On Reproduction and Respect for Life
October 14th, 2007 by adminIn the western society today, a certain level of respect for life, especially human life, is considered a norm. Although the origin of need for our judicial system concerning life and death arose much from the human tendency for vengeance, the system today also encompasses people that would die without anyone caring. This change has made the shift from respect for the mourners to respect for life, and this same idea seems to have been incorporated in the moral of many people.
Yet, there is a very clear and mostly unintended conflict with this moral and the de facto human practice that goes completely unnoticed, since we have another instinct concerning life and death apart from killing, namely reproduction.
Around the world, childbirth is mostly seen as a happy event, with the exceptions of some countries in which certain genders are unwanted, such as India. A mother is held in higher regard than women in general, and pregnancy is often glorified, especially in the western world, often to the point of obscenity. Now what is the problem you may ask? The answer is quite simple, yet so hard to properly comprehend in all it’s depth. Thus, I shall try to explain this as thoroughly as I can, for the sake of avoiding misunderstandings.
To be able to reason around justice of life and death as humans, we need to base our reasoning upon certain axioms. The first one is quite obvious: that which is born has not existed before it was born, in the same way as a house does not exist before it is built. Secondly, we need to assume causality, which I doubt many will reject.
Now, when humans reproduce, they give birth to a new being that has emotions and at some point will arise from the vegetative state into being conscious. Now, if we view this situation from a causal perspective, the parent is the rootnode of the child’s causality tree, the cause of the child. And the child will, supposing it stays alive for some time, partake in different forms of causality through its actions as well, and those affected will be parts of the causal tree of the child, and because the the parents are the cause of the child, the child’s causal tree is part of the parents’ causal tree. All saints, all murderers and all rapists had parents.
Thus, everything that the child does, and everything the descendants of that child do, is the cause and responsibility of the child’s parent.
Now you might think “No, children have a will and direction apart from their parents”, which certainly is true, but is not a counter-argument, since the parents had the child and thus made possible all the actions of the child in the first place. So unless the parenthood was without consent, each human bears the responsibility of all his descendants. This might seem absurd to many, and has to me been a puzzling realization, but is completely rational. It is a simple concept derived easily by logic: responsibility rests on causality, causality implies recursion. Still, it is interestingly unthinkable for the human, probably because we are hard-wired not to think about this. The idea of children clouds our judgement.
But it gets even more serious; every human that is brought to this world is brought without consent; you have no way of asking nobody if that nobody wants to be born. Birth and death are comparable events; they are radical shifts in the state of life to say the least. And there is no reason to why creating new life should be considered good, or even less wrong than murder. Both are making radical shifts to somebody’s existence without consent. We can quite easily imagine the possible pains of different forms of murder, so it is easy for us to comprehend the wrong because it is evident and acute. Yet birth (apart from the imminent bloodbath) is not an act of violence in that sense, and the problematics are indirect; most people will not torture their child (at least consciously), so it is easy to think that no damage is done. What constitutes a fundamental blindness to us and flaws our sense of justice, is probably our perception of time; the suffering of the child might roughly be divided evenly upon seventy years or so, assuming natural death of age. This dilution in no way decreases the total of the suffering, in the same way as it is wrongful to assume that constant abdominal pain for three years is any less than a kick in the head that hurts but does no apparent damage; in many cases the abdominal pain will cause much more suffering. Also, happiness in no way makes up for suffering; they are separate totals. Happiness does not remove the memories of pain from your brain, it just adds happy memories. If a person is tortured and alternately pleased, it only makes the person experienced, not necessarily happy.
What the above implies is simply that creating new emotional, conscious beings is a violation of respect for life comparable to murder. It is because of this realization that I nowadays advocate voluntary human extinction, meaning that we simply stop reproducing (no I don’t want people to kill each other ’til extinction). If someone wants to claim me a murderer for “not allowing children to be born”, I suggest they get psychiatrical help; I can’t act on anyone that does not exist. If we are to continue on that path of thought that people exist before they are created, it would imply that any human is a murderer if he does not reproduce as fast as his body allows him to. I shouldn’t need to mention the obvious suffering of overpopulation evident in many parts of the world.
My notion is based upon true respect for life, and because of that, I wish nobody would have to be created to this world. Any human that claims to respect life but embraces birth is a hypocrite; what that person respects is upkeep of life, which is obvious to our nature as animals, but inherently becomes a circular argument if one tries to reason with it.
Why is this not a fundamental part of our moral? Why did humans not go extinct ages ago? From an evolutionary perspective it is obviously beneficial for a creature’s success of reproduction that the creature reproduces, so evolution emphasizes those genes that keep the species from “thinking too much”. Thus, those who didn’t reproduce a thousand years ago won’t have descendants that live today; we are descendants of those who either had their way like animals or rapists and rape victims. What does this make us? It makes the human a hypocrite who is blind to his own crimes. It makes us the descendants of people whose minds were blurred by bestial desire, and the descendants of rapists.
This is our heritage, our legacy. Evolution prefers strong rapists and weak women as well as it prefers blinding stupidity. This way, evolution sets an upper limit for intelligence.
Reproduction with this in mind is a choice, and each and every one of us make that decision. My decision is not to partake in this insanity, and by doing so, neither will my genes that apparently helped me get rational and skeptical. I leave the reproduction to beasts, who one day might evolve into someone rational, who also chooses not to partake.
Posted in english |
October 14th, 2007 at 22:30
“But it gets even more serious; every human that is brought to this world is brought without consent; you have no way of asking nobody if that nobody wants to be born.”
This is technically true, but then, first-aid teams also work to save the lives of people who have been knocked out in accidents and are unable to give consent to being rescued. We do not consider this an immoral act, for consent is assumed - if they would not want to live, they’d presumably have killed themselves.
In the case of having sex in an attempt to concieve, we obviously cannot assume that the fetus would have a chance to commit suicide before being born. However, it is still reasonable to assume consent, because the normal condition of a human is to want to live. This normally only changes due to extreme suffering or mental imbalances of a serious kind, neither of which is typically encountered by most people (as seen by the low rates of suicide in almost any society - even Finland, often said to have a high suicide rate, only has around 21 suicides per 100 000 people per year - this is considerably lower than the birth rate, 1042 births per 100 000 people).
