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Is it immoral to have children?
In "The Immorality of Having Children" (2013, pdf) Rachels presents the "Famine Relief Argument against Having Children":
Conceiving and raising a child costs hundreds of thousands of dollars; that money would be far better spent on famine relief; therefore, conceiving and raising children is immoral.
They present this as a special case of Peter Singer's argument from Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972), which is why they haven't called it something more reasonable like the "Opportunity Cost Argument".
[Note: the use of "Famine Relief" here is in reference to Peter Singer's 1972 example, but famine relief is not where your money does the most good. Treat the argument as "that money would be far better spent on GiveWell's top charities" or whatever organization you think is most effective.]
It's true that having and raising a child is very expensive. They use an estimate of $227k for the direct expenditure through age 18 while noting that college [1] and time costs could make this much higher. Let's use a higher estimate of $500k to account for these. Considered over twenty years, that's $25k/year or $2k/month. This puts it at the top of the range of expenses, next to housing. It's also true that this money can do a lot of good when spent on effective charities. At GiveWell's current best estimate of $2.3k this is enough money to save nearly one life per month. [2]
But perhaps we shouldn't be thinking of this money as an expense at all, and instead more as an investment? Could having kids be a contender for the most effective charity? That is, could having and raising kids be one of the most effective things you could do with your time and money?
For example you could convince your kid to be unusually generous, donating far more than they cost to raise. Except that it's much cheaper to convince other people's kids to be generous, and our influence on the adult behavior of our children is not that big. Alternatively, if you're unusually smart, by having kids you could help make there be more smart people in the future. But how many more generations will pass before we learn enough about the genetics of intelligence to make this aspect of parental genetics irrelevant? Rachels considers the idea that your having children might greatly benefit the world, and rightly finds it insufficient. While your child may do a lot of good, for the expense there are much better options. Having kids is not a contender for the most effective charity, or even very close.
Having kids is a special case of spending your time and money in ways that make you happy. A moral system for human beings needs to allow some amount of this. It's like working for $56k at a job you enjoy instead of getting $72k at a job you like less. [3] Or spending your free time reading instead of working extra hours building up a consulting business. Keeping in mind both the cost and that on average people don't seem to be happier parenting, if having kids is what would make you most happy for the expense in time and money then it seems justified.
(This is how Julia and I thought of it when deciding whether we should have kids.)
I also posted this on my blog.
[1] College is currently in a huge state of flux. Advertised costs are rising far faster than inflation as colleges realize they can get away with near perfect price discrimination in the form of "either pay the extremely high sticker price or give us all your financial data so we can determine exactly how much you can afford." At the same time online courses and mixed models are getting to where they can provide much of the value of traditional lecture courses, and in some ways do better. I have very little idea what to budget for college for a kid born now; likely costs range from "free" to "all you have".
[2] Rachels uses a much lower number:
Givewell.org, which assesses charities, estimates that a life is saved for every $205 spent on expanding immunization coverage for children in Africa Sub-Saharan—apparently one of the most cost-effective projects. See L. Brenzel et al. 2006, p. 401
Their Brenzel citation is to the Vaccine-Preventable Diseases section of the DCP2. The $205 number is "Estimated cost per death averted for the Traditional Immunization Program in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia" in table 20.5.
[3] This is a $16k difference, which comes from taking $500k over 20 years and dividing by two for the two parents, and then adding some for taxes. Though the earnings difference is likely to last more like 40 years.
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Comments (317)
That is very much inconsistent with the fact that the median household income in the US, one of the richest countries in the world, is about $50K (before taxes).
The estimate looks bogus to me.
If you cut the estimate by 75%, down to about $500/mo the argument doesn't change very substantially. That money could certainly directly save more lives and could indirectly be used to get more than one person to do good.
Does the argument change substantially if you cut the estimate down to the price of the standard unit of indulgence, a Starbucks latte?
This includes college and the cost of time, which not everyone pays but I and most lesswrong readers probably would.
EDIT: this was too terse. More on opportunity cost:
Imagine a two-earner household where both people work full time making $32k each. This is below the median for the US, but let's be conservative. Let's say that after going on (unpaid) maternity leave for 6 weeks the mother goes back to work part time, and now makes $18k. The household income has gone down by $14k, which is a real cost of having kids, but this is a cost that is paid out of potential income, not actual income.
The higher your earning capacity, the higher this opportunity cost. Someone who takes the idea of "donate to charity as much as possible" seriously should probably be maximizing earning capacity, and probably earns much more than average. This means they're more likely to put their kid in daycare, and more likely to live in areas where daycare is more expensive, so instead of an opportunity cost we're back to having a real cost. (Daycare can range from $5k/year in the poorest states to $15k/year in the richest, it's higher in cities, and the highest paying jobs tend to be in urban areas in expensive states.)
LW readers' kids should get merit scholarships to college :-P
But if you're doing your estimate for a specific subset of the population, you should mention which subset it is.
College costs are also rarely fully paid by the parents -- typically a large chunk of them ends up being student loans to be repaid by the kids later. And time costs are a very fuzzy/squishy thing, you can make them anything you want them to be.
My oldest son tops his class easily in cognition. But he is also smart emough to not invest more energy in school than necessary. He has lots of pet projects (constructing a fighting vest, collecting a survival kit, organizing a fly market, exploring the suburb, planning his birthday) which don't gain him merit in school but from which he also learns a lot. So whether he will merit scholarships to college depends a lot on whether he specializes in signalling ability or in actual ability. And currently I'd bet on the latter (which I guess will earlier or later earn him merit anyway).
If he gets high enough SAT scores it should compensate for the lack of silly extracurricular stuff...
Here in Germany admission to university still depends on grades.
Not if he goes to university out of the country.
My hourly rate is $1000/hr. You owe me $1.39 for reading this comment. (Fallacy that time spent in activity X can be converted into dollars at hourly rate to arrive at realistic opportunity cost.)
Seriously in most parts of the world people have kids in order to make more money (e.g. by working more fields). That's one big reason why birthrate inversely correlates with prosperity.
"Fallacy that time spent in activity X can be converted into dollars at hourly rate to arrive at realistic opportunity cost"
I'm not arguing that "time spent with children" should be converted to dollars and counted as a cost of raising children. Instead I'm saying we should apply that to time you would work if you didn't have kids, but now that you have kids aren't working. For example, here's a post that claims raising kids is not that expensive, but they do it by having one of the parents stay home. If that parent were to work for pay instead they would bring in $X, which is a real non-fallacious opportunity cost.
"in most parts of the world people have kids in order to make more money"
I agree that child labor changes the economics of having children a lot, but I live in the US.
I value having and raising children of my own. I also live in a country with low demographic growth (like most of us), and I think pretty confidently my country would be better off in the long run if educated people with stable lives had more children (assuming no singularity etc.).
