[Content Warning: death, sexual abuse, suicide]
A young fellow I knew recently ended his life. We had discussed it before, and he was often miserable, saw no point in being alive, didn’t enjoy it, and as he said “never asked for it.”
It’s a topic I’ve wondered about off and on, and I’ve never been able to make sense of it. Comedian Sam Kinson (who I’ve “cancelled” due to his horrific homophobic sketches) used to do a sketch about it – the premise was “My soul was floating innocently in timeless space, with jesus and buddha, and you had to fuck and bring me down here!” I don’t have the superstition about souls, but there is still an issue of consent: how is it that parents are able to non-consensually bring us into the world? Who hasn’t, at some time in their life, thought, “I wish I’d never been born at all?” What the heck were your parents thinking when they decided to create you? Or, were you just a dumb accident born out of laziness?
Obviously, there’s an issue obtaining consent from the unborn, because they don’t exist. So, does that serve as an excuse for the whole thing? It seems that the usual justification is that the unwanted gift of life is so valuable and important, it’s assumed that eventually we’ll realize it was a great thing and be grateful. To someone who has been miserable and depressed their whole life, that’s not a good argument. One does not owe gratitude to people who create them, for reasons of their own, based on a unilateral decision. And, proud parents are not (usually) confronted with disapproval: “You selfish asshole, you created a human because you were too drunk to get up and get a condom and decided to ‘take a chance’?”
my mad photoshop skills
We can’t excuse parenthood based on good intentions, but some try: “the gift of life”, etc. To which, the response is: “the gift of gout, bad ankles, hunger and cold, and eventually a lonely death.” Because every parent who creates a child, has also doomed that child to eventually die. Maybe the parent thought it was a great big favor, but what if the child does not agree? It’s too late, by then. No doubt there are parents who have children and want to give them a great life, but just as often children are brought into the world to fill a hole in the parents’ needy psyche, or to be a helping hand when the parent gets old, or just in an act of monumental egotism: “I am so important that my genes are worth inflicting on the remaining life-time of the planet.” Which, of course, brings up another point: in spite of the size of the universe, we are still trapped in a limited biosphere, and any new human that is created is unwillingly invited to participate in the “rat race” of the culture they are born into. So, are the newborn rats.
My first experience with this train of thought happened when I knew a young couple who really wanted a child. There was something about them that didn’t quite “take” – they had a series of miscarriages, and resorted to in-vitro fertilization several times. Eventually, they had a successful pregnancy and the doctors informed them that the fetus was going to have spina bifida to an unknowable degree. The doctors hinted broadly that it was a good idea to terminate the pregnancy but, instead, they carried the fetus to term and produced – a tragedy. The child was never self-aware and lived about a year, sucking up all their remaining money, ruining their marriage, and driving the wife to near-madness. When I learned that they were going through with the pregnancy, I stopped talking to them and never saw them again. My feeling was that they were the most selfish people I had ever met: they cared only about their emotional neediness and were willing to create a painful and brief life because they were so special and important that the universe needed to carry a few of their spawn, or something like that. Never mind that there are plenty of kids who would love (not that they can consent) a good home and loving parents, available for adoption. No, it had to be their DNA or nothing. At the time, I remember thinking I couldn’t unpack all of the things in the situation, but it seemed unavoidable to me that the parents were racists, in addition to crazed with longing to pass on their genes.
Adoption seems to be less easy to challenge on the grounds of consent, but it’s still got problems. Obviously, the infant cannot choose to be traded around like a playing card. And, for every child that finds a good, loving, home, there are children that are adopted by people that abuse them. I knew a young woman who had been passed through several families, and she hated everyone especially the good christian family whose pater familias used to sexually abuse her. Naturally, when she finally went to child protection services, she was blown off because obviously she was doing fine. That was back in the 80s and maybe attitudes have changed enough since then, but I don’t have much faith in humanity left. For that matter, what about the “quiverful” families? I always wondered if their kids woke up some day and thought, “you fucking assholes created me because of your trollish, racist politics? I’m just a token in your game?” Those of us who are not ideologically crazed can step back, and look at the quiverful people and see that what they are doing is creating life for irresponsible, selfish, racist, politically questionable ideas – they aren’t creating the kids because they love kids, they’re creating them because they hate non-christians. May I say that’s obviously wrong? Yet, society tolerates it because this topic is one that cannot be easily addressed within a libertarian culture. [When I say “libertarian” there I mean: “concerned with liberties rather than privileges” not, you know, glib anarcho-capitalists with toxic individualism syndrome]
It seems unavoidably unethical to have children, so I have never blamed the largish percentage of children that grow up hating their parents, for seeing the situation from a dark perspective. If you could go back in time and mail your parents’ past selves a letter, would you give them the “go ahead” or tell your father to get the fuck up and grab a condom?