Is it justifiable to give birth without consent if we can assume consent in the vast majority of cases? I would argue yes, for several different reasons.
First, even if we assume that no amount of happiness cancels out even the slightest bit of pain in a moral sense, the fact remains that even if the human race voluntarily ended its existence within this generation, it would still leave countless of animal species to a life of suffering. If we managed to destroy the biosphere, life would still continue to evolve on other worlds. We have a moral duty to expand outwards to space and rescue other species from suffering.
Second, even if no amount of happiness cancels out any amount of suffering, technology will eventually allow us to build a society with no suffering and a great amount of happiness. Combined with the first point, we will be able to spread this state of being to other worlds. I see this as a better alternative than a world with no pain, but no happiness either.
Third, there is the pragmatic/evolutionary psychology argument. If those with the higher morals choose not to breed, it won’t stop the less thoughtful ones from breeding and continuing society. In evolutionary genetics, the carriers of a particular allele having a lower fitness doesn’t mean that the total size of the population will decrease, it only means that that particular allele will vanish from the population as it’s outbred by the others. Now, while it’s questionable how genetic “high morals” are, it’s been argued that memes function on a similiar level to genes. Should all the supporters of a particular philosophy choose not to breed, the ones with conflicting views will have a higher chance of passing their own thoughts on to their offspring. It’s also reasonable to assume that a person’s tendency towards altruism is at least partially inherited. Therefore a philosophy of voluntary extinction will not reduce the total amount of suffering, but is likely to actually increase it, as society evolves to have morals that won’t put such an emphasis towards the reduction of suffering.
This also goes against the argument from causality earlier: just like not voting means that you are forfeiting a chance to influence things towards a direction you consider moral, not having children means you are forfeiting a chance to influence the ethics of future generations (of course, this is not to say that you might not be more effective in influencing the future generations in some other way). While you are not creating a direct causal node which is your responsibility, you are enlarging the relative influence of the nodes caused by other people, and therefore you are indirectly responsible for actions taken by them. (This, of course, requires us to accept indirect influence to have at least a roughly equivalent weight as direct influences, which is not uncontroversial. I generally find it more meaningful to speak in utilitarian terms - one has a moral responsibility to maximize the amount of positive utility [however it is defined - "every point of suffering prevented produces one point of utility" sounds appropriate for purposes of this discussion] generated by his life, and if there are two different options, the more moral one is the one that causes a greater net utility. If having children causes a greater increase in net utility than not having them, then the moral choice is to have children, regardless of whether your influence is direct or indirect.)
October 14th, 2007 at 23:07
When first-aid teams work to save lives, they work to upkeep already existing lives, not creating people or murdering them. Thus, upkeep is not a radical shift in one’s existence.
About conception: Humans will want to live even though they are in great misery, simply because they have an instinct so strong that they continue their lives through great pain unnecessarily. Nevertheless, survival instinct is not an argument for birth, and this is not a counterargument because the argument does not rest upon the unwillingness of a fetus to live.
Even the concept of consent of a fetus is an absurd notion; there is no point in asking someone about consent postnatally, and concieving with statistical assumption still presents the enormous ethical problems of utilitarianism, which I personally refute, being a moral absolutist. Your answer only raises more questions.
About saving other species: the first problem is that we need to assume there are other species, which we certainly do not know for sure, and have no means of properly researching for the time being. Also, if the technological advancement you mention is to happen, there will be no need for humans to spread the gospel of voluntary extinction; we could have machines do it for us. Your notion also wants to extend responsibility towards beings that we do not know if they exist.
I am also doubtful about technology solving our problem of happiness vs. suffering, since it is true to the human nature for the social system not to arrange itself in such a manner. Even if such an event should occur, it would still ignore the suffering of many generations. It is a choice where you prefer the wellbeing of one in a thousand.
You also resort to irrational thought when you see happiness as an absolute value; what does not exist can not experience a lack of happiness.
About the pragamatism:
You resort to the “oh no they will outbreed us” notion, and trying to modify the gene pool like that is first of all extremely problematic due to you causing lots of new beings for your own sense of righteousness, but also because such attempts are quite futile; intelligent people will generally always find less interest in breeding than hillbillies. It is a game that cannot be won. Such behavior would be completely past the point, because it would only result in more suffering in the form of massive amounts of new children. The game of voluntary extinction does not inherently reduce the amount of suffering (although it might prevent some), but informing others might cause them to play the game as well, leading to a larger scale prevention.
The reason why voting cannot be compared to making babies, is because voting does not produce create actors of causality who are conscious and have feelings. Voting only modifies their power.
Using the same logic, I could argue that it is better to use my entire life killing people, so that they won’t make the wrong vote in the next election. The same ethical problem arises, so I instead choose to not start playing any of the outbreeding or slaughter games, because their inherent cost will be greater than their goal.
Due to the above reasons, having children does not produce a larger net utility than not having them, although even the concept of utility in this sense is absurd and leaves many questions unanswered.
October 14th, 2007 at 23:54
When first-aid teams work to save lives, they work to upkeep already existing lives, not creating people or murdering them.
I do not see this as a meaningful distinction. You die and are reborn as a different person each time there is a change in the structure of your nerve cells, which is to say, countless of times each day. “Upkeeping an already existing life” is equivalent to creating a new one.
Conception and consent: you were the one who brought up the concept of consent in regard to new lives, not me. But it gets even more serious; every human that is brought to this world is brought without consent; you have no way of asking nobody if that nobody wants to be born is what you wrote. Yes, the concept of consent is of dubious value for fetuses, so don’t use it.
You are, of course, free to be a moral absolutist and reject utilitarianism. Just be aware that by doing so, you are not as effective in acting moral as you would be otherwise.
We do not know if there are other species, true, but there is a very high probability that they either exist or will evolve in the future. The amount of planets in the universe is astronomical (no pun intended) - the amount of galaxies alone is in the billions - with some physicists even proposing that there is an infinite amount of planets. Certainly if there is an infinite amount of them we know for certain that other species exist, and even if there was only a finite amount, the probability of us being the only ones in the universe would seem miniscule. Furthermore, if the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, then an infinite amount of new species are being created every second. It is true that we could have machines do our work for us, but that point is moot for as long as we have not developed the machines in question. Once they have been built and sent to carry out their task, then I agree that this counter-argument has been refuted and voluntary extinction may proceed, but not before.