I roughly value, in decreasing order: my family and friends; "people like me" (nerds, educated people, etc.); western countries; the rest of the world.
It's not clear to me whether jkaufman is arguing that it is wrong for me to value that (wrong according to whose values? mine??), or that even according to my values, I should still help poor countries instead of having kids.
We should be careful to make the distinction between jkaufman's own opinions and those of the paper they posted a link to.
By the way, it's refreshing to see people be honest with themselves and others about what they value instead of the posturing/kool-aid one often sees around this topic.
In general I think it's better to assign x percent of your money to charity and then spend that money optimally rather than compare literally every thing you do to optimal charity. First, because t seems something you can get way more people to do and second because selfishness is a giant driving force behind optimization. Rich people spending money on cell phones in the 80s has led to better tech access now in Africa. If they instead spent that money on feeding people, nothing would be qualitatively different and the world would be worse off on net.
So if you're counting your kids as charity that's one thing, but if you're having kids because you WANT kids that's a different story.
On the kids as charity front: the world could use motivated high intelligence kids a lot more than it can use more people living on the edge of starvation. Even if you don't think smart kids are +EV for the world to begin with, bringing one up to care about Africa will get you a lot more value than you put in, I think. Assuming you're not averse to deliberately raising your kid to agree with your views on helping the world.
Agreed.
I was recently worrying about this argument (the one in the OP) independently, and this (the argument I've quoted from you) seems like the best response. In fact you may have just tipped me towards "have kids."
This argument renders virtually everything immoral. Why is having children singled out? Resources spent on a drink from Starbucks are resources that could be spent on famine relief, therefore going to Starbucks is immoral. Resources spent developing philosophical arguments against various activities are resources that could be spent on famine relief, therefore Rachels's work is immoral. And so on.
I'm pretty sure the OP rarely if ever patronizes Starbucks.
True, but I do spend money on things I want out of a discretionary self-spending budget of $45/week.
Can you afford to raise children on that?
Definitely not. My answer to Nisan was misleading in this context. Brief budget summary:
That remaining 70% of my income is enough to raise kids on. Currently we're saving most of it.
I brought in the $45/week because that's the piece of our budget that Starbucks would come out of, but it looks like it just confused things.
Broadly I agree with you, but the reason to single out having children is that it is so much more expensive than other things people do for enjoyment. At $2k/month its comparable to all my other spending combined.
Having kids doesn't seem to be about enjoyment, it's more on the "want" side of the want/like distinction. I think wants are a valid part of human values and don't have to be grounded in likes, though people who talk about "utility" seem to be mostly talking about likes.
How do you reach the conclusion that people "want" to have children in the sense of that link?
I am skeptical of giving much weight to "wants" in the sense of that link, but I don't think children are such a want. I do think that there is another relevant distinction in happiness research, between asking people "How do you feel right now?" vs "How satisfied are you with your life?" Childcare is very bad on the "like" scale, but a child produces much pride and life satisfaction.
I think it's quite clear that having children is less moral than donating the equivalent number of funds to effective charity under the average WEIRD+liberal morality. I think we might have guessed that this was the case even without checking the numbers.
However, if we want to use the word "immoral" and keep its traditional connotations intact, we have to show that having children is less moral than not having children and taking the money you would have spent out of circulation. (And that would be a problem we could realistically be uncertain about)
Otherwise, things like donating to the arts become "immoral" and I'd consider that too far from common use to be useful.
Edit: After running a few examples through it, I find I really like this method of defining im/morality dichotomously. Anyone have a reason that it doesn't conform to intuition?
Edit2: "WEIRD+liberal" originally said "average lesswrong user morality" but people seemed to read that as 'utilitarianism" or some other moral philosophy, which was not my intention. I simply meant "the values of people whose morality is roughly like Lesswrong users" (and I suspect this ill-defined category also contains the majority of humans by a narrow margin, but I'm not confident about that)
I don't think I "should" be giving my money to charity instead of having kids. So either I'm not an average Lesswronger, or you're wrong about the beliefs of LessWrongers. In any case, I don't think it's "quite clear".
That's not how morality is defined, for me and I think most others. It's not about what you would do. It's about what how you wish people would act in a world where you personally were out of the picture. (So "people shouldn't hurt each other" is a moral instinct since you are out of the picture, "people should give me money" is not a moral instinct since you are in the picture).
Egg A contains an upper-middle class Westerner, will one day wish to have a child and be able to carry out that wish. Egg B contains an upper middle class Westerner, will one day wish to donate the equivalent amount of money to charity, and be able to carry out that wish. Only one egg can get fertilized and become a person. Which Egg would you have hatch?
You use the word "should". That's precisely the misunderstanding that I was hoping to dissolve. I too, do not wish you to feel compelled to give money to charity instead of having kids out of some sense of moral duty.
That's why I'm making a distinction between "immoral" and "less moral". It's usually not immoral to spend money on things that you like, but it's less moral than minimizing your consumption and donating all the money to charity. I would admire a person who took the latter path more than a person who took the former path - and this despite the fact that I am currently on the former path (as in, I still eat out sometimes and stuff). I'd consider that person to be more good than I currently am, because their actions reveal that they have a preference function which weights morality more highly than mine does...but that doesn't make me bad, just less good.
Tautologically, I prefer to achieve all my preferences, not just the moral ones. Tautologically, my aim is to be as good as I prefer to be, no more and no less. This should be true for all agents. For any given individual, having children is probably not the most moral thing, but it might be the most preferred thing.
We understand morality differently.
For me morality is defined as a set of my own axiomatic values (I generally think of morals as a set of values and of ethics as consequences of morals in terms of behavior). Other people have their own morality, of course. Many moralities are sufficiently similar so we can talk about systems of morality (which in the West used to be the province of religion, mostly).
I certainly do not think of morality as how I would like the world to be.
By "average Lesswrong-user morality" I read "utilitarianism, but without utility being well settled".
Briefly, what moral system do you follow?
I don't have a clear enough idea of what utilitarianism entails exactly (what counts as utility? "happiness" is too simplified ... how do you aggregate?); but overall I consider it more useful for thinking about say, public policy than it is about individual choices.
I don't really know which moral system I follow, and am even slightly suspicious of the idea of trying to put it down formally as a "system", since there's a risk of changing one's judgements to fit what system one has professed whereas it should go the other way around. I think it's more useful to try to understand things like incentives or happiness or lost purposes or mechanism design or institutions or the history of morality than it is to try to describe/verbalize one's moral "system".
If Lesswrong caused people to be more likely to think that it is more moral to donate money to effective charity than to have children (which you did not say), then that would lower my opinion of Lesswrong significantly.
Regardless of the actual arguments? That would lower my opinion of your opinions significantly.
No, and I did not say that. However, I have priors about what the correct answer is and priors about what causes people to believe certain false answers. My opinion of the rationality of members of the Flat Earth Society is not very high, even though I have not explored their arguments in depth and even though I realize they probably know arguments in favor of the round earth hypothesis better than I do.
