a few practical purposes, like subsidized access to birth control, and you might be able to talk them into others, like switching the estate tax exemption level from a per-estate to a per-inheritor amount.
The bigger difference is that neglect and abuse are carried out after children are born, while poverty is usually there before they are born. Prospecitve parents are much likelier to correctly predict they’ll be bringing up poor children, than that they’ll be bringing up neglected or abused children. And for the same reason, it’s much easier for society to predict who’ll be a poor parent, and disincentivize them, than it is to predict who’ll be a bad parent.
So if people really carried about bad decisions vs. bad luck, they would blame poor parents for deciding to have predictably poor children. Instead people seem to reason that both poor and rich people have a right to raise children, which mostly overrides the desire of those children to not have poor parents.
The anti-meritocracy scenario is a third distinct one, good catch. In that scenario one would have to weigh the evilness of rich people and its likely effects on how they treat their children vs. the positive effects of greater material wealth on the children and how the goodness of poor people factors compared to their material deprivation. Also noteworthy is that in an anti-meritocracy wealth may actually corrupt due to social networks.
Overall I should emphasise that I’m not promoting the policy, but that I found it an interesting case where it seemed my moral intuitions confliced with both utilitarianism and my virtue ethics. I was more hoping to creating moral thought experiments rather than figuring out which one best describes the real world. Maybe I should have disguised “rich” and “poor” with two other groups and made the utilitarian analysis there, but then I suspect people would just outright accept the utilitarian solution proposed in each of the scenarios. At least that is the impression I got from how the community reacted to more concrete examples of dustspecks vs. torture compared to the abstract case.
Which virtues are you using for your virtue ethics?