I grant you the point that improving the well-being of people in the future will ignore the suffering of many generations.
Happiness as an absolute value is not an irrational thought. Assume that we have some meaningful method of quantitatively measuring happiness. If one person exists in the whole universe and he experiences a hundred points of happiness, then the absolute value of happiness is one hundred. If two people each experience a hundred points of happiness, the absolute value of happiness is two hundred. If there are no people in the universe, the absolute value of happiness is zero.
You resort to the “oh no they will outbreed us” notion, and trying to modify the gene pool like that is first of all extremely problematic due to you causing lots of new beings…
The new beings would be born anyway, but they would be the children of others, so your point is moot. If one segment of the population doesn’t have children, that means no resources are consumed by their non-existent children and the others have more resources at their disposal to have children with (this is one of the key principles driving natural selection, really). The voting metaphor is still valid.
It is true that it is an uphill battle, but surely you acknowledge that it is likewise impossible to convince all of humanity not to have children. Having children and instilling your values in them, on the other hand, at least helps reduce suffering while not having children increases the amount of it. If you reject the idea of having more children because it is ineffective, while embracing the idea of voluntarily extinction which is impossible to carry out, you are showing a double standard.
You could argue that it is better to use your entire life killing people, yes. The relevant question, then, would be whether this strategy would be likely to be the most effective in carrying out your morals, which I do not think it would be.
October 15th, 2007 at 01:04
And neither do I think your notion of outbreeding through creating a cult-like baby factory will really change anything for the better.
I hold that in the practical sense, we can only apply our morals upon ourselves (assuming others have free will or are outside of our direct scope of action) and so make the direct ethical decision of not reproducing. This way, at least I am not the cause of far-future actors. My respect for life is so deep that I simply cannot resort to “the end justifies the means” (which also is ethically controversial). Although one certainly might turn this into a game of Civilization (or why not Alpha Centauri?), I think one’s effect on such a system is too diluted to be seen as a probabilistically rational means, as long as one does not have direct and near-to absolute power.
I think analysis of religious traditions will provide enough proof that there is no way of preserving such values in the cult-like movement which you describe. It would certainly degenerate to the point of defeating the purpose by the time the movement would make any real difference.
I simply view creation and murder as crimes so heavy, nothing can justify them absolutely.
I do recognize the hardship in convincing the entire humanity, but I actually have a plan. We poison the Well; we find a means to sterilize the entire human population in a way that does not harm their other bodily functions. I can think of no argument that would see this as a general problem, because that would not cause a radical shift in their existence, it would only limit other people’s possibilities for disrespect for life. It’s kind of like making all human beings incapable of violence towards each other. Even though they might like hitting each other, I don’t think we have any reason to believe their unhappiness stemming from lack of violence will be greater than that caused by violence.
As our current situation is comparable to giving birth directly into a meat grinder, I can also see no reason to why reproduction should be seen as a human right, since such a statement would be done on the cost of the children who pay the price without consent. So as the means are not problematic, I need not justify them with any end.
October 15th, 2007 at 01:17
You die and are reborn as a different person each time there is a change in the structure of your nerve cells, which is to say, countless of times each day.
While this is completely valid way of defining beings, it is of rather limited use. If you limit the meaning of the abstract symbol “me” to mean the current position of a group of particles, you have a perfectly valid description of reality, but it is an definition that is very badly suited for studying the emergent behaviour called consciousness. To do that in a meaningful way one has to assume a connection between a temporal series of particle configurations. This connection is difficult to define with precision, and is of course arbitrary (it’s not built into the fabric of universe, it’s a pattern we see/project into what we perceive of the physical world). One should remember that the world we live in as humans is not the raw physical world, but instead a simplification of it, created through the abstractions and symbols (which are partially arbitrary human constructions) we use.
So, if you use that definition where each tick of time has a distinct “me”, then murder for example becomes impossible, because stopping a continuum requires the temporal dimension you just left out.
If you however use a definition of consciousness that involves the temporal dimension, the start- and endpoints become quite special in meaning, and thus first-aid no longer is equivalent to creation of a new consciousness.
Is it justifiable to give birth without consent if we can assume consent in the vast majority of cases?
The consciousness can’t make any decision about its own existence (or anything else for that matter) before it starts to exist. If the consciousness doesn’t exist, there is nothing that would object to not being created. However, once the consciousness has been created, it is able to disagree with the decision of its creator. If the potential creator chooses not to create, then all consciousnesses involved (just the creator) are content.
As I see it it’s a simple comparison of probability: if no creation takes place, the risk of failure is 0, but if creation takes place it is greater than 0. The choice should be obvious.
If happiness is absolute, then suffering is also. It is therefore as valid to consider not breeding to be superior, because it removes all possibility of adding to the absolute value of suffering in the universe, as it is valid to recommend breeding because it carries a large potential of increasing the absolute happiness.
The rest of this post describes my personal morale, and is therefore far from absolute truth.
As I see it, happiness is not an absolute good and suffering is not an absolute evil. Devoting one’s life to try to manipulate these statistics of the universe makes as little sense as any other meaning-of-life. My own morale is based on trying to maximise the happiness-through-interest (a.k.a. hacking) experienced by myself, to minimize my suffering and to simultaneously allow other sentient beings to follow their own ideology as long as it doesn’t make it impossible or difficult for me to follow mine. I accept that this morale is completely arbitrary.
Within this morale, it becomes completely absurd to devote the necessary resources required for procreation, when the potential for happiness through that is reduced to zero by the fact that I’d never hack my own child (that would mean seriously hampering another consciousness’ possibility of following its own path).
As I see it, making children means commitment to improve the world that the next generation lives in, commitment to the betterment of mankind. While I can see that some people would hold that as a good thing worth sacrificing a large portion of their own lives for, I don’t agree with it myself. While I’m in no way opposed to building a better future, and even work towards it in some ways, I don’t see it as an absolute good. I think that the only sensible way to achieve such a better world would be through the transhumanistic singularity, which would (probably) mean that consciousnesses would no longer need to die on a regular basis and be replaced by new ones. This would mean the elimination of the whole problem, because humanity could continue without the need of creating new minds.