In a discussion of arguments about morality, why are you not at least looking at the arguments? Or if you have looked at them, could you say why you disagree instead of just falling back your priors?
If we were discussing the reasons "that having children is less moral than donating the equivalent number of funds to effective charity under the average Lesswrong-user morality," then I would look at those arguments, but we are not discussing that. The original post is only one argument, a weak one, and that is the one being discussed here.
I was merely mentioning my priors. At the very least, Lesswrongers should be aware that what seems obvious to them might seem highly implausible to others. No arguments were offered for the position that "having children is less moral than donating the equivalent number of funds to effective charity," only the claim that the average Lesswrong-user believes this. It is that statement that I was addressing.
If?
I think it's pretty clear that LessWrong both disproportionately attracts people who tend to believe that and that those people mutually reinforce that belief.
I wold appreciate it if anyone could point me to material about this subject that has been influential to LessWrong users.
The quoted excerpt from Rachels doesn't mention enjoyment. In Rachels's view (or yours), is it moral to have kids so long as I am doing so out of a sense of duty rather than because I expect it to be fun? If I was a starving kid in Africa, I am not sure I would see the difference, assuming that a vitamin A deficiency hasn't rendered me blind.
Isn't every avoidable act (i.e. decision) that yields negative consequences (or less positive consequences) when compared to the alternatives immoral? If no, how do you define immoral?
Your tone indicates to me that you believe the OP's argument to be unreasonable as it is exceedingly hard to follow. But does that preclude it from being (1) possible and (2) morally sound?
Depends on what you mean. Would I prefer if people ceased their selfish behavior to ruthlessly attack the world's greatest problems? No. To a small degree perhaps. The way people demonstrate more concern for their morning beverage than for the millions of poor and starving people in the world is part of what makes them human. I wouldn't want that to go away.
Nor given people's selfishness would I want a social norm that people should sacrifice what they have for the sake of the poor. People would respond to this norm by not gathering many resources in the first place, and the aid would be carried out ineffectively, without much attention paid to quality.
However, if I could just snap my fingers and reduce the wealth of the average wealthy Westerner and transfer that wealth to where it could do a great deal of good alleviating poverty and hunger, I would.
So, Ayn Rand is right? Except...
...this doesn't fit. At all.
Wouldn't a one-time transfer of wealth be doomed to fail quickly due to your view of humans' innate selfishness and laziness? That is, resource inequality would restore itself quickly, no?
I think it is odd that you see some sort of moral value to "flip the big equality switch" via a snap of your fingers, yet you push back against the idea of more gradual steps toward a similar end.
No, Ayn Rand is as silly as any other highly influential and successful political philosophy. However, the truth is that people are remarkably selfish. Observe the many who are more concerned about their coffee-based beverages than wars and starvation. This makes them human. I don't want them to stop being that way, not completely, not even to a great extent.
Resource inequality is not the concern here. Poverty is. Poverty can be reduced by giving people wealth.
If a person said to me, "I used to be selfish and spend a lot of money on Starbucks, but now I see the error of my ways and will devote my life to fighting poverty," I would applaud his morality.
It's not obvious this is true other than in the short term.
This sentence also exists in a large number of variations with the word "wealth" replaced by "power", "technology", "information", "self-confidence", "government assistance", etc. etc.
I think this is a feature of any moral system wherein maximization of something is the standard of morality.
Yes, if the goal is only to maximize a particular good, then everything else must be sacrificed to it. That is the beauty of maximizing utility, which does not specify anything in particular. Thus it only demands that lesser utilities be foregone in order to obtain greater utilities, which is hardly counterintuitive.
Feature or misfeature?
I just meant "characteristic".
Not true.
It's just that maximizing your preferences (having children, going to starbucks, whatever) is often at odds with maximizing the subset of your preferences which you identify under the category "moral". This example only seems single-minded because moral preferences are just a small subset of all your preferences.
If you strive to maximize all of your preferences (which is what you are striving for anyhow, in theory) rather than a limited subset called "morality", you'll see that every action which you would prefer to take is in fact the action which will best maximize your preference function.
The argument isn't very convincing; there are far better arguments to be made against having children.
Coffee purchases seem to be done by near-mode thinking (at least for me), while having children is usually quite planned.
Personally I like giving myself quite a bit of leniency when it comes to impulsive purchases in order to direct my cognitive energy to long-term issues with higher returns. Compare and contrast to the idea of premature optimization in computer science.
There is a sleight of hand in the quote: it replaces "suboptimal" with immoral, where being optimal means maximizing a specific utility function.
For example, if your (fake) utility function is something like "total number of people on earth by the time you die", then yes, you should, among other things, forgo personal procreation. Fortunately, very few people have such a simplistic approach to life. If they did, they would find even better ways to maximize this number, like subverting birth control efforts or something.
Or maybe their utility function is the "total number of people who live to be at least 80 years old", that's why they want to save people from famine. Or something else.
My point is that the quote is an example of fake consequentialism, where some unspoken deontological or virtue ethics is couched in terms of utilitarianism, but without ever explicitly stating the utility function, because any particular action advocated by its proponents would then be revealed as suboptimal.
I think their professed utility function would be maximizing something more like Quality Adjusted Life Years, under which efficient charity efforts would most likely be more effective than subverting birth control efforts, and it's certainly within the realm of plausibility that it would be more effective than having children.
However, the usual formulations of QALYs definitely do not adequately capture my own sense of utility, at least. I can't speak for those behind the calculations.
Right. Maximizing total QALY sounds good on paper, but can probably be gamed as easily as any other utilitarianism. Say, by wire-heading or drugging. Complexity of value and such.
I think adoption needs to be delved into into a lot more detail. Rachels Paper only briefly mentions adoption:
My wife and I are fairly well off, so over the course of our life, I would not be surprised if we could potentially give hundreds of thousands of dollars to charities. We are also going to be having our first in person, pre-adoption meeting with a adoption social worker this weekend. If we do adopt a child, we will likely spend that hundreds of thousands of dollars on the child and not on the charities.
So in terms of impact, now would be a VERY impactful time for me to hear any and all arguments for and against this being moral, immoral, or morally neutral, and I feel a bit let down the paper just sort of glosses over this.
Please don't worry about personally offending me! I'll even call Crocker's rules.
Purchase fuzzies and utilons separately. Adopting is not going to be anywhere near the most efficient way to improve the world. Certainly do not do it out of a sense of obligation; that will lead to a build up of resentment that will hurt you all. Do it if you want to, but recognise that you're doing it for your own sake.
Up voted for calling Crocker's Rules when things actually mattered.
Roughly: adopt if you would prefer a life with the child, not because you think it's making the world better.