This is going to be more of a problem – not that anyone will be able to do anything about it – as climate change [and there’s still time for a nuclear war!] begins to bite: the living may envy the dead. I’d say there’s some possible defense of parenthood that can be issued on the basis that the parent is trying to give the child a better life than they had. What if that equation flips because the parents’ culture has fucked up the planet to the point where the child is most likely to have a worse life than the parents? “OK, boomer.” [Ballistic missile subs are also called “boomers”] I used to imagine that, if there were a nuclear war, humanity would die because no responsible person could bring a child into the post-apocalyptic world that would remain: agriculture failed, nuclear winter, poisoned water and air, “happy birthday!” But we can be sure that, as people frantically evacuate from wildfires brought on by human-caused drought, some number of children were being hauled along by the parents that had birthed them into that fucked up situation in the first place.
Sure, “it’s an instinct.”
But, if we excuse something on the basis of being instinctive, what about our instincts to kill, steal, rape, and build massive mega-corps that allow us to amass gigantic wealth we can use to abuse other people’s children? If we excuse non-consensual person-creation on the basis that it’s an instinct, we have excused all crimes, or we have to somehow justify that making an exception for person-creation is somehow OK because the parents are ignorant, or something. I know it’s an “argument from ignorance” but I can’t imagine a good moral justification for non-consensually creating a person that does not become a meta-excuse for everything wicked. Maybe my imagination is not that good.
This kind of reasoning is flat-out weird, but it seems to me to be a consequence of philosophizing about ethics. It’s part of why I consider myself a moral nihilist: philosophizing about ethics leaves me staring at a plate of whagarbl – it doesn’t make sense. And, if a system of ethics results in contradiction and bullshit, then it’s only being applied selectively. If we say “consent matters” I can think of no bigger place where it should matter than in whether or not a new person is created. Conclusion: consent does not matter, because generally we consider this non-consensual thing to be good if not beautiful. It reminds me of the fanatical animal rights activist that I heard on some podcast or other, who said that they wished all the dogs in the world would die, because then the species would be free, as a whole, from human exploitation. That’s, um, a radical view and it makes me very uncomfortable because I like dogs and I think that some of them like(d) me. A person who favors non-consensual person-creation would probably say the same thing: “You know what? Kid are so cute I don’t care if I’m dooming them to a miserable life that ends in cancer, or whatever. Whee! Look at its little toesie-woesies!”
Where I’m left standing is that it’s unethical to have children unless you are pretty sure that you a) want them b) plan to try to raise them as well as you can c) have the resources to support them d) can try to give them a better life than you had. That’s a tall order; it leaves most of the people that are created as unwanted accidents.
Yes, I am familiar with the “voluntary human extinction project.”
I wanted to photoshop the picture of the stork to be an animated .gif with an alternate frame containing a stuka, but I just don’t feel like spending the time. Sorry! I did the motivational poster, though. [OK I did the photoshopping but the resulting .GIF is 250k and I try not to post large images here. So you’ll just have to imagine it]
Jonathan Haidt (yes, I know, he ended up embracing conservatism because he imagines almost everyone actually prefers the system that privileges him so much) has an excellent metaphor that represents a lot of human thinking: the rider and the elephant. Our conscious, rational self is a rider, sitting on an elephant – all our subconscious plus emotional thinking. The rider imagines themself to be in control of the elephant, but mostly the elephant does what it feels like doing. The rider has the ability to interfere a little at some moments and cause the elephant to tilt a little bit, here and there. Philosophizing about ethics means working entirely from the rider’s POV, and this is very unsatisfying to the elephant, unless the rider does the work to retrain the elephant, very slowly and patiently. (Secular dharma practice is one method for retraining one’s elephant.)
One problem I have with your conclusions is that in countries with large economic inequality and a poor safety net having children becomes yet another privilege of the rich. At the same time, there are probably a lot more people who can teach would-be children good values among the non-rich than among the rich. But I do agree with you that parenthood creates more responsibility from parent to child than the other way around and especially that there is no requirement that a child feel gratitude towards their parents for being born.
Very thoughtful. Every time I read these things I have to recalibrate.
I guess one consequence of this is that I support the idea that civilization should provide an easy, painless exit to anyone who wants it, no questions asked.
Marcus, thanks for the essay!
