to form babby, or not to form babby

aimless upthread: "the genetic link is actually kind of useful in its own way, in that many personality traits tend to run in families"

a curious thing abt my adopted niece is that she has stepped into almost the exact personality space left in my family by my mother's death, even tho mum died several years before my niece was born. it's not genetic and it's not mimicked (my sister is quite unlike my mum, tho someone with many of mum's characteristics suits her well, so it may be learned be positive reinforcement) (viz niece s learned VERY YOUNG AND VERY DEFTLY that being funny and cheeky often lessened the trouble she was meant to be in, a very mum tactic)

I don't get this, even in deontological terms. Science/probability aside, a non-existent unborn human cannot consent or deny consent to anything, nor do I see how. The human right to give or deny consent to things that are done with one's body can only be acquired subsequent to actually becoming human. How can someone have a retroactive right to require consent for things that were done before they were born, that resulted in the human birth that allows them to have the right in the first place?

i agree, that poses puzzles. i don't think i actually need to say 'without consent', it just serves to flag the way in which child-begetting poses an ethical hazard. it's true that were we to need the consent of the begotten to beget them, then it would never be possible to beget them ethically (absent some other factor that made it ethical, since we are presuming that violations of consent belong to some broad class of prima facie wrongs). but the reason the idea of consent naturally suggests itself in this context (to the extent that 'never asked to be born' is such a proverbial complaint) is that were it possible, consent would mitigate the kind of externalization of risk/responsibility that is involved in being the one whose actions cause another being to exist. essentially, a bad thing to have done to someone else is not wrong if 'they asked for it' and voluntarily assumed the risk it entailed.

i suspect that various ways of trying to head the argument off by questioning the sense of its use of similar ethical/moral concepts in a zone where they seem to go awry (much like happens in debates about intergenerational obligations around the environment or climate change, for instance) would be attracted toward removing any sense of 'responsibility' from the key life-course occurrences on which it turns: in effect, to say that while sometimes people's lives can go badly, or not well enough, it can be so without that being 'anyone's fault', not the begetter nor the begotten (nor society etc?).

someone upthread suggested that my argument obviously came from a place of resentment and disappointment, that it served to make baseless insinuations about people who embrace parenthood. perhaps they did not see, as i think silby probably did, that the core idea is one of compassion for the person the child would grow up to be, which i am assuming would be a foremost concern for the prospective parent. the two basic principles are these:

1) calamitousness of existence. people's lives can go badly for them, sometimes profoundly badly, in ways that no one appears to have any reliable means of remedying. i am not talking about being born with problems (though that possibility seems relevant), or with not being raised in a loving environment (which the prospective parent is surely responsible for, which i think tends to suggest that their initial readiness to parent is already implicated in questions about whether one could 'harm' a not-yet-existent being), but with the longer-term life outcomes that enter onto the scene once our default perspective is that a person is their own person now, with their own life to lead, their own responsibility for making their life what they want it to be.

2) externalization of risk. one acts, another exists.

for the prospective parent, the question is not about treating the kid well, or having one's own perspective shift radically upon having the kid, or about sharing the wonders of existence with the kid. nor is it about the human drama of fostering the kid through trials and tribulations that seem all-important but prove to be just growing pains that we all face as we grapple with existence. none of that has to do with the question of whether or not the prospective parent would have a good reason for looking at an undetermined future, with some perhaps negligible chance of an existence which from the existent's perspective was on the whole extremely unhappy, and deeming it suitable to chance it ON BEHALF OF ANOTHER who would actually be the one who stood to be burdened by the choice, were it ultimately burdensome.

it may be that you are confident that not only you have a means for addressing (1), but that you can effectively impart that to a prospective child. this is where some non-religious and some religious alternatives stand to make one contribution to the problem, because they have more to do with how one adapts oneself to adversity and disappointment and disability, to human limitation, than the alternatives that have more to do with ensuring that one has worldly power and security (prudent ones but not ones that seem to be capable of preventing extremely negative life outcomes of the sort that are, again, undergone primarily by those who suffer them). this is one place where the argument could be answered, because the argument involves a difficulty with responsibility. if there are reliable means for any person to say to another, 'you'll be fine, just do…', and really help them do it, then the initial externalization of the 'risk' of existing onto another may carry little culpability.