Second comment on this page: www.givinggladly.com/2013/06/cheerfully.html.
link
Heuristically, I agree with jkaufman and lmm, but I wonder if you can do something like a Fermi estimate of the impact of this decision? (Leaving your potential fuzzies out of it for now; after you estimate the impact, you can talk with people of the appropriate reference class to help you predict the level of fuzzies that you're likely to obtain or lose. Then, if the numbers are going in opposite directions, you can estimate how much you care about impact vs fuzzies to help make your decision.) Here are some factors you might want to estimate:
What are you aiming to optimize for? If it's truly altruism, then it's unlikely a kid would generate the same utility as hundreds of thousands of dollars going toward great charities.
Realistically, the current answer to this is "My wife's utility function." That includes a fair amount of altruism, although not necessarily in an organized way.
After review, I think most of my approaches to altruism also seem to be disorganized. The only thread that seems to run through them is that they seem to be focused on having minimum guilt, but that means I need to have a better grasp of 'What makes me feel guilty?' to answer the question well or I'm just pulling a phlogiston.
My current model of my own guilt sort of feels like something which slowly increases over time which can be removed by being altruistic in a similar manner to how people get hungry over time and they minimize that by eating.
That being said, that doesn't quite seem like it cleaves reality correctly, but I can't think of a better metaphor right now. I'm going to want to think more about this.
I think the marginal difference you can make by adopting is probably surprisingly large. (If your expectations of the amount of good it's possible to do are well-grounded to start with.)
The difference in quality of life for a child who's adopted rather than staying in the care system is spectacularly large: it's a long time since I looked at the data but I remember it being eye-popping. And society is likely to be better as a result - there's a much greater chance of the child contributing positively to society rather than causing significant problems. (Of course, this is on average: some cared-for children grow up to do spectacularly positive things for society, and some adopted kids go on to a life of antisocial crime.)
There are way more children who would benefit from being adopted than there are adoptive parents. (In the UK it's something like 10- or 20-to-1 at the moment.) With some complex social issues, it's hard to see what the limiting factor is in improving things: not here. For looked-after children, the supply of adoptive parents is a runaway winner.
[EDIT: Woah, cultural assumptions there, sorry. From a quick glance, it looks like there is a shortage of adoptive parents in the US, but nothing like on the scale as in the UK.]
One of the big problems with organised altruism is the distance from the donor to the beneficiary: for instance, if you're trying to help people a continent away, and in a profoundly different social context, it's hard to be confident about what is genuinely improving things and what isn't. But an adopted child lives right in your house and is socialised by you, so the distance - literal and figurative - is much smaller.
I wouldn't advocate it as a life choice for people whose main goal is purely to benefit society. Parenting is bloody hard work, physically and emotionally. But some people (me included) find it hugely rewarding as well. So if you think you're likely to find it rewarding to parent, adopting seems to me like a great thing to do.
On a personal note, good luck with the process: friends and relations who've been through it have had mixed experiences. But the ones who ended up adopting report being very happy they did so.
(Bias declaration: I'm a parent of young children, and so likely to irrationally overvalue actions that benefit young children.)
Sometimes adopted children were kidnapped from their families, rather than being in the care system. I don't know how common this is compared to adoption of children who don't have families or are being abused, but it should go into the calculation somewhere.
Yes - I wasn't thinking of inter-country adoption in this context, because it's barely-on-the-radar where I live (UK) for people who want to adopt.
I do not think that you should decide to have or not have children based on you estimates of the impact on the world.
Certainly not if you're trying to maximize your hedonic happiness. But children do not increase hedonic happiness; they increase your sense of living a meaningful life. To maximize the actual meaning of your life, you must use estimates of the impact of your decisions; whether or not this affects your perceived sense of meaning depends on how seriously you take moral arguments.
I think both of your statements are true for some people and not true for others. They are not general rules.
What is the actual meaning of my life?
There is variance in happiness, yes, but studies have shown that having children does not on average result in higher hedonic happiness, although it does increase a sense of living a meaningful life. If you doubt this, I can dig up the reference; I think it was actually referred to in the Rachaels paper. I said "certainly not", but that wasn't meant to be taken literally; of course it's not certain that you'll be equally or less happy with children.
I think I didn't word the second sentence correctly. I was trying to make the point that having a sense of meaning is not the same as doing reasonably well at improving the world in the ways you care about.
If you wanted to maximize your sense of meaning, you wouldn't object to being wireheaded in a blissful and maximally meaningful cyber-world. I think it's reasonable to say that most people object to such wireheading because they care about their actual impact on the world. At least, they want to appear as if they do.
I am not average person, you don't look to be one either.
Well, again, it depends. For some people "meaningful life" has nothing to do with improving the world. And if your idea of meaningful life is improving the world, I don't see how you can have a sense of meaning and at the same time be aware that you're not "doing reasonably well".
Fair enough, but I still don't think I am very good at predicting whether I'll be happier with children. I also doubt that other people who do think they will be happier are very accurate. Humans are notoriously bad at determining what will make them happy/unhappy. I'm thinking in particular about the study about lottery winners vs. amputee victim from Dan Gilbert's TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html.
Society as a whole regards having children as profoundly selfless, rather than selfish, so I think I am fair in concluding that some of the sense of meaning that people get from having children is related to improving the world for future generations. That particular self-satisfaction might not be disturbed by Rachaels' argument if one does not take moral arguments seriously.
I think adopting a child will likely be superior to donation for your all your personal preferences, while donating the equivalent amount of money will likely be superior than adoption for the smaller subset of your personal preferences which you call "morality". Both the adoption and the effective charity donation are moral, but the donation is more moral. Additionally, both will likely satisfy the sum of all your preferences, but the adoption is likely to satisfy them more.
I may be wrong about your values, of course. At the end of the day, you will in theory do what you believe maximizes all your preferences rather than maximize the subset of preferences you label "moral". Truly maximizing morality would mean giving up a lot - what actually happens is that morality is just one weighted variable among many others that you wish to maximize.
Adoption moral pros you may not have considered:
1) When you spend, you use money to transfer resources from one place to another, where you believe they will be more efficient. When you adopt, it's true that you are likely diverting resources to a sub-optimal place morally, but the non-financial investment you put in is also creating resources.
2) Don't just look at "good you could do with the money you would otherwise spend on the kid" in a vacuum. An un-adopted child still diverts money from someone. Adoption frees up those resources for the adoption center / the state to do more good work. So when calculating the total moral loss inherent in this choice, it's [good you could have done with the money you will spend on the kid] - [good the state/adoption clinic will do with the money they will save from you adopting the kid] - [good you will do by raising the kid] ... which is be a fair bit less moral loss than you might initially assume.