@anat, I disagree with this:
In today’s world, it is not having children privilege of the rich, because the poor do not have access to information and/or contraceptives.
That is also a reason why I do not totally agree with Marcus here, although I do agree with the notion that children do not owe their parents love and gratitude automatically just because they have “given” them life.
Charly@#5:
In today’s world, it is not having children privilege of the rich, because the poor do not have access to information and/or contraceptives.
That still does not relieve the parents of the moral burden; in fact it is irrelevant to the child. Even if it’s born wealthy, the child is still doomed to suffer and die – so much more so if the child is born working class or worse. We’re just arguing about the canapes and champagne.
Another way of asking that is “would any rational person want to be Barron Trump, including Barron Trump?”
I do not disagree with you fundamentally, just a bit.
For example “rational person” is akin to “perfect sphere”, “perfect vacuum”, “frictionless surface” and similar concepts. It could be useful as a model for thought experiments, when used correctly it can provide some insights into reality, but ultimately, it does not exist. Measuring people to some “(rational) person standard” is always doomed to fail, because they will never measure up. Which is not the failure of the people, but the failure of the measurer to acknowledge reality. Instead of trying to deal with people how they are, the measurer tries to make them what they (according to them) should be. One of the possible results of such thinking is an oppressive authoritarian regime.
I have argued, vociferously, with some of my friends when they tried to argue that vaccinating children should not be mandatory, that state should not force parents to do this, or that. My usual reply is “your child is not your possession to do with as you please but your responsibility to care for the best you can, if you fail that, the state should step in to cover your failures “.
I am, likewise, not sure what value there is speculating on whether choosing to reproduce is immoral on the grounds that the children can’t consent because they don’t exist. It seems a rather circular reasoning, because existence is an absolute precondition for consent of any kind. “Consent” has no meaning whatsoever in the context of the nonexistent, so it could be argued that setting in motion the existence of a person is directly responsible for allowing them the power to consent in any capacity.
I think a more productive defence might take the form of reckoning up likelihoods. If one thinks that there is a good likelihood they can provide for and help out the prospective existee to the extent they will find existing a preferable alternative to not, then maybe it can be morally justified. The majority of humans are pretty similar when it comes to their basic needs, and I don’t think “happier being alive than not” is an especially high bar to have to clear for prospective action. Sure, the reckoning might be imperfect, but we’re talking moral judgments, not absolute ones. If someone is terrible at making moral calculations, are they immoral? If they genuinely believe their calculations are right and justified, what opprobrium can we bring to bear on them?
Charly at 7 – Excellent takes. Spot on. Fangtastic.
Cartomancer – I’d say there are potential values to be had in this speculation. Assuming society recognized the principle here more broadly, it might engender more sympathy for the position of children, who are routinely objectified as possessions. And when people are informed that consent is a real moral issue and are convinced of that, they can choose to act morally – popularizing the idea in the right place and situation might cause fewer people to be born into suffering.
“happier alive than not” might be easy to establish – there’s no happiness in nonexistence – but “more miserable alive than not” is equally easy to find and establish. I often say if I’d been aborted it would have saved me a lot of suffering. My life on the proportion is more OK than not, so I’m OK with continuing it, but I see myself as very fortunate in that regard. Seems like everyone I know is some shade of miserable or fucked up. If my local situation is indicative of the actual odds of having a good life, I’d say this is a discussion worth having.
The crux there seems to be what the aim of the discussion is. Should we be trying to place blame and make people feel bad for morally questionable decisions? Or just help everyone make better decisions going forward? I’m OK with a version of this that isn’t just looking to distribute shame.
–
<raises hand>
(Well, not yet, anyway)
@11 – not that I can recall either!
Marcus @ #3: I guess one consequence of this is that I support the idea that civilization should provide an easy, painless exit to anyone who wants it, no questions asked.
I disagree with the last bit. There should be questions asked, to avoid “constructive murder” (think constructive dismissal), various other forms of coercion, and, only slightly more debatably, temporary, curable conditions. There should be a robust, but quick, private and compassionate process, with no cost or stigma associated with bailing out at any moment. (We should also try to make it so that nobody prefers death to living because of poverty, lack of access to healthcare, injustice, oppression, and so on — but we’re failing quite badly at that already.)
I suspect this is something deep inside humanity as it would explain why we’re in such a hurry to kill ourselves off as a species.
