What would it take? Answer these questions.
Posted on: February 14, 2011 - 1:02am
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What would it take? Answer these questions.
I'd like to know people's response to the follow questions. What would it take to eliminate the following scourges from the world? What changes in cultural attitudes, new technologies, education, laws and government policies would be necessary to end these?
To end crime?
To end poverty?
To end environmental damage?
To end religion?
To end all suffering, human and animal?
Is the cure for these things worse than the disease?
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success. --Mark Skousen
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But other people do exist that's why your idea is not intelligible from a utilitarian standpoint. To sterilize people who want to have children would harm them whether or not having a child would really make them happy, so there's definite harm associated with 1 & 3.
There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine
H.P. Lovecraft
How is birth control removing autonomy? It is preventing autonomy from coming into being, not removing it. A potential parents choice to not have a child is an exercise in autonomy that is a net neutral, indeed it might increase autonomy.
I see where you are coming from, but if you don't accept the axiom that life has inherent worth, there isn't anything to discuss, it is an axiom.
That was my point. If you don't place any value on, 'life because it is life' then we're back to square one, you might as well kill yourself. But you have to realize the inherent worthlessness of life is not an axiom most humans subscribe to, so it doesn't make much sense to apply it to the rest of humanity when making a moral calculation.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
I don't have to say that the potential pleasure is relevant. It is relevant after you already created them. People experience pain, but they also experience pleasure.
I wouldn't say that it "overrides" the value, but it would have some significant weight, so that a person would have to experience exponentially more pain than pleasure for me to not create them. Without this point, I suppose you could say that we shouldn't create anyone who would experience more pain than pleasure. Of course, there is already some subjectivity in whether a person is experiencing more pain than pleasure and vice versa.
Lol, what "reason" do you have to accept any fundamental moral assertion? There is none. I just value life.
That's easy. For example, I could just say something like, extreme overpopulation causes a lot of pain, such that it is of greater weight than the value of the lives created.
Even if it contradicted my initial premises, I can just say that I follow my premises as a general rule rather than strictly. It's morality. I can tweak my premises as much as I want to make everything fit.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
Of course, but my position is that it's less harm than the alternative. Putting a rapist in jail harms him too but we don't consider it immoral to do so because we think letting him go is worse. You're jumping ahead a little here, we're discussing the morality of procreation, which we need to do before we can talk about whether the alternative is better or worse.
The fact I don't place value on life just because it's life says nothing about whether I should kill myself, I can still place value on stuff in my life. That makes more sense to me because if my life was entirely full of shit I don't see why I should be thankful even about the fact that I had that life, quite the opposite. I'm not sure it even ultimately matters in this discussion unless you're going to assert that the value of life automatically trumps all the potential suffering (which would lead you to the conclusion that infinite lives in hell is still better than those lives not existing which I find completely unacceptable). If the bad things in a life outweigh the value of life + the good things in that life, then the value of life didn't really change anything for that life.
So, back to my main problem. If you think it's acceptable to not create lives even if those lives would have a good life (and statistically they propably would have at least a decent one) BUT you do recognize the value in not creating bad lives, what's the problem with just not creating lives? If your answer is that every potential parent's autonomy is the most important factor, then ok, I can't see any logical reason why that doesn't work. It's just not convincing for me because it's the parents choosing to exercise their autonomy at the expense of the potentially suffering child, all with no moral requirement to take that risk.
So how can not creating them be bad if you only recognize value in lives after they've begun?
Ok, I disagree with the exponential standard.
Totally true, I guess I'd replace reason with motivation or something along those lines, you obviously get the point.
You can arbitrarily dictate anything but does that extreme overpopulation really meet your standard of exponential suffering? Even if it does, are we at that point now?
If you're just gonna tweak your standards any time it suits you then what's the point of having any? Obviously there can be exceptions but you need to provide some reasoning for them if you want them taken seriously, otherwise it's no different from saying something like "murdering people is wrong except for me when I'm really pissed".
Well, I suppose I don't have to consider the pain or pleasure of individual lives. I can just say it's bad to not create life in general because life is better than no life. I.e. I could say that I value life existing, but not specific non-existent lives.
If I think it's bad enough, then it's bad enough.
I'm thinking, maybe I don't really care much about whether individual lives come into existence of not, I just want our species to keep on existing.
How can I not have any? True, I don't need to make any precise official statements, like, "I love chocolate ice cream three times as much as vanilla!" But, still, I like chocolate more than vanilla, regardless of whether I philosophize about it. Maybe tomorrow I'll like vanilla more. Maybe I already like it more when it has strawberries on top or when there's caramel.
I could give more serious sounding reasons, but they'd still all be bullshit reasons. The only real reason is I prefer it. The "reasons" would just be describing what I prefer.
Haha. The biggest problem that I see with that statement is that it can only apply to the person himself. No one else would have the preference that it's okay for him to kill people when he's pissed because they're not the ones pissed.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
Well, that is intelligible from a utilitarian standpoint - though I think rapists are put in prison for retributive reasons - but it may still be wrong. It remains to be seen how much harm would be done by preventing all human reproduction.
However, if true I'd consider it more a defect of predominant theories of ethics if they cannot provide rational grounds for continued survival than an invalidation of human existence.
Even you must not find it too convincing if you haven't killed yourself yet.
If you really desire to see human extinction though I'd say take heart because as a matter of probability most observers would be born in a larger generation closer to the end than a smaller, earlier one. If the human population would one day number in the trillions it's pretty unlikely you'd be one of the first 100 billion.
There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine
H.P. Lovecraft
This whole argument resumes in Manageri thinking that life isn't worth experiencing. I think it is very much worth EVEN if there is nothing more to it that these few decades we spent here.
I think life is worth experiencing despite the pain.
And I'm very glad Ktulu has kids!!
I think killing people is always wrong. And hurting them just because they believe in different things much more so.
My advocacy on birth control has nothing to do with pleasure or pain directly. It has to do with rationality. Only an irrational bacteria would consume maximum resources to exponential growth in a finite medium. What follows this action is medium exaustion and the death phase.
Of course if we have a rational number of habitants on the planet we would also in theory be able to give a much more confortable life to most humans, as there would be available more resources per person.
So... I have to say that we must maximize pleasure and well being and minimize pain and hardship BUT more important than that is experiencing life. So yes I agree with Ktulu, it is all about priorities.
Saying that birth control is then irrational because I prioritize experiencing life, is I think, a non sense question. Because we are talking about nothing at all. There are no human beings here only a potential baby caused by a 10 min F%#$. Birth control is neutral in this sense, neither good or bad.
Thus I must conclude that I give more importance to the experience of life but having in mind that we must rationally address it by making it a the most fair and pleasurable experience possible.
I think we're defining morality differently, because what you just wrote, to me, is an exact paraphrasing of what I wrote. Morality is a set of values that I assign weight to. At one time I thought dogs were the embodiment of loyalty and worth a human life. Now I think they're just animals that would make an interesting artistic impression when ran over by a car.
Edit: The above oversimplified example is not a segue to the paragraph below.
Of course my morality has changed, I used to be an idealistic naive liberal, now I value responsibility, reliability, and actualization over ability. I consider myself to be conservative on most issues. It is in my personality to act on my feelings, and my triggers changed, of course. But my morality has changed and will continue to change. I think you're confusing morality with personality traits.
"Don't seek these laws to understand. Only the mad can comprehend..." -- George Cosbuc