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Trevor_Blake comments on Initial Thoughts on Personally Finding a High-Impact Career - Less Wrong
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No profession eradicates potential human suffering and certain human death like that of a vasectomist / sterilizer. First a few, then dozens, then hundreds and millions and billions of people, generation upon generation, never to have existed or suffered or died. Or possibly had a good time, sure, but always to suffer and always to die.
Addendum: I am speaking only of voluntary sterilization. Such as my own vasectomy. Billions of people will never suffer or die due to my voluntary choice.
I'm not a negative enough of a utilitarian to agree to this. Any sort of sterilization I'd do would be in the first world, where I think lives are almost certainly net positive.
And even if, somehow, getting people to stop existing was the thing to do, I imagine there are more efficient methods.
Getting people to stop existing might not be the right thing to do, but there are many people who should not be created. All else equal, I feel people whose children would be at a high risk for horrible diseases like depression should avoid procreating until the state of genetic engineering or embryo selection is much advanced (in both reliability and generality of factors identified).
Faulty reasoning alert. You are assuming that
A) Had you not been sterilized, other forms of birth control would not have been used.
B) The people with whom you might have otherwise procreated will not find alternative mates.
C) Had you had children they would have gone on to have billions of descendants themselves.
D) Humanity won't end tomorrow before any of your descendants can grow up.
It's possible though far from definite that your choice has reduced the world population by approximately 2 people. I don't think it's reasonable to claim billions of lives averted.
I'll leave it to others to discuss the issues of negative utilitarianism, and whether it's actually a good thing to eliminate the possibility of more future people.
Thank you for your alert!
'A' is a challenge to my claim, requiring me to clarify sterilization is different because it is 100% effective while most other methods are less than 100%. Thank you.
'B' only challenges my claim if I produce children with my own children. My mates and their mates aren't agents I can make moral choices on behalf of. I can make moral choices for myself, and I can make the moral choice to have or not have children, making them agents I do make choices on behalf of (including the choice to exist). If I were to then have children with those children, 'B' would be true. That's not going to happen, several times over.
'C' and the sentence after 'D' might well be true, but 'might' is a pretty weak word to bet the lives of (a bunch of people) on. I'm lucky in that I have genealogical records going back over 1,000 years in my family, and that gives me a pretty strong sense that people make a bunch of people. I'm sure I have (a large number) of ancestors, and that number gets even larger when I include ancestors I don't know about at all, proto-human ancestors, mammal ancestors, vertebrate ancestors... every one of them suffering and dying. My vasectomy throws a spanner in the spokes of that wheel.
'D' is an argument that works for or against any claim quite well. The world is going to end so don't have children, the world is going to end so have children.
To claim it's not a good thing to eliminate the possibility of more future people is to claim there is a moral obligation to produce children. I could be mistaken, but this seems like a reasonable if/then claim. It's not a claim I make, as I don't claim it's not a good thing to eliminate the possibility of more future people.
Thank you again for your alert!
“That's the mother of all sampling biases.”
BTW, what would people here think of the following argument? If refraining from having children is good/rational/moral/[insert applause light here], then good/rational/moral/[insert applause light here] will do so; bad/irrational/immoral/[insert boo light here] will have more children than them, and (to the extent that badness is inheritable -- not just genetically but also memetically) in the next generation there will be a larger fraction of bad people. That doesn't sound like a good outcome; good actions predictably leading (causally and/or acausally) to bad outcomes means that your ethics system is broken; therefore, the assumption that refraining from having children is good must be wrong.
(I tentatively endorse it, but not with very much confidence.)
This doesn't make sense to me. At the very least, one could claim neutrality as an alternative. And discuss quality of life, rather than quantity.
How many people who would like to get sterilized fail to because there aren't enough professional sterilizers?
Two friends of mine were refused by their physician when they tried to get one. They were told women in their twenties shouldn't be sterilized, as they would change their minds later on. They had to move out of state to get the operation they wanted. When I got my vasectomy I had to listen to a full sixty-minute hour lecture on why I shouldn't get one, then was told to come back in one month, at which time I got a half-hour lecture on why I shouldn't get one, and having stuck it out for all that I got one. My post advocating voluntary sterilization is currently at -2, up from -3, and every criticism of my post is getting voted up. This doesn't directly answer your question, but I suggest getting voluntarily sterilized isn't as easy as it could be and having more professionals might change that.
I wonder if those lectures are required as part of the official ethics of the profession? In general you need informed consent, but that's not normally an hour, a waiting period, and then another half hour.
(I think in general more waiting periods for permanent changes would be good. If we could practically have ones for pregnancy, tattoos, drug use, suicide, etc I'd be for it.)
Out of curiosity, did you suggest that you could bank some sperm? (Quite cheap, and quite doable.) That addresses the claimed objection and lets one see if that was the doctor's true rejection in a sense.
I did not make that suggestion or any other during the hour long lecture or the month long wait or the half hour lecture. Instead, the doctor brought it up in both lectures and said because frozen sperm sometimes failed to revive, freezing sperm was a bad idea and thus another reason to not get a vasectomy. I got my vasectomy at the most lefty, pro-family planning agency in Portland OR. Getting a vasectomy is not easy.
Perhaps I am being uncharitable, but that sounds like a completely bogus rejection: you don't need much sperm to revive, you can bank more than one batch of semen, and all the mentions I've seen of the topic say you can expect something like 40% of the sperm to thaw without problem.
When one party holds all the cards (ability to conduct surgery) and another party holds no cards (request for surgery), the first party can say and do just about anything they want. All I could do was nod my head and say yes, okay, yes, I understand, yes, okay, yes, I understand, okay for a month and then I got what I wanted.
I fear I have contributed to taking this thread too far from its original topic.
Not doing something irreversible to myself while I'm still in my twenties unless I'm dead sure about it sounds like a very good heuristic to me. See also rabbis being supposed (IIUC) to dissuade prospective converts to Judaism, stuff people do before getting married, etc.
(RISUG will likely make that moot.)
How does your not reproducing mean that we'll have billions fewer future people?
Wait, you forgot 'genocidal leader' and 'irresponsible nuclear submarine captain.'
Equating voluntary sterilization with genocide (currently at +3, while my initial comment was at -3) is relevant to a later comment on what sort of resistance exists for people getting the operation I got.
Those both add lots of present suffering, probably more than they reduce future suffering.
Ok, 'charismatic suicide cult leader'
What? Death is bad because it ends life and life is good. It's not clear to me that living then dying is worse than never being born at all in the first place, and indeed in a vacuum ISTM the former would clearly be better (though in the real world it has externalities e.g. grieving parents that the latter lacks, so I'm not sure of the total effect).