Speaking of us being a species, our self-awareness may evolved as part of our survival, but it’s also a curse because we know our time is limited and we will suffer and life generally sucks except for a few bright spots. We also think our self-awareness and intelligence has overtaken our instincts, but we’re just fooling ourselves. That’s why we will always fuck and that will lead to reproduction. Being born into this world is just an unfortunate effect of this world being what it is.
We can measure the people who prefer existence to not by the suicide rate, informed by the attempted suicide rate. We can ask large numbers of people if they think their life was worth living, if they wish they’d died earlier, if it was okay until soon before the decision to die.
This whole post seems to be based on a basic assumption that life isn’t worth living, or perhaps that since a life might not be worth living, it’s wrong to even try. I feel this is unduly pessimistic; perhaps you should examine your premises here?
I’ll sign on to the «have never wished I’d never been born» list. Again, your universality assumption here is far too pessimistic.
Ketil Tveiten@#16:
This whole post seems to be based on a basic assumption that life isn’t worth living, or perhaps that since a life might not be worth living, it’s wrong to even try. I feel this is unduly pessimistic; perhaps you should examine your premises here?
Good question. I don’t take it as established that life is worth living. It seems to me that that would always be an individual’s opinion about their own life, and nothing else. Suppose I think my life is worth living, and you don’t: is that valid? Is it any more valid if I don’t think my life is worth living and you do? In order to make an argument about that, I’d have to have a criterion of what “worth living” was and it seems to me that it will always wind up a matter of opinion. That’s my premise, here – since it will always be a matter of opinion, it will always be personal and people will occasionally conclude their life isn’t worth living in spite of what everyone else thinks.
I’ll sign on to the «have never wished I’d never been born» list. Again, your universality assumption here is far too pessimistic.
Well, that’s certainly interesting. Maybe I am a pessimist. It seems obvious to me.
Emu Sam @15: My maternal grandmother complained for years about not having died at 85, when she was still healthy and independent. The only thing that may have been a suicide attempt was when she nearly burned my parents’ house (where she was living by then, in her own separate unit) down at 91. But I know she hated her existence for much of the time in her later years. A functioning easy exit service would have been good for her. (She ended up dying a few minutes past midnight on her 92nd birthday, about 2 months after the fire incident.)
Tabby Lavalamp@#14:
Speaking of us being a species, our self-awareness may evolved as part of our survival, but it’s also a curse because we know our time is limited and we will suffer and life generally sucks except for a few bright spots. We also think our self-awareness and intelligence has overtaken our instincts, but we’re just fooling ourselves. That’s why we will always fuck and that will lead to reproduction. Being born into this world is just an unfortunate effect of this world being what it is.
I agree about the self-awareness. To me, it has always seemed like something that evolved out of a threat-monitoring, status-check loop and it doesn’t need to be much more than that. Throw in a bit of strategy optimization and imagination and that’s it.
Instinct, to me, seems like an interesting problem. If we look at other animals and identify their behaviors as instinctive, we are unreasonable if we imagine that we are free of instinct and they are not. It may be an instinct to believe we have no instincts.
If one were to say humans are natural capitalists, in that we are constructed to always want more for less, and that we are inherently unsatisfied with our current situation and that is an evolved-in instinct – I would agree. That would, for me, explain unsatisfaction. I have believed for a long time that humans are more or less never fully happy with whatever their current situation is, because that’s what drives us to do more ${whatever} we are doing.
That belief has been, um, instinctive in me. Although, seeing the commenters who say they have never thought “I wish I had never been born” makes me wonder if perhaps I’m the odd man out.
«Is life worth living» is one of those futile philosophy exercises of trying to give a rigorous definition to a concept that does not admit a rigorous definition. Best not bother with those, you’ll know it when you see it.
If you haven’t committed suicide yet, at least that is evidence that you think life isn’t that bad. Now stop worrying about all this and go do something you enjoy, that is time better spent.
cvoinescu@#13:
I disagree with the last bit. There should be questions asked, to avoid “constructive murder” (think constructive dismissal), various other forms of coercion, and, only slightly more debatably, temporary, curable conditions. There should be a robust, but quick, private and compassionate process, with no cost or stigma associated with bailing out at any moment. (We should also try to make it so that nobody prefers death to living because of poverty, lack of access to healthcare, injustice, oppression, and so on — but we’re failing quite badly at that already.)
Thank you for that. I agree, but … let me explain a bit more why I said that.
