Also, whoever saves a person to live another fifty years, it is as if they had saved fifty people to live one more year. Whoever saves someone who very much enjoys life, it is as if they saved many people who are not sure they really want to live. And whoever creates a life that would not have otherwise existed, it is as if they saved someone who had an entire lifetime yet to live.
Which is why I”m still puzzled by a simplistic moral dilemma that just won’t go away for me: are we morally obligated to have children, and as many as we can? Sans using that using energy or money to more efficiently “save” lives, of course. It seems to me we should encourage people to have children, a common thing that many more people will actually do than donate philanthropically, in addition to other philanthropy encouragements.
are we morally obligated to have children, and as many as we can?
Cost of a first-world child is.… checks random Google result $180,000 to get them to age 18. Cost of saving a kid in Africa from dying of Malaria is ~$1,000.
Right now having children is massively selfish, because there’s options that are more than TWO magnitudes of order more effective. It’d be like blowing up the train in order to save the deaf kids from the original post :)
Not necessarily. A full argument would consider the opportunities available to a child you raise—it’s perfectly possible for a single first-world child to be a more productive than 180 kids in Africa.
There’s also the counter-point (to my previous point) that having children discourages other people from having children, due to the forces of the market (greater demand for stuff available to children ⇒ greater costs of stuff available to children). Of course, the effect on demand is spread out to stuff other than just stuff available to children, so overall this does not cause an equal and opposite reaction.
If you successfully teach your child to be utilitarian, effective altruist, etc., though, the utility of both previous points are dwarfed by this (the second point is dwarfed because the average first-world child probably wouldn’t pick up utilitarianism, EA). I’m not sure what the probability of a child picking up stuff like that is (and it would make one heck of a difficult experiment), but my guess is that if taught properly it would be likely enough to dwarf the utility of the first two points.
Well, yes, but my point is that this is a rather unreasonable clause, since if we actually pay attention to what we can efficiently do, “have children” doesn’t even make the Top 100. So why would you possibly focus on “have children”, and treat it as a dilemma?
I interpreted that line as a cached-though / brush off, not “of course I’ve done the math, and there’s a thousand more effective things, but I still find it odd that having children can EVER be a positive act. I mean, ew, babies! Those can’t be good for the world o.o”
I suppose it’s the difference between asking “is it better to blow up the train” and asking “can it be better to blow up the train?” It’s worth noting that even if we have an obligation to create lives, our obligation to save them is easier to fulfill; but it’s still worth knowing if the two are actually equivalent.
Reading the original comment, adam does, in fact, seem to have assumed that having children would be the right choice if it mattered, so … point, I guess.
A lot of people don’t consider failure to exist the same as dying. Of course, we need some level of procreation as long as there is death, and humanity would probably continue to expand even then.
But the whole point of the post above is that our personal feelings are negligible next the enormity of the utilitarian consequences behind our feelings.
The goal behind altruism is to improve the quality of life for the human race. The motivation for altruism maybe due to evolutionary reasons such as propogation of the species etc., but it is not the same as altruism.
This post is however about the latter as you have rightly pointed out. Nevertheless,
When human lives are at stake, we have a duty to maximize, not satisfice
and therefore, the way to go about maximizing is to first ensure that all people currently alive remain alive and well taken care of. After that there’s plenty of time to go about having more babies :)
I will note that this is one of the fundamental failings of utilitarianism, the “mere addition” paradox. Basically, take a billion people who are miserable, and one million people who are very happy. If you “add up” the happiness of the billion people, they are “happier” on the whole than the million people; therefore, the billion are a better solution to use of natural resources.
The problem is that it always assumes some incorrect things:
1) It assumes all people are equal
2) It assumes that happiness is transitive
3) It assumes that you can actually quantify happiness in a meaningful way in this manner
4) It assumes the additive property for happiness—that you can add up some number of miserable people to get one happy person.
None of these assumptions are necessarily true.
Of course, all moral philosophies are going to fail at some level.
Note that, for instance, in this case there is an obvious difference: adding 50 years to one life is actually significantly better than extending 50 lives by 1 year each, as the investment to improve one person for 50 years is considerably less, and one person with 50 years can do considerably larger, longer, and grander projects.
Also, whoever saves a person to live another fifty years, it is as if they had saved fifty people to live one more year. Whoever saves someone who very much enjoys life, it is as if they saved many people who are not sure they really want to live. And whoever creates a life that would not have otherwise existed, it is as if they saved someone who had an entire lifetime yet to live.