Adoption moral cons you may not have considered
1) If you don't adopt the child, someone else is likely to do it. But if you don't donate to effective charity, no one is likely to take your place. (However, you can mitigate this by adopting a child that other people would for some reason be unlikely to adopt)
As a bit of a generic update about that meeting... very little of any dramatic import happened. The first visit seemed to be primarily focused on "Thank you for filling out that first chunk of paperwork. You still need to fill out these various forms of paperwork so that we can confirm that there are records that you and all adults living with you are sane/safe/non-criminal, etc. That being said, there are still 2 more home visits after the paperwork, and classes, and books.
I get the feeling I was substantially compressing all of the drama and moral decision making of adoption into a single meeting, when in fact, that isn't how it feels at all when you actually start going through the process. (For reference, I live in Maryland. I have no idea how other states or countries manage their adoption processes, and this may not apply to anyone else.)
The most comparable thing I can think of now is getting my driver's license, but more so. Not that I think there is ever a specific "Adoption License." but the relative amount of work, classes, and bureaucratic effort feels in about the same order of magnitude, if higher.
I'd argue that there's a significant benefit to increasing the proportion of rational thinkers, which I would think would happen significantly more often with children of rationalists. Your individual child probably won't make a difference, but other rationalists probably think like you, so you're really making a timeless decision that produces many thousands of more-likely-rational children.
For the amount of money a child requires couldn't CFAR do more to spread rational thinking?
Not sure, insufficient data. At first, probably, but at some point CFAR's capacity will stop being the limiting factor, being replaced by the low sanity waterline itself; meanwhile, the rate of rational parents producing rational children is something I'd expect to be constant.
Maybe...
a) having and raising well-educated and well-brought-up kids is expensive, but in the end it is a fantastic investment (and from my own experience, makes one happy) b) having and raising kids who will require charity to survive is cheap, and also immoral
Unfortunately, giving to famine relief promotes b).
The term "famine relief" in this context is unfortunate. Rachels is extending a 1972 paper of Peter Singer's which used that term. The argument is much stronger if you mentally substitute "most effective charity" for "famine relief".
You should repeat this at the top level. This changes things quite a bit.
Making a child gives them ~70 QALY's. That's not a lot by efficient charity standards, but it's a lot by "helping the people closest to you" standards. If sibling needed $100K to purchase 14 QALY's, would you help them?
Depending on how your "helping the people closest to you" works, should it include people who don't exist yet?
If having children were a net cost, humanity would have gone extinct long ago -- in fact, it would never have got started. The reality is, though, that on average, over a person's life, they produce more than they consume. For evidence, look around you, and compare the modern cornucopia with 100 years ago, or 1000. The investment that parents make in raising a child is paid back (to the world, not to those parents) in the resulting adult's life's works. This payback is ignored by the above argument.
One controversial or taboo possibility is that an intellectually elite Less Wrong poster may have much more of an impact on technological/economic progress by investing in a child than an equivalent investment in the third-world poor. One could argue that the majority of technological progress is driven by the top few % of people (measured either through intellect or economic resources), and that people in third-world countries (i.e. those who would benefit from bed nets) aren't really in a position to cause much impact.
Why invest the money in your child? If you want to produce smart children, donate to science camps, college funds of tech colloeges or whatever seems most promising. It seems a priori highly unlikely that the best way to invest 500k into producing top researchers or inventors (or basically anything) is by having a child yourself. Even if you have amazing genes, that would only be an argument for sperm donation.
The per-dollar returns on education funding are unfortunately really dismal. The choke point in our Fritz Haber/Norman Borlaug/Edward Jenner pipeline is not the amount of science education out there. It's a combination of the low-hanging fruit being picked, insufficient investment in novel approaches and not enough geniuses. You could invest the money in far-horizon science research but 500k dries up really quickly that way. If you can have a kid with say, a 5% chance of an IQ over 155 it seems plausible that is the optimal use of that money.
Not everyone has sperm. But even if you do donating is really unlikely to have the same effect as finding a woman whose genes are similarly excellent and have a bunch of children with her.
The investment of 500k is certainly still sub-optimal but the lesson there is to not spend half a million dollars on your child. You can reduce this cost by having more children (which will bring the per-child cost down), by not spoiling them with status signal purchases and not paying $200,000 for an elite college education when a state-school is sufficient.
Very true. Each year we produce thousands of new Ph.D.s and import thousands more, while slowly choking off funding for basic research, so they languish in a post-doc holding pattern until many of them give up and go do something less innovative but safer.
If genius is a limiting factor, and genius is often under utilized, then spending half a million on increasing the odds of full utilization of a genius may be a good investment. If you can arrange for that genius to be your own child, you would be best situated to spend that half million for maximal effect.
Only if you're only allowed to have one child, for some reason.
One scenario that makes it relatively more attractive is if you believe that society already provides the resources needed for similarly situated people to achieve close to their potential, so there isn't more "room for funding" in GiveWell parlance. Another possibility is that it's actually more expensive to have an impact than naive analysis would suggest because actually influencing other people's children in a meaningful way is very difficult and having direct control of the environment is the most important aspect.
Agreed. Plus the child themself will have a blessed life.
You are right, but I don't think that's relevant to the argument.
The argument isn't that having kids makes people on net worse than before. The argument is that it makes people worse than another action would. (And even then, it's not always suboptimal; the more costly it is to raise a child--and in the first world it is very costly--the less moral it is to raise one.)
As far as I can tell from the OP's summary, the book could just as well be arguing that having children is a net asset... and instead of wasting resources on your one or two children, you should use them to help a dozen other people have 40 or 80 children.
This is a view I disagree with because the utility function should be evaluated over the entire support range, and maximizing child output on a local time-scale at the cost of a long-term overshoot, collapse, and dark ages (or at worst extinction) does not do that.
Well, reproduction provides a net gain to progress. Exactly what the net consequence of progress will be when all has been cast and counted remains to be seen. It's possible that having kids = good...until having kids all of the sudden = bad.
In Rachels' paper, comparing the happiness of parents to the happiness of voluntarily childless people seems wrong, because childlessness hurts most when it's involuntary. (See how much people spend on fertility treatments.) That said, I don't know if deciding to donate instead of having kids would be more similar to voluntary or involuntary childlessness. That depends on how strongly you feel the urge to have kids. And in the long term, if we view the paper as a call to social engineering, it depends on whether that urge is biological or social.
Actually, the first happiness studies that found that having children massively decreases happiness were using involuntarily infertile couples, not voluntarily childfree folks, as their comparison group; the authors were very surprised that involuntarily infertile childless couples were happier than their child-having peers!
A few of these early studies: Glenn, N.D., & McLanahan, S. (1982) Children and marital happiness: A further specification of the relationship. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 44, 63-72 (great quote: negative effect of offspring on both marital and global happiness of parents "is not absolutely conclusive, of course, but it is perhaps about as nearly conclusive as social scientific evidence on any topic ever is."
Anderson, S.A., Russell, C.S., & Schumm, W.R. (1983). Perceived marital quality and family life-cycle categories: A further analysis. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 45, 127-139.