I believe we already exist in a system of coercion and that, as you imply, it is sometimes what drives people to conclude that they wish they had never been born at all, or don’t want to live. In order to say that society should question a person’s desire to die, I would say that it presupposes that life is worth living and – perhaps it’s not always the case. When we talk about “means testing” desire for death, we are implicitly stacking up society’s idea of how and why it’s valuable and giving it preference over the individual’s beliefs, which may be the problem in the first place. For example, I would support a person’s desire to terminate because “I am bored.” Note that that assessment is entirely about them and doesn’t say much about external conditions, Is that an acceptable reason for most people? And, if not, on what basis? On the other hand, I am also comfortable with “it is worth living, no matter what you think, because this world contains pizza.” The question there is whether the individual is able to see the inherent value of pizza as a reason to live, and accept it as such. It just seems to me that we’re too wrapped up in our own individual reasons for living to be able to make a fair assessment of another’s.
cartomancer@#8:
I am, likewise, not sure what value there is speculating on whether choosing to reproduce is immoral on the grounds that the children can’t consent because they don’t exist. It seems a rather circular reasoning, because existence is an absolute precondition for consent of any kind. “Consent” has no meaning whatsoever in the context of the nonexistent, so it could be argued that setting in motion the existence of a person is directly responsible for allowing them the power to consent in any capacity.
Yes, exactly. Seeing consent as meaningless in this situation is one way to dodge the whole issue, and it seems to me to be reasonable, because otherwise we do have all of the other issues like, “… you doomed me!” come crashing into the situation.
But it also seems to me that we (?do we?) agree that having a child brings some responsibility (“moral burden”) on a parent. So perhaps what we are doing is offsetting the unilateralism of the parents’ decision by granting them responsibility for what they have done. I would accept that trade as fair, so long as civilization as a whole did, too. We see, though, that there is a range of opinions about that – I’ve known people who wander about creating children pretty casually, and not accepting any responsibility for them at all, leaving them entirely as the mother’s problem forthwith.
So perhaps what we are getting at is an explanation for where parental responsibility comes from: they made this choice to create a thinking, feeling, person and it’s their responsibility to help it survive, thrive, and be happy. Happy-ish.
I think a more productive defence might take the form of reckoning up likelihoods. If one thinks that there is a good likelihood they can provide for and help out the prospective existee to the extent they will find existing a preferable alternative to not, then maybe it can be morally justified. The majority of humans are pretty similar when it comes to their basic needs, and I don’t think “happier being alive than not” is an especially high bar to have to clear for prospective action.
I agree with that. If a parent creates a new human and thoroughly expects that it will enjoy life, and tries to ensure that, then the unlikely event the child does not is perhaps not the parents’ fault. The parent, basically, is saying “I am bringing you unilaterally into this vale of tears, but – look – there is pizza!” And the child grows up, sees the pizza is good, and has a happy life. I suppose it’s possible that a child might not like pizza and might then decide it would rather not exist any more in which case they need a way of finding a gentle exit. And it would be appropriate, in that process, to ask, “have you considered pancakes?”
Great American Satan@#10:
Should we be trying to place blame and make people feel bad for morally questionable decisions? Or just help everyone make better decisions going forward? I’m OK with a version of this that isn’t just looking to distribute shame.
That’s good. I’m not really trying to construct a system whereby we can blame parents for creating new people, but rather I am trying to tease out the question of what responsibility they should/do take for that act of creation. There are a lot of people who have been created because a father was too drunk to get a condom, and that is a question of parental responsibility (or irresponsibility) – in fact I know a child that was a result of a drunken encounter at a party, and his mother can’t even recall who the father was because there were several possibilities and she doesn’t know who they were, anyway. So, what do we do? Seems reasonable to me to say that the responsibility for creating a new person falls on the mother because she had an opportunity to take a “morning after” pill (I remember suggesting exactly that when she called me in distress) but her beliefs were that that little clot of cells was a person with rights, etc. That was a strange situation because here she was asserting that clot of cells was a person, yet she was apparently somewhat comfortable with getting wasted and fucking a couple guys and creating a person that casually. I’m not making a moral judgement about that part of the process, but I do think it’s a bit off to say “this is a very important thing, what I treated incredibly casually.” She didn’t like my suggestion that she name the child “drunkfuk” – I guess I was being too flippant about the thing she was so casual about.
I often say if I’d been aborted it would have saved me a lot of suffering.
Right! That’s a good general response to the anti-abortion argument “well how would you feel if your parents had aborted you?” which we’ve all, probably, heard. The flip side is that then you’d have missed all the pizza, gout, hard work to enrich Jeff Bezos, and the good times you managed to find throughout your decline and fall.
anat@#1:
Jonathan Haidt (yes, I know, he ended up embracing conservatism because he imagines almost everyone actually prefers the system that privileges him so much) has an excellent metaphor that represents a lot of human thinking: the rider and the elephant.
