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WalterL comments on Rationality Quotes Thread April 2015 - Less Wrong
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If you can't feed your baby, then don't have a baby.
-Michael Jackson (Wanna be starting something)
Right, just the thing they should have told those irrational pregnant women who ran away from the Eastern part of Ukraine.
Even if we're willing to take it out of context like this, we might still consider it ethically undesirable to have kids in a time and place where military conflict or politically caused poverty is likely.
Applying this, humanity would have quietly died out a few thousand years ago...
2 responses:
You can easily augment the underlying harm avoidance principle with a condition that it should not result in the extinction of intelligent life (assuming that intelligent life doesn't cause even more harm in the long run).
That makes no sense to me at all.
Because it did not follow the ethical guideline that you suggested.
This statement, if true, only shows that not following the guideline back then was the correct choice. What about today?
What, do you feel, is the relevant difference between back then and today?
It's as HedonicTreader said: humanity is nowhere near extinction today.
His ethical guideline has nothing to do with how close humanity is to extinction.
However, if practiced diligently, it can bring humanity to extinction in a few generations from any population size.
I personally wouldn't decide to have kids in a warzone... But what context are you referring to? Is there any context outside of sudden, subjectively unlikely disaster where the quote is meaningful?
...but it's okay if others do it? How is that different from saying, "I personally woudn't decide to abuse children..."
It was written by Michael Jackson. I don't think he was referring to sudden, subjectively unlikely disasters, but the personal material means of people deciding to become parents.
It's impossible to have children and do no actions whatsoever which are less than optimal for the children. Rather, people make--and have to make--tradeoffs between things being bad for the children and other considerations. There is an acceptable range of such tradeoffs. Having kids in a warzone falls in that range and abusing kids does not. And even if you think people making other tradeoffs are actually wrong rather than just making the tradeoffs based on different circumstances, there are degrees of being wrong and abuse is wrong to a greater degree.
Is it the same to die without ever abusing children and to die childless?
I don't think this is how the real world works.
Well, quite. What can we do about that?
What exactly is the problem you want to solve? :-/
Clearly.
But what if I can get taxpayers to feed my baby?
Af first I thought you doing that Redditesque sarcasm, in which you argue a straw man of the outgroup in a mocking way, which made me disappointed since the goal is signaling rather than discourse.
However perhaps you are being serious? Are social services a valid means of feeding a baby, rendering the original quote not applicable in countries where social services exist? I think the answer is obviously yes, in that if social services are available, people are going to use them. Whether the should exist is a separate discussion.
I was being serious. Abstractly, if my doing X requires Y, but I don't have Y but I'm confident that if I do X the government will give me Y, then my lack of Y isn't much of a reason to forgo X.
I think it's a law that if you fund something you get more of it. Serious discussion of safety nets, etc. already assumes some parasite response from the "ecosystem," takes it into account, and argues safety nets are still a good thing on net.
I think "unintended consequences" is a better analysis framework than "parasite response from the ecosystem".
And speaking of, there is a recent paper discussed on MR which claims to show how safety nets drive down the decline in labor force participation and, in particular, that "the Clinton-era welfare reforms lowered the incentive to work".
It certainly sounds less cynical, unless we use strong charity and see it in the most technical way possible.
I think the most plausible use case for government-funded incentives to have extra kids is a wide consensus that a society doesn't have enough of them at the time, according to some economical or social optimum.
But even this requires a level of cynicism in seeing kids as a means to an end.
Can you also get them to pay for cryonics? I don't know if you consider cryonics worthwhile, but the point is that "feed" generalizes easily.
The difference is that babies suffer if they starve, but not if they don't have cryonics.
The badness of making an extra life comes from its suffering (+ negative externalities) [- positive externalities]
Interesting... can you say more about why you include a term in that equation for internal negative value (what you label "suffering" here), but not internal positive value (e.g., "pleasure" or "happiness" or "joy" or "Fun" or whatever label we want to use)?
I suppose it was because the original quote started with a negative framing, the assumption that the baby might not be fed.
I think both birth and death are stressful experiences that are not worth going through unless there are compensating other factors. I don't think infants have enough of those if they die before they grow up.
Also I suspect human life is generally overrated, and the positives of life are often used as an excuse to justify the suffering of others. I do not trust people to make a realistic estimate and act with genuine benevolence.