Bernard, J. (1982). The Future of Marriage. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Campbell, A., Converse, P.E., & Rodgers, W.L. (1976). The quality of American life: Perceptions, evaluations, and satisfactions. New York: Russell Sage.
Campbell, A. (1981). The sense of well-being in America. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Elderly childfree are happy too: Rempel, J. (1985). Childless elderly: What are they missing? Journal of Marriage and the Family, 47, 343-348.
That's surprising, thanks!
I just looked through the first study on your list and couldn't find any mention of infertility. The second one's behind a paywall. Maybe I'm missing something, can you give some quotes about the happiness of involuntarily infertile couples?
Which family characteristics did they control for?
Only if you're operating under a utility function that assigns an equal value to all people, or at least the value of one person's well-being is not significantly different from another's. If you reject this premise (as I do), it's not necessarily true that the money would be better spent on famine relief. Perhaps I could donate $200 to a charity that would buy food for starving people, or I could use it to buy a Nintendo 3DS for my girlfriend, or for myself. I value my girlfriend (and myself) much more highly than I value the well-being of strangers, so I see nothing wrong with spending that money on a person I value more highly.
The same goes for raising a child. Presumably, I would value my child's well-being much more highly than the lives of strangers, and value the fulfillment of having a child similarly.
All of these "what you should do if you are a utilitarian" articles should start with "Assuming you are a being for whom utility matters roughly equally regardless of who experiences it..."
That assumption is part of what "utilitarian" usually means. In particular, "utilitarian" does not mean the same thing as "entity that tries to maximize some utility function".
Yes! Thank you for articulating in one sentence what I haven't been able to in a dozen posts.
Isn't that what "utilitarian" means?
I think "utilitarian" has picked up too many different meanings for us to use the word without saying which meaning we mean. I see people using it in (at least) 5 different senses.
Someone who prioritizes function over form, which might be the most common lay definition. (See e.g. Wiktionary defining "utilitarian" as an adjective meaning "practical and functional, not just for show".)
Someone trying to maximize a utility function or welfare function, whatever that function's form. (I mentally call this "utilityfunctionarianism" to distinguish it from the other meanings.)
Someone trying to maximize an additively separable utility function or welfare function, i.e. someone who defines social utility as a weighted sum or average of each person's utility. (Ken Binmore uses this definition in his Game Theory and the Social Contract and says it's a "not uncommon definition".)
Someone trying to maximize an unweighted sum or average of each person's utility, i.e. an egalitarian utility maximizer. (Which seems to be the meaning being used here, and sometimes elsewhere on LW, e.g. here.)
A Benthamite, which (I think?) is close to meaning 4, but with "utility" operationalized as "happiness".
So it's a fuzzy term.
An argument elsewhere on LW reminds me of a 6th meaning for "utilitarian": a synonym for "consequentialist".
Yeah, this is the winner.
"Well being" is nebulous enough, but without specifying the relative weighting, it means very little, particularly with the "weight everyone equally" variant finding such strong support, and being so at odds with what people actually do.
There are two ways of making the world better: you can remove suckiness, or you can increase awesomeness. Deciding to never have kids is ceding one of the primary ways in which global awesome can be increased in favor of decreasing global suck. If you live your life only concerned with decreasing suck - or, more importantly, if everyone lived this way - the worldwide suck level would likely equilibrate to tolerable levels and then stagnate.
Space exploration is indulgent; that money should be spent on mosquito nets. Arts detract from time which could be spent earning money to donate; give it up. Having children is selfish; instead, make the lives of people you will never meet slightly less intolerable. Instead of studying to be an engineer so you can build/find/create hospitals/oil/technology, become a day trader and increase the efficiency of markets by a negligible fraction while donating your earnings.
Of course I am being tongue in cheek. You should do both things - increase awesome and decrease suck. There can't be a knockdown argument against having children because it would generalize to a knockdown argument against trying to do anything except perfectly optimal cash generation and donation.
Suppose you're a book-lover and your house is on fire. You get your spouse and children out and ignore your books. That doesn't mean you don't care about books, it means you've got an emergency that requires you to focus on other things.
Suppose you love awesomeness and the world is full of cheaply fixable suckiness. Maybe you fix the suckiness first and ignore the tempting vistas of awesomeness. That doesn't mean you don't value awesomeness, it means there's an emergency.
So if someone decides that they need to make big sacrifices to decrease suck, it doesn't necessarily mean that they think decreasing suck is all that matters. They might care about awesome too, but trade off awesome against suck in such a way that right now concentrating on suck is important.
Does thinking that way mean endorsing a world in which no one ever does anything but suck-minimization? Nope, not quite. It means endorsing a world in which everyone concentrates on suck-minimization as long as there's a huge suckiness problem. Once we've dealt with the mass starvation, vast numbers of deaths from malaria, horrendous poverty, etc., then we can start paying a lot more attention to awesomeness. And at that point there'll be a lot more people with a reasonable prospect of some awesomeness in their lives, so maybe we actually maximize long-term awesomeness that way too.
(I do not necessarily endorse that position. I certainly don't act in a manner perfectly consistent with it. But I don't think it's at all fair to say that arguing for sacrifices in the name of reduced suckiness amounts to preferring a world in which everyone spends all their time toiling for minimized suck and nothing awesome happens. Our book-lover doesn't want a world in which everyone spends all their time rescuing people from fires -- but as long as the fire is burning and people need rescuing, what else should one do?)
What if, for practical purposes, there is an inexhaustible supply of suck? What if we can't deal with it once and for all and then turn our attention to the fun stuff?
So, judging from the reception of my post about the Malthusian Crunch certain Wrongians sense this and have gone into denial (perhaps, if they're honest with themselves, privately admitting the hope that if they ignore the starving masses long enough, they will go away).
I propose a middle ground between giving everything and giving nothing-- a non-arbitrary cutoff for how much help is enough. A cutoff that can be defended on pragmatic grounds without having to assume a shared normative morality.
You put just enough resources into pure suckiness remediation to insure that spillover suckiness will not derail your awesomeness plans. I emphasize pure because there are pursuits that simultaneously strive for new heights of awesomeness and fix suck in equal measure. Obviously this quality is desirable and such projects should not be penalized for having it.
Well, that would be very bad, and it might mean that an altruist of the sort I describe would in fact think the best course of action would be relentless suck-mitigation, for ever. A world of relentless suck-mitigation wouldn't be a lot of fun, but if you're faced with an inexhaustible supply of suck it might be the best you could do.
[EDITED to add: I see you've been downvoted. For what it's worth, that wasn't me.]
The charities I think are doing the most good are working along "remove suckiness" lines, but an "increase awesomeness" charity could get you much more awesomeness per dollar than having kids.
Think marginally. The argument is that right now, the world's population would be better off on net if more people gave to effective charities instead of having kids.