I really like that.
It also resonates with the philosophers’ feeling that one should lead an examined life, and Socrates’ endless enthusiasm about examining others’ whether invited to do so, or not.
One problem I have with your conclusions is that in countries with large economic inequality and a poor safety net having children becomes yet another privilege of the rich.
I apologize; I probably threw a head-fake when I mentioned Barron Trump. There are great parents who are not necessarily financially rich. For example, my parents, who are academics – not billionaires – but who deliberately and thoughtfully created me and made sure I had the things and opportunities I needed. My parents didn’t give me a Lamborghini, hookers, and blow – but they gave me books. Lots and lots of books, and a world of opportunities. I’ve known children of the wealthy who don’t have that much care lavished upon them, and live in smaller worlds than I did. So, the question – which relates to wealth but is not exactly determined by it – is the parents’ responsibility to the child they chose to create, for the childn’s initial life.
There’s another curve-ball in this, for me: there have been parents who were chattel slaves, yet created children they knew were born into chattel slavery. That says a lot to the idea that there is an instinct to create new people, which is blind to the conditions of the parent(s).
@Sunday Afternoon and John Morales:
Interesting! Well, I’m surprised and I guess I congratulate you.
Another offshoot of this line of questioning is: If we do create true self-aware machine intelligences, what ethical responsibility do we have towards them? Are they merely property; chattel slaves to do with as we wish, or are they full persons with rights? Or something somewhere in between? They, too, did not consent to be programmed into existence…
I’ve recently read Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”, which shows different groups of people coming to different conclusions on the topic. In the story, the AIs are created as digital pets, but it seems clear that they can learn and develop. They certainly seem to have the intelligence and some of the emotional levels of children. Some people form close emotional attachments to the AIs (and why shouldn’t they?). Some want to exploit them as tools; use them as obsessive savant-like problem solvers, and simply put them away into dormancy when they are not wanted. Some want to torture AIs; deliberately put them into situations the AIs find deeply distressing. Some want to turn them into corporations, so that they will have the same protections as corporations have under the law. Some think they should be protected from sexual exploitation; some think they should be allowed to make their own choices on the matter. But for how long should they be protected? How “old” is old enough to consent on that particular thorny issue?
A ironic twist is that there is also the idea of “reprogramming” humans that is brought up: Using oxytocin hormone therapy to induce an emotional bond as part of a corporate contract.
As with all of Chiang’s stories, it’s very thought provoking, exploring many possibilities.
I don’t think consent is the right issue. The real point of contention is the quality of life of the child and whether the parent adequately prepares the child to be a functional adult in their environment.
Let’s look at consent first. There’s no consent involved when dealing with a person who doesn’t exist yet. Or things that are not a person but might be someday. There’s no question of rights if I touch a piece of food. There is if I wait until a person has eaten it and then touch that person. To argue othewise is to be one trivial step away from the “every sperm is sacred” fallacy. My gametes don’t belong to anyone but me. Everyone acknowledges this because no one is responsible for what happens to them but me. I share responsibility for a child with the other person whose gametes combined with mine to start it off. But I’m always going to be responsible for providing mine.
And that leads into the real issue: parental responsibility. You aren’t responsible for getting an impossible consent because there’s nothing to get consent from. You’re responsible for taking care of a child because someone has to be. The things don’t survive without adult care. And there’s no one else who’s got a better claim to responsibility than the two parents. They’re at least responsible for finding someone else who will accept a transfer of that responsibility via adoption.
Lastly, consent is kind of a big deal. It’s something our culture is finally deciding we might just want everyone to finally fucking understand and deal with whether the rich shitlords want to or not. I don’t think it’s very useful to water the concept down by implying it should be had here, where it’s impossible to get. The shitlords are simpletons, don’t confuse them please. Money buys a lot of things but brains sure as hell isn’t one of them.
To address the original point, I’d say that the decision to create a child must be a morally neutral act, simply because there is no scale on which to judge quality of life, before said life exists. There is no way to say whether a particular person will be on either side of the ‘wish I’d never been born’ divide. Conceivably advances in psychology and neuroscience might one day nail down what it is that makes human beings ‘happy’, but we’re certainly a long way from there right now.
I will say that despite what I consider to be adequate reserves of empathy, I find it near impossible to imagine what it’s like to be glad you are alive. I think it’s wonderful that some of you do, but I do not understand you at all.