(2) is by no means the final word on what it would be ethical or responsible to do. we have seen several people in this thread suggest, more or less explicitly, that it's okay for the parent or, more often, for human beings of some larger group or all human beings to treat the kid as a means to their ends, or as a means to the project(s) of human existence more generally. others have suggested that in some sense the kid has just got to suck it up because humanity needs him, or human culture is worth the price of a few broken people here or there. while these responses are relevant they do sound somewhat glib to me as responses to an argument specifically focused on what one person owes another and what one person could not possibly give to - i.e. do for - another, which is to live their life and undergo its possible sufferings for them.

otm

in ways that no one appears to have any reliable means of remedying

suicide pretty reliable means

#rejectedfirstdraftOzzysongtitles

j's long post above is an excellent example of placing the choice of whether or not to have children solely in the province of rationality. the rational objections listed there will never be overcome by rational rebuttals, so that it becomes rationally indisputable that that no children should ever be brought into the world purposely.

but millions of kids are going to be born anyway. all that rationalizing is helpless in the face of the urges felt between emotionally entangled, sexually active adults. the same person who believes in j's conclusions today will eagerly toss them aside when other conditions prevail. imo, it is not wrong, but rather a sterile exercise that leads nowhere.

That’s my fav kind of exercise tho

rationality is dumb imo

everything important to me in my life has nothing to do with rationality

it is not wrong, but rather a sterile exercise that leads nowhere

I see what you did there

'look, kid, don't think about it too much. it's just that your mom and i were screwing a lot, and we figured what the fuck, let's make a baby, what could possibly go wrong for the kid, let that be his problem'

fuck the what

I think the specter of dumb-rationality is not present here honestly tho.

As someone who wrestled with AI design a while back, I concluded that any attempt to replicate human thinking absolutely had to incorporate simulated emotions at a deep, persistent level, or it would quickly fall into absurdity. Without emotions all you have left are appetites, facts and logic, and machines have no appetites.

Emotions tell us how to value our experiences. Without emotions no fact means any more than any other fact. 'Paraguay is located in the Western hemisphere' is precisely equal in value to 'my femoral artery has been severed' or 'these cornflakes contain maltodextrose".

conscious AI is a pipe dream

well, what the argument is especially made to highlight is the emotions with which a parent might look upon the life of a child, since grown to adulthood, and unable to find contentment in life, for quotidian or perhaps severe reasons—but through the lens of concepts which discourage the parent from excusing themselves for their part in that or in crediting themselves morally for any self-regarding satisfactions derived from the undertaking.

j., I sincerely admire your ability to muster such an articulate, in-depth response to the question 'to form babby, or not to form babby'.

so, j, your arguments have established that parents acquire no moral credit for any happiness or satisfaction accrued by their offspring during their existence, but they are to be held fully responsible for whatever pain or discontentment their children eventually feel, due to their having put them in a position where pain and discontent were even possible. quite.

what kind of psychopath gives themselves credit for anything

I have a feeling this will slowly devolve into yet another duel between compatibilists and non-compatibilists.

that's a discussion we should save for: Calvin vs. Aquinas: FITE!

I no longer care about free will, that was a childish fascination

Hi,

We have two. Amber and Alice. Some of you may know this.

Why?

We needed some cool people to talk to.

xps no, i think they can and should accept that credit where appropriate. the argument is concerned with a disparity in the magnitudes of happiness and sadness possible and the ways in which they are to be linked with responsibility.

the reason i alluded to pascal's wager is that for parents and for people thinking of themselves, the extreme negative outcomes coincide with the responsibility-to-exist-and-make-of-one's-life-what-one-can when it is at is most alienated as between parent and child. so the argument is not one of blaming the parent for everything, it is one of the parent (this gets at sund4r's sort of concerns again) 'saving' the child in advance from a circumstance which it is not metaphysically possible to save them from once the child has come into existence.

many of the usual ways of assessing the experience of childrearing and of sharing sympathetically in the sufferings of one's child (as in the exultations) have a tendency to smear the subject of the emotional experience with the subject of the (relevant—the child's) life-as-existed. all i am insisting on is that one not do this illicitly if it prevents one from perceiving the above point, which i think is the dispositive one ethically (pre-begetting).

which it is not metaphysically possible to save them from once the child has come into existence.

yes it is. suicide.

You keep harping on that GD but it is perfectly possible to resent coming into being in the first place and abhor the idea of committing suicide. I resent my existence in no small part because I abhor the idea of suicide.