I want to increase awesome by decreasing suck.
There are a lot of paths in science and engineering that accomplish that, and space travel (in the long view) is definitely one of them.
There are several fundamental problems here, but I'm just going to focus on this one; if we intelligent people stop breeding due to this kind of intellectual argument, why do we expect the less intelligent masses to follow suit?
More intelligent wealthy and responsible people, exactly the people this kind of argument (and it's middle class equivalent, "A nineteenth British scholar unfamiliar with technology curves decided we're all doomed!") targets, have the lowest birth rates in our society. This gets more and more extreme the more highly educated and wealthy the people in question are.
On the other side of the coin, the incentive structure of our society encourages our least responsible members to reproduce as much as possible by shouldering most of the burden their children create. Adding more private charity on top of these existing government incentives and cutting off the right-end of the bell curve just means the dysgenic trends in our society will get worse and worse.
Since IQ is 60-80% heritable, and correlates strongly with income education and social responsibility, it is extraordinarily unwise to trade a short-term gain in QALYs for long term damage to the intelligence of the species. Especially if we think technological innovation will be key to solving future problems, any method which puts selective pressure against high intelligence is absolutely poisonous on a societal level.
If we really care about making the world better for humanity in the long run, people with IQs even slightly above the mean need to commit to having enough children to offset the current dysgenic trends in our society and pursue political/economic solutions to reduce dysgenic population growth. This kind of pathological altruism is ultimately short sighted and suicidal.
How long do you think it will be until we understand the genetics of intelligence to the point that "dysgenic trends" don't matter?
Isn't this a much stronger argument for sperm/egg donation than having kids?
From what we do know now, intelligence is extraordinarily polygenic. Once we've identified specific alleles linked to high / low IQ respectively, and figured out what they do well enough to be confident messing with them, and have the ability to modify the genome on the scale of dozens to hundreds of genes at once... well, I'd like to think I'll still be alive and in the industry by then but who the hell knows.
The two are hardly exclusive; even in countries with no legal limits to donation you can still always raise another half dozen yourself in addition to whatever number of children you can conceive through donation. We're talking about reversing trends involving billions of people, no-one can afford to be a slouch.
I agree it's complicated, but are we talking about more than 50 years? Claimed dysgenic effects are very slow.
Fair point.
That's not really a question I can answer, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it did.
Basically, to do it right, we'd need a lot of different fields that are in their infancy right now to mature more-or-less all at once. We're talking about taking macroscopic structural issues like brain volumes in different regions or the size of axon paths between them which are vaguely described by modern neuroscience and the huge number of genes potentially implicated in intelligence and then turning that into a single theory of what 'g' actually represents and then using that as a basis for therapy. And that will very likely depend on how good our ability to transfect large amounts of DNA into living cells are; right now you can't even move the gene for hemoglobin, much less whatever is needed for the hundreds of alleles you might have to change in a full overhaul. Throw in 15-20 years for FDA approval and your standard political controversy and you're looking at a big question mark.
I mean sure it could be that the problem isn't as difficult as it looks or the Singularity materializes and drops a solution in our laps, but I really wouldn't advise you to count on it.
The problem is that the rate isn't constant; Vining, the guy people usually refer to for the "whites lose 1.6 IQ points a generations" figure, pointed out that the fertility differential is highly dependent on overall population growth. In periods of population increase the high IQ tend to lead the pack and the trend is eugenic, while in periods of population decline they trail and create a dysgenic trend.
Currently the US birth rate is below the death rate, with higher-IQ whites and east asians having the worst of it, so it wouldn't be surprising if by 2048 we see a much larger decrease in global IQs than you could have predicted with data from the 1940s birth cohort.
See here.
That depends on how many smart people are available, over time, to analyze the genetics of intelligence.
Within this context, isn't donating sperm/eggs the same thing as having kids except that someone else will have to bring them up and bear the costs?
According to what moral theory?
Presumably utilitarianism.
With which utility function?
Does it matter? All of the standard utilitarianisms come to the same conclusion here. It doesn't matter whether you're aggregating preferences, happiness, satisfaction, or wellbeing when the level of global inequality is this high. In all of these systems there are other people who can get far more utility out of a marginal dollar than you can.
The question is how you do the aggregating.
Both total and average give the same result here.
Not if you're comparing states with different numbers of people.
They both give the same result in the sense that "give your money to the best charity" yields far higher aggregate utility than "have a kid".
(As your kid would be one in 7 billion, they're even quite close in how much charity beats reproducing by.)
Careful! Confusing utilitarianism with utility functions can make you very sick and you might have to go to the hospital.
Both Rachels and I are considering consequentialist moral theories that involve valuing the well-being of others. Utilitarianism is one of these, but many lesswrongers value others and are consequentialist without being confident in what would count as utility or believing it scales linearly with people.
Really? And kids are not persons and their happiness does not count?
That's not what the OP meant. Rather, "if the decision to have children is justified, then it is justified by considering how happy it makes you, not by how happy your children will be."
Why is that?
Kids are definitely persons and their happiness definitely counts, but so are the thousands of other people you could be helping with that $500k.
These thousands of people already exist. You're making new people to be happy.
And there is, of course, the obvious observation that if everyone follow that logic, this will be the last generation of humans on Earth.
Rachels considers this, and I agree with their argument:
Actually they already do.
And there's lots of literature on that, too.
There are many problems with this analogy -- for example, Rachels asks people NOT to do something so the proper parallel would be for billions of people not to come to her house which seems perfectly fine to me.
But to make clear the major flaw of this comparison let me ask you a question: What percentage of human population would you like to follow the advice of not having kids? And if it's less than 100% what would you consider to be the best way of dividing people into those who should have kids and those who should not?
This question solves the silly problem of "but what if everyone did that" -- please tell me how many people do you want to do that.
Having kids is justified altruistically if the benefit to the world of having kids is greater than the benefit to the world of spending a similar amount of money and time on the most effective charity. This isn't a percentage thing; it depends on people's individual situations. Right now donation probably wins for nearly everyone, but as more money went into the best charitable options it would become more and more expensive to dramatically improve a stranger's life, which would decrease the fraction of people that shouldn't have kids.
That's not what Rachels and you say. From her quote with which you agree:
I don't see any qualifications like "depending on your individual situation". Neither do I see them in the OP.
Rachels is inviting people to sainthood (" If we become saints...") and as far as I can see she wants as many people as possible to do so.
I'll repeat the question: in your opinion, right now, what is the fraction of people that shouldn't have kids?
Stuart Rachels is a male philosopher.
Thanks. I had an obvious contamination...
I interpret Rachels' use of "in our position" as being that qualification, and I think that's how it was intended.
100%. But I would also say that everyone reading this should spend their marginal dollar on the most effective charity and not on themself. This sense of "would the world be better if you did X instead of Y? Then X is moral and Y is not" is incredibly demanding.