I have listened to at least one lecture on the philosophy of death, and the thing I remember most clearly was the argument regarding opportunity cost. If you are not alive, you don’t get to act, which means that if there is anything you would want to do, if you were alive, you are prevented from doing it by virtue of being dead. Like a lot of philosophy it might seem stupefyingly obvious, but it does represent a negative consequence which can be borne by the non-alive and thus entered into a moral calculus.
It’s also worth remembering that ‘happiness’, to whatever degree it can be quantified, has little to nothing to do with things like the comforts of modern convenience. It’s largely unaffected by whether you have a house, or a car, or a decent job, or a family. You can have all of those things and be unhappy, or have none of them and be blissful. The causes of misery tend to have more to do with freedom of action and expression, for which money is only a partial proxy due to the suffocating weight of the economic system we all suffer within. Because of this, externalities will have only a limited predictive power regarding the potential future happiness of possible people. A nuclear wasteland without capitalism might be preferable. (I should caveat this paragraph by saying that none of the foregoing in any way diminishes the misery caused by poverty within a system which demands productivity in return for the limited freedoms it grants. That suffering is significant, but I would argue it’s being caused by the system, not by the circumstances of poverty.)
Finally, several people have suggested that suicide is a useful determinant of how many people want to die. It isn’t. Suicidal ideation is complicated, and many suicide attempts are a form of self harm, rather than an intent to self extinguish. At the same time, there are plenty of people who would rather not be alive, but have no intention of dying. People accommodate suffering remarkably well, and death is inevitable. Suicide then is a desperate and often impulsive act, rather than a rational response to adverse circumstances. Without wanting to resort to evo psych, we wouldn’t be here if humans killed themselves whenever they felt miserable. Those of us who wish we didn’t have to bear the burden of existence are not necessarily those who will swallow a bottle of sleeping pills. I imagine it could be dangerous to confuse the two.
When Terry Pratchett was living with his advancing Alzheimer’s, he campaigned strongly for the right to die. There is a small book of his thoughts on the subject, and I remember a documentary in which he visited Dignitas in Switzerland. Worth a look for anyone interested.
Oh, and also it’s just occurred to me that the assumption that parents are responsible for their children is culturally derived. There’s no reason that all children shouldn’t be everyone’s responsibility, parenthood is a facet of individualism as much as anything. There are plenty of cultures in which fatherhood isn’t even recognised, or in which aunts raise children equally with their mothers. Sometimes all child rearing past weaning is done by grandparents.
Once a sprog pops out of their mother, it’s anyone’s ballgame.
Ian King@#29:
Oh, and also it’s just occurred to me that the assumption that parents are responsible for their children is culturally derived. There’s no reason that all children shouldn’t be everyone’s responsibility, parenthood is a facet of individualism as much as anything.
I agree. When I did my series on Badgeria, one of the points that I found a lot of people shied away from was the idea of the state taking children away from parents and raising them communally, by professionals. In my opinion, that is one way to achieve equality in a few generations (also, destroy inheritable wealth) – but people push back against that idea. It’s interesting – I know plenty of parents who send kids off to day care, yet they continue to assert that they are the best people to raise their kids. It’s kind of self-refuting.
American attitudes toward child-rearing appear to be a classist re-interpretation of victorian British practices (makes sense, the Brits were the world-spanning empire at the time) with the added assumption that the way the Brits raised their kids produced good, effective, little elites. Never mind that they were also vicious and creepy, but the influence of British methods and techniques of schooling is unmistakable. The ancient Romans, if I recall, were not so concerned about adoption and the whole “breeding” thing, which I assume, in the US, is a left-over of social darwinism and eugenics. What’s funny is that the British model also de-emphasized parents raising their kids, instead relying on support staff.
It is my belief that there is a career opportunity for someone “Doctor” Phil-like (but maybe competent and thoughtful) to brand themself as a “child raising expert” and come by for an hour a day or something like that, to a select list of clients, to help tutor and form the child. After Dune comes out, the market for this service in silicon valley could be huge – no, I’m not kidding. In Dune Herbert demonstrates a child that was raised to rule, with 3 tutors: the musician/swordsman, the armsman, and the mentat as well as the bene gesserit authoritarian mystics. The idea was to fuse those things into a young person who was multi-skilled, practiced at manipulation and truth-saying/twisting, and hand to hand combat: Herbert’s idea of an evolved monarch. It’s an interesting idea. Actually, if you look at how the Hungarian schools worked during the time when Szilard, Kurti, Von Neumann, Teller, Von Karman, etc., were raised – it was a mix of group classes and individual tutorship. Kids spent relatively little time annoying their parents. Of course, it’s hard to know how to raise a child like John Von Neumann under any circumstances. But, the Hungarian model may have influenced Herbert.