Which is why I”m still puzzled by a simplistic moral dilemma that just won’t go away for me: are we morally obligated to have children, and as many as we can? Sans using that using energy or money to more efficiently “save” lives, of course. It seems to me we should encourage people to have children, a common thing that many more people will actually do than donate philanthropically, in addition to other philanthropy encouragements.
Cost of a first-world child is.… checks random Google result $180,000 to get them to age 18. Cost of saving a kid in Africa from dying of Malaria is ~$1,000.
Right now having children is massively selfish, because there’s options that are more than TWO magnitudes of order more effective. It’d be like blowing up the train in order to save the deaf kids from the original post :)
Not necessarily. A full argument would consider the opportunities available to a child you raise—it’s perfectly possible for a single first-world child to be a more productive than 180 kids in Africa.
There’s also the counter-point (to my previous point) that having children discourages other people from having children, due to the forces of the market (greater demand for stuff available to children ⇒ greater costs of stuff available to children). Of course, the effect on demand is spread out to stuff other than just stuff available to children, so overall this does not cause an equal and opposite reaction.
If you successfully teach your child to be utilitarian, effective altruist, etc., though, the utility of both previous points are dwarfed by this (the second point is dwarfed because the average first-world child probably wouldn’t pick up utilitarianism, EA). I’m not sure what the probability of a child picking up stuff like that is (and it would make one heck of a difficult experiment), but my guess is that if taught properly it would be likely enough to dwarf the utility of the first two points.
Well, yes, but my point is that this is a rather unreasonable clause, since if we actually pay attention to what we can efficiently do, “have children” doesn’t even make the Top 100. So why would you possibly focus on “have children”, and treat it as a dilemma?
I interpreted that line as a cached-though / brush off, not “of course I’ve done the math, and there’s a thousand more effective things, but I still find it odd that having children can EVER be a positive act. I mean, ew, babies! Those can’t be good for the world o.o”
I suppose it’s the difference between asking “is it better to blow up the train” and asking “can it be better to blow up the train?” It’s worth noting that even if we have an obligation to create lives, our obligation to save them is easier to fulfill; but it’s still worth knowing if the two are actually equivalent.
Reading the original comment, adam does, in fact, seem to have assumed that having children would be the right choice if it mattered, so … point, I guess.
Oooh, I like that distinction, and will try to remember it in the future :)
A lot of people don’t consider failure to exist the same as dying. Of course, we need some level of procreation as long as there is death, and humanity would probably continue to expand even then.
Why? Because dying is painful? Beyond that, I see them equivalently.
Non-existing is not the same thing as ceasing to exist.
Among other reasons, if you die there will be people mourning you, whereas if you had never existed in the first place there won’t.
But the whole point of the post above is that our personal feelings are negligible next the enormity of the utilitarian consequences behind our feelings.
Caring about the world isn’t about having a gut feeling that corresponds to the amount of suffering in the world, it’s about doing the right thing anyway. Even without the feeling.
The fact that no one knows the unborn person yet doesn’t mean that she doesn’t matter.
I was using mourning synecdochically to refer to all the externalities your death would have on other people, not just their feelings.
The goal behind altruism is to improve the quality of life for the human race. The motivation for altruism maybe due to evolutionary reasons such as propogation of the species etc., but it is not the same as altruism.
This post is however about the latter as you have rightly pointed out. Nevertheless,
and therefore, the way to go about maximizing is to first ensure that all people currently alive remain alive and well taken care of. After that there’s plenty of time to go about having more babies :)
I will note that this is one of the fundamental failings of utilitarianism, the “mere addition” paradox. Basically, take a billion people who are miserable, and one million people who are very happy. If you “add up” the happiness of the billion people, they are “happier” on the whole than the million people; therefore, the billion are a better solution to use of natural resources.
The problem is that it always assumes some incorrect things:
1) It assumes all people are equal 2) It assumes that happiness is transitive 3) It assumes that you can actually quantify happiness in a meaningful way in this manner 4) It assumes the additive property for happiness—that you can add up some number of miserable people to get one happy person.
None of these assumptions are necessarily true.
Of course, all moral philosophies are going to fail at some level.
Note that, for instance, in this case there is an obvious difference: adding 50 years to one life is actually significantly better than extending 50 lives by 1 year each, as the investment to improve one person for 50 years is considerably less, and one person with 50 years can do considerably larger, longer, and grander projects.
That last one sounds like we should try to make a simple, self-improving GAI whose goal it is to tile the universe with smiley faces.
Source?
Robin Hanson. He was speaking in quotable prose but expressing his own opinion.