The singularity is however not yet upon us, and might not come during the lifetimes of the now living. It would not sadden me much if humanity would cease to be before that. Lost potential, yes, but potential is always lost. Humanity will end in oblivion at some point, it is inescapable. It can’t be the end that brings meaning to it all, it must be the process. One life filled with excitement and learning is more valuable to me than a hundred lives after each other, if those lives are entirely spent on survival.
October 15th, 2007 at 01:32
Just a comment on the absolute value of happiness; as happiness is something that is experienced by the (human) consciousness, happiness is not an absolute value in a universe without humanity. The value of happiness without humanity is not zero; the parameter does not exist at all. Thus, it is irrational to see happiness as an absolute value.
October 25th, 2007 at 15:38
I simply view creation and murder as crimes so heavy, nothing can justify them absolutely.
Been thinking about this discussion on and off since my last response. I find that the biggest contradiction in the voluntary extinction line of thought is that both killing and breeding are considered bad. I could understand thinking that said that killing was good and breeding bad, or that breeding was good and killing bad, but this one is harder to rationalize. Apparently life is a bad thing until the point when people are born, when it suddenly becomes a good thing. Preventing a child from coming into existence by using contraception is a good thing, but killing that child after it is born is a bad thing. Can you explain the reasoning behind this one better? To me, either life is a good thing or then it’s a bad thing - it’s contradictory to have it be both.
Some responses to individual points:
freenerd:
I think analysis of religious traditions will provide enough proof that there is no way of preserving such values in the cult-like movement which you describe.
In that case, every generation should be entirely different from its parents, and no country should have any culture or national stereotype that remained even the slightly constant from one generation to the other. I do not find this to be the case.
Just a comment on the absolute value of happiness; as happiness is something that is experienced by the (human) consciousness, happiness is not an absolute value in a universe without humanity. The value of happiness without humanity is not zero; the parameter does not exist at all. Thus, it is irrational to see happiness as an absolute value.
Happiness is a property of certain sorts of minds; certain sorts of minds are atoms in a certain sort of configuration. By your reasoning, there are no absolute values at all - grass typically grows on planets, and if a region of space happens to have no planets, then the amount of grass in that region is not zero, but undefined.
Waino:
So, if you use that definition where each tick of time has a distinct “me”, then murder for example becomes impossible, because stopping a continuum requires the temporal dimension you just left out.
From an unpublished essay of mine: “Now, it should hopefully be obvious that by itself, reincarnation of self does not suggest that murder would be alright - if you kill somebody, you are still killing one particular self, as well as all the countless of selves that would be born in that body later on.”
Of course, this requires one to attach a value to potential beings, which you two don’t seem to be doing…
October 25th, 2007 at 16:26
Apparently life is a bad thing until the point when people are born, when it suddenly becomes a good thing. [...] Can you explain the reasoning behind this one better? To me, either life is a good thing or then it’s a bad thing - it’s contradictory to have it be both.
This is exactly the the key point of this discussion. In your view, potential life and actual realized life are equal. In my view, they are completely separate, and have separate moral value. If you would be consistent in your thinking, then you would have to conclude that masturbation, contraception and simply not breeding children at the maximum rate that one’s body is capable of is evil, because they cause potential lives never to be made real.
It is much more reasonable to see potential life as just that: potential. Then there is no contradiction. There is the decision of the creator: the decision of realizing that potential, or abstaining from it. Before that decision is made, the potential life is not worth anything, as it does not exist. After the decision has been done, undoing it becomes a separate kind of moral decision, because the process is not simply reversible. After the creation, the life is no longer potential, and so it has value.
This brings us to a related point: Of course, this requires one to attach a value to potential beings, which you two don’t seem to be doing…
That is true, I do not attach value to potential. That is because potential is probably infinite. Most of it (an infinite amount, actually of the same cardinality as the original potential, as the number reduced from it is finite) is always “wasted”, because the things that become real (within a defined area) are finite. Furthermore, we already know the long-term result of all our work: annihilation. In one form or the other, it will come. The probability of annihilation during each time-unit is greater than zero, so when time reaches infinity, that probability will be realized at some point, however small it might be. That means that we cannot seek the value or meaning of our lives from the future, from any future potential. If it is to be found, it must lie in the path we take into that inevitable destruction. It must lie in that which is, not that which might be.
By your reasoning, there are no absolute values at all - grass typically grows on planets, and if a region of space happens to have no planets, then the amount of grass in that region is not zero, but undefined.
In a way that is so. But not in the way you formulated it, but rather: there are no absolute values at all - grass is an arbitrary definition invented by humans, and if there are no humans, then the amount of grass is not zero, but undefined.
“Grass” is just a simplification we have invented, to focus attention on the similarity between certain groups of atoms that work as self-replicating machines, thus spreading that similarity around in their offspring. In the physical world there are just bunches of particles, each one unique (in regard to its position and energy). Their groupings are human inventions.
Ofcourse there can be other sentient species than homo sapiens, with their own similar abstractions. But by my own definition they are just as human as we are.
[...] if you kill somebody, you are still killing one particular self, as well as all the countless of selves that would be born in that body later on.
Not really true. Living is a boolean value, either one lives or one doesn’t. In the instant the murderweapon hits, the victim still lives. That particular “me” lives. One of the temporally following collections of particles will be the first one to no longer fit the definition of being alive. But the one immediately preceding it was still alive. If there is no continuum connecting those two, then one can not speak of murder. The alive “me” is alive, and as it is temporally static, or having its temporal dimension reduced to zero, it is by definition unable to change. It simply is alive.
Murder, meaning to turn something that is alive into something that is dead, is impossible, unless there is a temporal dimension to beings.
If one attaches value to potential future states of those particles, then one has in fact accepted the temporal continuum of the me-concept, and is therefore
no longer using the one-me-per-tick-of-time definition of “me”.