Perhaps you don't resent your existence as much as you think?

xps you can't save someone else from that by committing suicide!

i don't know how serious your posts on this topic have been, granny, but if you're actually interested and not trying to goad me, i think that it just speaks in favor of the difficulty. a parent hopes never for their child to find itself in such desperation that suicide seems like a way to fix the problems with its existence. but broadly speaking, that is the risk in principle that the parent takes on, that the child might become incapable of choosing life (when, no less in principle, no one else can choose it for them).

I'm just rebutting the gaping flaw in your logical argument

like you can personally reject that as an option, but that doesn't mean it isn't an option

your invocation of Pascal's Wager is apt, though in your application of it, instead of gaining the infinite joys of heaven, the wager consists of avoiding inflicting the known, but temporally limited pains of corporeal human existence. But would not accepting the terms of the original wager as valid nullify your inversion of it?

btw, I'm just playing around here, so you needn't play along unless it is fun.

It doesn’t free a parent of their moral hazard though.

it takes more effort to stay alive than to die

Not sure about that.

it takes a lot of effort to die, I can't even skip a meal without my body screaming at me

referring to a child as "it" is weird

anyway GD your parents can't commit suicide for you

xp Shakey these are uniformly dense spherical childre

xps i don't think you are, granny you're just churlish.

the religious and non-religious remedies to the calamitousness of existence that i mentioned upthread have traditionally put a very strong proscription on suicide, and more or less elaborated visions of existence that served to ingratiate people to life despite its sufferings and disappointments. but thinking that there are not effective remedies of that sort available does not make suicide an 'effective' remedy. the ancient stoics often pillory that idea by encouraging people to kill themselves if they really think life is so bad, but that's because their goal is to convince people that they actually have the means available to escape despair, which no less than committing suicide, involves using one's will to choose under some conception of the good. they just think that in most cases, the choice of suicide is an erroneous one.

to use this possibility in an argument that has to do with how a parent should be concerned for their prospective children seems to me needlessly brutal. what it sounds like to me is someone who dislikes the sound of the argument and supposes that the retort can be directed at the arguer. but not everyone is capable of considering arguments without transmuting them into parodies of reasoning.

again, I've brought up suicide solely in response to "there's no remedy to awful pain of existence"

to use this possibility in an argument that has to do with how a parent should be concerned for their prospective children seems to me needlessly brutal. what it sounds like to me is someone who dislikes the sound of the argument

to deny that suicide is an effective remedy sounds to me like someone who dislikes the crux of their argument being removed

anything more than one is beyond our ken

lol it's all beyond your ken. it's all beyond anyone's ken. or budget, or whatever it is. very few of the metrics seem to apply.

joygoat and ymp i very much enjoyed your posts. i am saving up j.'s until i have a whiskey and can focus on it.

guys

babies

not fuckin existence

babies

they're not just for christmas, is the vibe i'm getting

I mean yes obviously suicide will solve all my problems but I still as a person have to be capable of it, my parents couldn't even raise me well enough to be prepared to kill myself

not enough positive representations of young people killing themselves that focus on how they don't have any problems anymore

well this took a turn!

That's a parenting fail xxp

lol it's all beyond your ken. it's all beyond anyone's ken. or budget, or whatever it is. very few of the metrics seem to apply.

True enough, but we'd rather stick to the more recognizable end of the great unknown (for now).

aimless, the original wager may very well obviate this pessimistic version (or so we could call it—actually it just occurred to me independently, but pascal's wager seems like a useful comparison) of it! i don't know. as i recall, there are some issues with the premises about the infinitude of the expected 'payoff'. but in the case of my argument, i think it is more plausible that one's child's life could turn out badly 'enough' in a relatively fault-free way to make that prospect carry some force in one's considerations (if you're familiar with the probabilistic framing of pascal's wager: 'enough' to make the expected values of the different cases come out as required).

in any case, that's why i allowed that perhaps a sincere faith of some suitably existential/cosmic kind would provide a person with good grounds for believing that taking the risk on another's behalf would be acceptable. it does seem to me, though, like even a 'believer' has the same kinds of problems with respect to imparting the 'remedy' to their child that anyone does (which no doubt partly explains the dogmatism of traditional upbringings)—they're the one who has to live it, not you, which includes 'live with a sincere faith in life', basically.