Related but unrelated: childess people writing about how to raise kids seems to be “a thing” and the most notorious example is probably Jean Jacques Rousseau, who wrote Emile – a fictionalized account of raising a child. Rousseau, himself, got several sex-workers pregnant but immediately left the area in order to not have to deal with any actual children.
Ian King@#28:
When Terry Pratchett was living with his advancing Alzheimer’s, he campaigned strongly for the right to die. There is a small book of his thoughts on the subject, and I remember a documentary in which he visited Dignitas in Switzerland. Worth a look for anyone interested.
How to Die in Oregon I believe it is.[wik] It’s excellent and very moving. Pratchett also did a speech on death with dignity that was amazing and was performed by a “stunt Pratchett” – also excellent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmejLjxFmCQ
I found it odd that, after all that, he chose to die “naturally” (e.g.: drugged to the eyeballs waiting for renal failure and a coma) but nobody can argue with such a choice. He spoke movingly about drinking a glass of scotch on top of some barbituates while listening to Mozart, which closely matches my idea about how I’d like to go (for me, I would prefer nitrous oxide with some Rammstein or maybe Evanescence’s Taking my last breath)
Ian King #29
Well, that brings consent back on the table. If I’m to be responsible for the children other people make, then I get a say in whether or not they make them.
Ianir @#27
We live in societies that make contraceptives expensive and abortions unobtainable, especially for the poorest. These societies, thanks to religions, also deny people’s access to information about how to prevent unwanted births. Mifepristone is cheap enough to mass produce, but, no, thanks to stupid social norms, people cannot get it without paying hundreds of dollars and knowing how to pay with bitcoins.
Thus, of course, parents cannot be held responsible for their unwanted babies. People often don’t even get to choose whether they want to produce a child. Forcing an immense responsibility upon a victim who got unlucky (going through an unwanted pregnancy is terrible enough in itself) is wrong. If new mothers want to abandon their babies, that’s their right. Granted, throwing out a newborn baby in a trash container would be pointless cruelty. Therefore, unwilling parents should instead leave their unwanted babies in places where they will be safely picked up so that state agencies can deal with finding somebody willing to adopt this kid.
@lanir (27)
what the hell? just because you can’t get consent doesn’t mean you get to ignore it. if you can’t get consent you don’t do whatever it is, unless you can make a really good argument that it is in their best interests.
which none of the pronatalists are able to IMO.
i think it’s important to remember that the human brain is biased towards optimism and wanting to continue existing. it takes a lot of trauma to override, like years of torture trauma. those of you arguing that life is worth living need to consider if you’re just working off this innate optimism.
finally you can avoid this whole issue by just not making kids. only you are impacted by your decision, and you don’t have to work out the ethical issues
@dangerousbeans
But since the new child will also have that innate optimism, doesn’t that argue that they’ll be in favor of being born and therefore it’s justifiable?
I think this does come down to the question of whether you think living is all it’s cracked up to be, and we’re not likely to settle that with rational arguments, since it’s inherently a subjective evaluation.
Personally, I’m on the fence. I prefer staying alive, but I’m not sure I’ll be all that sad when it’s time to go. At least that means I no longer have to deal with all this bullshit. And feel responsible for it. Fuck, why does my brain do that?
@LykeX
as i pointed out, you don’t have to resolve the question if you just don’t create people. not creating people is only an issue if there is an ethical compulsion to do so, which no one is arguing for.
anyway, imagine a brain implant/conditioning that makes someone happy to do whatever they told, even if it is slavery or worse. obviously putting that into existing people to take control of them isn’t allowed, but is it ok to do it to newborn kids? they aren’t aware of the choice they have lost, and the process will make them happy to have had it done (cause we tell them to be happy).
i’m sure you can see where that is going, it’s not a subtle analogy.
I think it might functionally be more useful for someone suffering depression and angry at being alive to talk to a therapist about ways to deal with those intense feelings. It’s easy to latch on to one specific way to think about one specific aspect of life in the most miserable way possible and sometimes hard to see that it’s not the whole story or the only valid perspective or even as important as it might seem.
I mean It miiight be true that all life and joy and satisfaction (and sadness and pain) is the result a by-definition deeply unethical selfish choice to have children, but it might also be possible that’s one of many equally valid ways to think about one relatively small aspect of life that’s taking on a level of absolute importance it doesn’t deserve.