October 25th, 2007 at 22:59
Apparently life is a bad thing until the point when people are born, when it suddenly becomes a good thing. Preventing a child from coming into existence by using contraception is a good thing, but killing that child after it is born is a bad thing. Can you explain the reasoning behind this one better? To me, either life is a good thing or then it’s a bad thing - it’s contradictory to have it be both.
Someone’s life can’t be a bad thing before someone is created, simply because there is no life concerning that individual before that. In the same way as existence is not a feature of an object, neither is life a feature of a living being, as it is a being only because it is alive and an object is an object only because it exists. You are clearly falling into philosophical traps. Very natural ones for the human mind, but yet false. Also, life itself is never good; it is only for the respect of someone else’s subjective experience that I see forcefully ending it as bad. You can’t prevent a child from coming to existence by using contraception; that child does not exist so there is no one to prevent. Killing a child is obviously a bad thing because it usually causes suffering at some level, especially if the child is sentient. Murder is always without consent, and it is not our matter to decide about someone else’s existence as a being.
In that case, every generation should be entirely different from its parents, and no country should have any culture or national stereotype that remained even the slightly constant from one generation to the other. I do not find this to be the case.
Certainly not, that is not what I claimed. Culture is a meme, but it is not within the human scope to construct such a meme that it would successfully live on without any modification. You can teach someone what to do, in the end, you can’t teach someone why to do it; they have to realize it themselves to really realize it. This cultural movement you are proposing is doomed to fail, since it tries to be what humans are not. It is inevitable for it to change over time. Obviously it will resemble the original to some extent, but it will change, and over time the changes will be so many, that will be hard to find any resemblance at all. Just compare the Christian holy method of baptism; it degenerated from near-death submersion, probably causing near-death-experiences to simply squatting a few drops on somebody’s head. The changes defeat the purpose. Saying no to my claim would mean that there has never happened any change, which there obviously has.
Happiness is a property of certain sorts of minds; certain sorts of minds are atoms in a certain sort of configuration. By your reasoning, there are no absolute values at all - grass typically grows on planets, and if a region of space happens to have no planets, then the amount of grass in that region is not zero, but undefined.
Just as Waino argued; there is no happiness as well as there is no grass unless there is a human being to experience them (and even though a human is there, they only exist within the human’s mind; wholes are not features of the universe.) If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is there to hear the fall, does it make any sound? Certainly not for a human which isn’t there. You irrationally resort to idealism. Wholes exist only for a sentient being, not for the universe.
Happiness is an invention of a sentient being that exists only in the mind of the experiencer, not in the physical world. In the physical world, it’s just particles, and there’s nothing special about them. Thus, happiness is not a feature of the universe, so it is not an absolute value. Therefore, there is no rational point in trying to argue for the upkeep of happiness at the cost of suffering. Both are real to the subjective minds in which we operate, but we lose no happiness if there is no we. And at the same time, there is no suffering. It is a perfect win-win situation. Without resorting to superstition, there is no argument against this, but many for it.
October 26th, 2007 at 00:22
Waino:
If you would be consistent in your thinking, then you would have to conclude that masturbation, contraception and simply not breeding children at the maximum rate that one’s body is capable of is evil, because they cause potential lives never to be made real.
Giving potential lives value doesn’t mean that we should breeding all the time, but rather that we should be devoting our main attention to combating existential risk. See http://www.nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste.html .
(Of course, this implies that as a society, we should be having children, since not having them is definitely an existential risk.)
In your view, potential life and actual realized life are equal. In my view, they are completely separate, and have separate moral value.
If you don’t want to use the thought of one-person-per-tick-of-time -thinking, then consider this: you could be run over by a truck today, so the you living tomorrow is only a potential being. If you wish to build an ethical system that is only concerned with actual beings, that means that the system should maximize current pleasure - any long-term planning past the immeadite moment is useless, because it touches on potential beings, not actual ones. All beings are potential ones and nobody is an actual one if we are evaluating future points in time.
In a way that is so. But not in the way you formulated it, but rather: there are no absolute values at all - grass is an arbitrary definition invented by humans, and if there are no humans, then the amount of grass is not zero, but undefined.
True. Still, I am not sure how all of this discussion is really relevant - I don’t see how “the amount of happiness undefined” is any better than “the amount of happiness is zero”. It amounts to the same thing, for all practical purposes.
freenerd:
Also, life itself is never good; it is only for the respect of someone else’s subjective experience that I see forcefully ending it as bad.
Sure, subjective experience, then.
You can’t prevent a child from coming to existence by using contraception; that child does not exist so there is no one to prevent.
So why do people use contraception, then, if it isn’t preventing anything from coming into existence?
(It might be useful to make the difference between a specific child and children-in-general. It is true that there is no specific child who’s “waiting by the cloud to be born” who is denied existence - however, some child is always denied existence each time action is taken to prevent conception. Denying this is to deny that contraception does anything.)
This cultural movement you are proposing is doomed to fail, since it tries to be what humans are not.
You are saying that any movement which seeks to promote greater altruism and thoughtfulness is doomed to fail? I’m not at all convinced that our cultural history supports that claim. Certainly complete altruism and thoughtfulness is impossible to achieve, but I only want to achieve greater altruism and thoughtfulness, not absolute such. If people are more altruistic in such a way that it contributes to reduced overall suffering, even for a short while, then the movement has been successful.
Happiness is an invention of a sentient being that exists only in the mind of the experiencer, not in the physical world. In the physical world, it’s just particles, and there’s nothing special about them.
The mind is the particles in question, unless you wish to resort to (silly) mind-body dualism.
October 26th, 2007 at 03:57
If you don’t want to use the thought of one-person-per-tick-of-time -thinking, then consider this: you could be run over by a truck today, so the you living tomorrow is only a potential being. If you wish to build an ethical system that is only concerned with actual beings, that means that the system should maximize current pleasure - any long-term planning past the immediate moment is useless, because it touches on potential beings, not actual ones. All beings are potential ones and nobody is an actual one if we are evaluating future points in time.
No, because by considering the future being a potential being and not the same being in a hypothetic situation, you assume non-continuum of self, and you have a contradiction, because you just said we should ignore non-continuum. Continuum implies that we are the same being tomorrow and today, so we plan for a future moment considering the current self unless we will be doing guesswork on the future changed-but-still-about-the-same-self.
True. Still, I am not sure how all of this discussion is really relevant - I don’t see how “the amount of happiness undefined” is any better than “the amount of happiness is zero”. It amounts to the same thing, for all practical purposes.
In a way, but “the amount of happiness is zero” pretty much parses as “people are not happy”, which again is a bizarre statement if there are no people. It’s like saying “the dinosaurs aren’t content today”, considering they pretty much went extinct a long time ago (we exclude s.c. living fossils).
Sure, subjective experience, then.
Obviously, because we are humans. There is no way to properly relate to a human objectively, as there is no one to relate to.
So why do people use contraception, then, if it isn’t preventing anything from coming into existence?
People use contraception to avoid creating new lives. This is not the same as preventing someone from coming into existence, because that requires that the someone exists already, in which case we have an obvious paradox. “Preventing someone to come into existence” sounds like someone is struggling to get here but we are pushing them back (no, sperms don’t count as sentient beings).
You are saying that any movement which seeks to promote greater altruism and thoughtfulness is doomed to fail? I’m not at all convinced that our cultural history supports that claim. Certainly complete altruism and thoughtfulness is impossible to achieve, but I only want to achieve greater altruism and thoughtfulness, not absolute such. If people are more altruistic in such a way that it contributes to reduced overall suffering, even for a short while, then the movement has been successful.
I think you have a flawed definition of success there; with that reasoning, if I help an old lady across the street then I am a “successful movement in promoting altruism and thoughtfulness”. Even though altruism in the real sense is quite impossible and I was somewhat thoughtful in that situation, I hardly qualify as a “movement”, not to mention there is little guarantee my movement will span over even a single generation.
I am quite convinced cultural history supports my claim. I have not heard of a movement that successfully promoted altruism and thoughtfulness and survived for very long, if success is defined as effective improvement of quality of life as a consequence of heightened “altruism” and thoughtfulness that inspires and enlarges the movement even more, ie. a good positive meme that survives. As far as I know, that subculture of the rave culture kind of scattered, and the major world religions we have today are quite the contrary. See here: http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html
If that kind of culture existed today, I certainly would have known of it, because if the world was governed by such traits, then there would be no need for me to invent such a cultural movement. Our world would be very different, actually. (I think it’s a requirement for the success of such a movement that it would be widespread by today, otherwise it obviously failed.)
There is much reason to believe that people are the most happy when they live in small tribes, simply because our natural automata of social pack-living works in that situation. It is the dysfuntion of that trait in great, dense populations that seemingly turns “decent people” into psychopaths toward anyone but their closest friends and loved-ones. So if you wanted to have “altruism” and thoughtfulness, you should seriously decrease the amount of people on Earth into what worked in the hunter-gatherer times. But I don’t see why to do this, as we could win(win as in not lose at all) even more by just having no people at all.
The mind is the particles in question, unless you wish to resort to (silly) mind-body dualism.
Happiness and mind are both inventions of a sentient being. Although we can perceive some level of platform for these inventions, any attempt to do so is arbitrary on a particle level. And again, the inventions are in no way inherent to the particles of the platform. You can’t take the “happiness part” of it away and preserve that happiness any more than you can run a brain through a kitchen mixer, pour it into a skull and wait for something intelligent to happen. In the end it’s not the particles, it’s their complex but fragile arrangement - the particles themselves are all replaceable. But even though we might subjectively experience consciousness, it still does not exist on an objective plane, simply because consciousness and any of our experiences in general, are arbitrary wholes. (Note that even particles are arbitrary wholes, they are just a convenient way to discuss matter(which is quite an arbitrary way to discuss arbitrary energy levels in the universe).) On a really objective plane, everything “just is”.
October 26th, 2007 at 18:39
Xuenay:
Giving potential lives value doesn’t mean that we should breeding all the time, but rather that we should be devoting our main attention to combating existential risk.
Well yes, if you try to maximize the total amount of realized lives during the entire existence of the universe, from start to finish (if there are such endpoints), then one shouldn’t overbreed, because that lessens the chance of survival for the species.
However, that assumes that said maximization is valuable in itself. It assumes that continuation of the human species is valuable. These are quite ungrounded assumptions, as we already know the ultimate fate of humanity (destruction), and there is no unchallengeable reason why having more people live and then die would be better than having less people do it. I can understand that you find it to be a good thing, but that decision is completely axiomatic. I don’t share that axiom with you, so the system I have constructed is different from yours.
It is only natural that it is in the best interest of society that the people in it breed. However, society is not a sum of its citizens. There are all kinds of emergent phenomena, that only take place when a collection of components interrelate in a specific kind of pattern. Non-sentient, non-living particles form our cells. Non-sentient but living cells form our brains and thus allow our consciousness to emerge. Sentient humans form a non-sentient society. I place little value in the memetic interest (sortof a weird concept, how can something have “interest” if it is not sentient? Well, the same way non-sentient lifeforms have goals or interests, that have simply emerged through evolution in their “programming”. There does not need to be sentience involved for there to be goals) of society to continue its existence, because i value all non-sentient beings below all sentient beings. The needs of even one single individual surpass the needs of society, but not the needs of any other sentient individual.
If you wish to build an ethical system that is only concerned with actual beings, that means that the system should maximize current pleasure
Yes, that is a form of hedonism, and it is a perfectly valid moral system. However, your claim that it would automatically follow from denying the one-person-per-tick-of-time-thinking is flawed, in the way freenerd already pointed out. Even though both the o-p-p-t-o-t concept of self and the continuum concept of self are both perfectly valid, they are mutually exclusive. This is an interesting property of these emergent kinds of phenomena that arise when sentient beings find patterns in the physical world: as the patterns are arbitrary, there are often several equally valid ways of defining them. It’s like taking a picture and cutting it up into a puzzle. There are several ways of cutting the same picture into different shaped pieces. Any one of them is valid when only parts from that system is used. However, you can’t mix and match pieces from differently cut pictures however you like, because you won’t get a valid picture as a result.
You can either postulate o-p-p-t-o-t and use the separate potential future beings thus produced, or then you can postulate the continuum self, and have those potential future selves merge with your current self. You can’t have both.
The mind is the particles in question, unless you wish to resort to (silly) mind-body dualism.
Not true, you don’t have to resort to any such dualism. You only have to postulate that the whole is greater than its parts.
I’m not absolutely sure about it, but I think it is a claim which is neither true nor false, it is just a way of viewing reality. You separate phenomena into different levels of abstraction. This is something that humans are forced to do, because we simply cannot comprehend the enormous amounts of particles that our physical world consists of, or model their interactions with each other. Even if the rules for these interactions are rather simple, their frequency is so enormous that we cannot think that fast. We are forced to use abstractions in order to see the forest from the trees.
freenerd:
So if you wanted to have “altruism” and thoughtfulness, you should seriously decrease the amount of people on Earth into what worked in the hunter-gatherer times.
Either that, or improve upon humans. Replace the heuristics our brain has evolved - that have previously produced good enough results with very limited processing power, but which are failing more and more in a modern world - with more general algorithms, which are less specificly optimized and thus require augmenting of our brain (A list of some such flaws in our current software can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases). After repairing the flaws in our reasoning, we must also make people use it for their decisionmaking. Currently most humans are almost completely driven by cravings and emotions. The bloody history of man - despite its numerous attempts at making people respect each other thorough pleading to their emotions - is convincing proof of the fact that emotions simply don’t work on this scale. We would need to get people to subject their cravings and emotions to their intellect, and not the other way around, in order to make them cooperate effectively in larger societies than ca 150 persons.
October 30th, 2007 at 16:42
I was going to write a comment further arguing that it’s not immoral to breed, but then yesterday night I realized something that made me revise my position.
Previously, my stance was basically that since the majority of people born do choose life despite the suffering endured, it is alright to have children, as those who suffer enough that they don’t want to live are a small minority. A very unfortunate minority, but their desire not to live was counteracted by the desire of the others to live, combined with potential people also being valuable, etc.
However, if we assume that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, then every event, no matter how improbable, takes place in some alternate universe. This includes things considered impossible by conventional physics, such as a chair spontaneously reconfiguring itself to become a table. Every moment of time creates an infinite amount (or possibly an immense but finite amount, which I suppose depends on whether the universe is finite or infinite: I’ll use the term BFN, Big Freaking Number, from now on) of alternative branches of the universe.
This implies that every moment, there are countless of “nightmare” worlds created - from ones where unlikely random events lead you to kill your lover and afterwards having no idea of why you did it, to near-literal nightmares where a ruling dictator class appears from nowhere. The density of the different branches varies immensly - in the vast majority, nothing out of the ordinary happens. The less likely some universe is, the less of them are created.
However, even if the fraction of “nightmare” universes is tiny, there are still BFNs of them, with an unmeasurable amount of suffering in each, far more than could be justified with any ethical system I see as reasonable. Now, if a person chooses to breed, they are effectively increasing the amount of suffering by BFN “units of suffering”, for there is now one more person who gets to experience a BFN of nightmare worlds. (Of course, the person could come into existence anyway - matter could spontaneously reconfigure itself to be that person. This does not matter. The issue is that the relative frequency of worlds with suffering is increased, for there are far more worlds where the person is born normally than where he spontaneously enters existence.) Therefore it is seriously unethical to breed, and it is possibly even unethical to save lives.
All of this, of course, depends on whether or not the many-worlds interpretation is true. Wikipedia gives links to some polls taken among physicists, part of the polls saying that MWI is the most popular interpretation and some saying that it is the least popular. Even among the ones who accept MWI, there is disagreement over whether MWI’s alternate branches are really real in the same way as our world is real.
While I need to give this further thought, and definitely become more familiar with quantum mechanics, it seems to me that even the smallest chance of MWI being real has so dire consequences as to make not-breeding the only ethical alternative, just to be sure. For as long as there is uncertainty about MWI’s reality, though, I won’t advocate humanity’s outright destruction, just in the case that it was wrong. (I realize that this is not entirely rational - the rational approach would be to indeed advocate entire humanity’s destruction for the same reason as why not to breed. I cannot quite bring myself to do that, however.)
October 30th, 2007 at 18:18
Although your argument certainly is valid if we presuppose the many-worlds interpretation. Still, I don’t think the MWI is necessary to see the problem in the utilitarian perspective where you see reproduction itself as obvious/inevitable and instead concentrate on minimizing the already done damage. You see, the bias in your argument is that you ignore a major part of the about 8 billion people on earth, but think that the same problem with a BFN of people is somehow completely different. Why would it be any different? We have no right as humans to make such devaluing decisions about the importance of others’ suffering and life.
October 30th, 2007 at 18:26
Xuenay:
While I’m very happy that you have concluded that breeding is immoral, I’m not completely sure about your reasoning for it.
Not all versions of MWI support your reasoning. The question is about the relationship between (free) choice and the forking of the tree of timelines. It is obviously not very scientific to assume that the two are identical, because that would place minds with free will in a special position in the world, as the cause or medium of the spawning of new branches. Claiming that consciousness could in such a way alter the very structure of the universe would require dualism of body&mind, or even idealism.
However, the two might still not be completely separate. The processes in our mind that make up our decisions are probably a combination of completely deterministic phenomena and quantum phenomena. If each of these quantum phenomena causes the timeline-tree to fork, then each decision we make will contain one or several forkingpoints, meaning basicly that we’ll make all of the available choices, in different timelines. (If they are completely deterministic, well, then we have determinism and no free will.)
This would basicly make free choice and morality meaningless, just like complete determinism does. Ofcourse you can’t choose your way of life according to that knowledge, just like you can’t with determinism, because you can’t choose. Or rather in this case, you’ll end up choosing all the alternatives anyhow.
MWI is an interesting idea, but it seems unlikely that it could ever become a testable hypothesis, or anything that could be used to predict anything, it is not a scientific theory, just an amusing idea. Ofcourse that doesn’t make it false, so you could still use the potential risk of it being true as a reason not to breed.
October 30th, 2007 at 19:39
freenerd:
The main difference is the sheer fact that all possible alternatives will take place in MWI - with conventional physics we can assume that the average person will prefer living, while MWI guarantees that every person will (with probability one) experience so much suffering that they don’t see life as worth it. Still, you are right in that it is more of a quantitative than a qualitative difference. I will have to give it some more thought - even though it might not look like it, this debate has made me considerably more dubious about the ethical worth of breeding. (Even assuming classical physics.)
Waino:
I’m a (causal) determinist. I reject the existence of true free will, though I admit that we have to assume the existence of something like it for many decisions. I do not really see how determinism makes morality worthless, though, any more than determinism makes the calculations of a computer worthless - just because the computer functions deterministically doesn’t mean that it would calculate things incorrectly. In this case, while I do end up making all the possible decisions, the relative frequency of the Is who make less-than-the-most-probable decisions is still smaller than the frequency of the ones who make the most-probable decisions. My utility function still evaluates different options and chooses the best ones - it is simply that in a small part of universes, quantum randomness causes it to make a different sort of choice. That doesn’t mean that the utility function wouldn’t make choices at all.
October 30th, 2007 at 20:04
I do not really see how determinism makes morality worthless, though, any more than determinism makes the calculations of a computer worthless - just because the computer functions deterministically doesn’t mean that it would calculate things incorrectly.
Determinism does not affect the validity of a moral system, but it does affect its utility. Is not the purpose of morality to guide us in our choices? If we make no such choices, then there is no point in morality.
If a deterministic computer is programmed to commit some act that according to a moral system is atrocious, the computer will, unless hindered, commit the act. The computer however is not made immoral through this, the only party that can have acted immorally is the programmer of the computer (if she has free will). If there is no free will in the universe, no choices, then there can be no responsibility for those choices, and thus no morality.
October 30th, 2007 at 20:11
But even in a deterministic universe, we do make choices. (Maybe you want to phrase “make choices” more technically as “different inputs weight our internal algorithms into certain outputs”, but it amounts to the same thing.)
Yes, the concept of responsibility is a dubious one. You may notice that I rejected its usefulness back in my very first comment to this thread. :]
October 30th, 2007 at 20:22
Maybe you want to phrase “make choices” more technically as “different inputs weight our internal algorithms into certain outputs”, but it amounts to the same thing.
Well, to that I agree fully. But that is nihilistic: the decisionmaking process is fully mechanical, and to impose any morality on it is fully arbitrary and in no way rational.
I myself am a post-nihilistic discordian (for me discordianism is not a religion, but a way of seeing the world). This means that while I do not believe that free will is physically possible (unless my assumption that the world is purely materialistic is false, in which case nothing I think I know is true) I am still delighted by the illusion of it, and try to make as much interesting things come out of it as possible. I understand that this is not rational, but I do not claim to be a fully rational being. I somehow just got the feeling that you considered yourself to be fully rational.
So, maybe I’m crazy, but atleast happy-crazy (discordian) instead of apathic-crazy (nihilist) =D
October 30th, 2007 at 20:49
I have never thought, or claimed to be, fully rational. Certainly I strive towards rationality, but I’m not crazy enough to think I’ve achieved full rationality.
Still, I reject the implication that morality is irrational. Rationality is about how you perceive the world, your morality is what you want to do to the world. One’s morality may be irrational if it is based on unfounded assumptions about the world, but morality is not, in itself, irrational - any more than the color of a random star is rational or irrational. The concept simply does not apply.
See also http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/04/feeling_rationa.html .
October 30th, 2007 at 22:36
Rationality is about how you perceive the world, your morality is what you want to do to the world.
Well, the irrationality of morality didn’t stem from any orthogonality between rationality and morality, but from the absurdity of wanting to do things to the world, if you know that you can’t change what you will infact do.
See also http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/04/feeling_rationa.html
I think we (the author of that text and I) mean different things with “irrational”. I don’t use it as a synonym for “false”.
As I see it, there are at least two kinds of emotion:
1) Goals, motivations, morality.
These are the axiomatic cornerstones on which one builds one’s system of thought. They are precisely about “what you want to do to the world”. It is not self-evidently irrational to have them, if one assumes free will. It is however irrational to claim them to be absolutely true, because they are completely arbitrary. One is also not required to have any, it is possible to have none (it leads to apathy and death, but is possible). In a way it is motivated to claim that having them is irrational, because there is no rational absolute reason to choose any, and if one chooses none, the system one builds will be much simpler (infact empty). In an ockham’s [sic] razorish way, that is more rational.
These emotions are arguably orthogonal to reason, because they simply apply to things where reason doesn’t have any material to work on.
I myself act irrationally in this matter.
2) Emotional heuristics.
These are parallel mechanisms to reason. They allow one to quickly assess a situation and make a decision, without having to think through all the possible scenarios. Usually they lead to a rather similar outcome as a much more computation-intensive rational chain of thought would. Social interaction seems to be full of these. They have evolved to support a very natural goal: survival of the genes the individual carries. However, as they are naturally evolved, they are far from perfect, they can often be tricked. This is why some things that when rationally considered lead to much greater probability of attaining goals, still feel bad.
The heuristics have developed to work in tribes of under 150 individuals, and they simply don’t scale up above that. These emotions are not orthogonal to reason. They are evolved to be shortcuts for getting to the same result as reason. They are just unreliable. And using them when there is time for a rational analysis of the situation is irrational, and immature. Sadly most people do so constantly.
These are the emotions that I recommended getting rid of, when I said “emotions simply don’t work on this scale. We would need to get people to subject their cravings and emotions to their intellect, and not the other way around, in order to make them cooperate effectively in larger societies than ca 150 persons.”
I use these kinds of heuristics only when forced to do so, when time is too limited for coming to a decision through rational thought
October 30th, 2007 at 23:10
Hmm… Actually, it would seem that I have been using bad language this far.
It would be much clearer to reserve “irrational” to mean a system that is not internally consistent, regardless of its axioms. The abrahamic definition of god is for example irrational, due its internal issues (for a good listing of some major ones, see the next entry in this blog)
It would be better to invent a new word for the things we have been discussing (having morale/goals if one assumes free will for example), for example “nonrational” or “unrational”. This word would be used only for issues which are truly beyond rationality, for example the selection of the axioms for the system one builds.