Translating this into practical behavior, I think people should set a (high) bound for their altruism and then optimize for their own happiness and life satisfaction within that limit. Which is why I'm choosing to have kids anyway.
I don' see how
(1) "I interpret Rachels' use of "in our position" as being that qualification, and I think that's how it was intended."
and (2) "I'm choosing to have kids anyway."
is consistent with
(3) "100%"
I've seen people argue that we should prioritize the happiness of existing people over new people, but I haven't seen it the other way around before. Why do you value creating new people over improving the lives of existing ones?
(There are also charities that have the effect of creating new people.)
All hail the unified global moral system. What a dystopia that would be.
Well, that's not the reference group you'd want to be looking at (thus weak evidence).
You provide both nature and nurture, and it's up to you to avoid the usual pitfalls. There were some recent posts on LW on how to raise critical thinkers. Now, intent doesn't equal intended effect, but a large disparity in effect size -- relative to "the norm" -- is to be expected.
You can choose to save lives, but I disagree that you have a moral obligation to actively save lives.
There are people who believe that morality is just a bug-ridden adaptation to improve inclusive fitness, and that upon analysis any moral intuition will collapse into one of "contributes to your inclusive fitness", "meaningless/obsolete", or "hijacked by others to make you contribute to their fitness". In this case, they are the people who will keep reproducing even if you convince them that by doing so they forego the chance to save the lives of strangers. Insofar that they pass this outlook to their children, they will in time outbreed those who believe that having children is immoral.
What ought appeal to both pragmatists and idealists, is the threat overpopulation (or more specifically sustainable per-capita availability of resources being sufficient to ) poses to humanity surviving long enough to expand beyond Earth. Or, if you're dealing with unimaginative types, delete the last four words.
But from that point of view, indiscriminately saving lives unaccompanied by any incentives to promote family planning is as bad as having too many children of one's own. Perhaps that $205 is even better spent funding the development of such incentives or funding technological advancement that will allow us to continue expand Earth's effective carrying capacity faster than population growth.
Saving lives does promote family planning, in a sense.
The excess growth caused by reducing mortality is temporary; once people's kids stop dying of random diseases all the time, they don't feel the need to have so many for insurance, and birth rates fall as part of a demographic transition.
When you save lives the most major effects are preventing short-term suffering and saving society all the resources that it's invested in the dying person.
The slower population growth that comes with improved education and standard of living is partly offset by increased per-capita resource demands. The quantity I don't have a clear idea how to estimate is how much per-capita consumption (lets say in fractions of an American or European) is sufficient to achieve a stable population.
I clicked this hoping it would be about Sister Y's arguments. :(
That's a lot of posts. Are there particular entries you'd recommend reading to start?
Why are we trying to analyze this in terms of utilitarianism given that this is the domain where we are least sure what utilitarianism should say?
As I wrote in my reply to buybuydandavis this doesn't require utilitarianism, just consequentialism and valuing the wellbeing of others.
But why do you believe that "this is the domain where we are least sure what utilitarianism should say"? The bit of utilitarianism that I think is most dodgy is what counts as personal utility. Summing it up over all people over all time seems the simple part.
And that's an equally weighted sum?
Until you've specified how "well being" is weighted in the sum, you haven't said much. I could weight it overwhelmingly on me.
I mostly disagree with both parts of the sentence "Except that it's much cheaper to convince other people's kids to be generous, and our influence on the adult behavior of our children is not that big." I would argue that
(1) Almost all new EA recruits are converted in college by friends and/or by reading a very small number of writers (e.g. Singer). This is something that cannot be replicated by most adults, who are bad writers and who are not friends with college students. We still need good data on the ability of typical humans to covert others to EA ideas, but my anecdotal observations (e.g. Matt Wage) suggest that this is MUCH harder than you might think.
(2) Despite one's acceptance of genetic fatalism, it's known that the biggest influences a parent can have are the religious and political associations of their children. Insofar as donating is determined more by affiliating with the EA movement than by bio-determined factors like IQ, we can expect parents to strongly induce giving by their children.
We can look to evangelical religions to get an idea of what movement building techniques are most effective for the bulk of the population. Yes, many religions have missionaries, but this is usually a small group of unusually motivated and charismatic people. But having lots of children is a strategy that many religions have effectively employed for the bulk of their members.
(One potential counter example I'd be interested to hear about is the effectiveness of the essentially compulsory missionary work for Mormon men.)
Maybe currently, but it doesn't have to be. Many people within the Boston EA community seem to have come to it post college and through in-person discussions.
Do college EAs need more support? Would better versions of things like ThINK's modules help? Funding for free food for meetings? Would subsidizing TLYCS distribution or some upcoming EA book do much to increase the spread of ideas?
If you can convince one new person to be an EA for $100k you're more efficient than successfully raising your kid to be one, and that's ignoring time-discounting.
I think religions mostly expand at first through conversion and then once they start getting diminishing returns switch to expanding through reproduction. EA isn't to this changeover point yet, and isn't likely to be for a while. But I also don't know that much about it.
Hmm. I haven't spent much time in the area, but I went to the Cambridge, MA LessWrong/Rationality "MegaMeetup" and it was almost exclusively students. Is there a Boston EA community substantially disjoint from this LW/Rationality group that you're talking about?
More generally, are there many historical examples of movements that experience rapid growth on college campuses but then were able to grow strongly elsewhere? Civil rights and animal welfare are candidates, but I think they mostly fail this test for different reasons.
I honestly do not think this is possible, and again I look to religious organizations as examples where (my impression is that) finding effective missionaries is much harder than getting the minimal funding they need to operate at near-maximum efficiency. This is something we need more data on, but I expect a lot of the rosy pictures people have of translating money or other fungibles into EA converts will not stand up to scrutiny, in much the same way that GiveWell has raised by an order of magnitude its estimates of the cost of saving a life in the developing world. I especially think that the initial enthusiasm of new EAers converted through repeatable methods (like 80k hours) will fade more quickly in time than "organic" converts and children raised in EA households (to an even greater extent than for religions).
Maybe. I have the impression that religions most used missionaries to expand geographically, and hit diminishing returns very quickly once they had a foothold. Basically, I guess that as soon as a potential convert knows the organization exists, you've essentially already hit the wall of diminishing returns. I agree as long as EA stuff has non-structural geographic lumpiness (i.e. geographic concentrations that are a result of accidents of history rather than for intrinsic reasons related to where EA memes are most effective) then EA missionary work may be the major driver of growth. But I think the EA memes are most effective on a wealthy, technologically connected sub-population which we may quickly saturate in just a few years.
I hear many more people describe their own conversion experience as something akin to "I heard the argument, and it just immediately clicked" (even if personal inertia prevented them making immediate drastic changes). I do not hear many people describe it as "I had heard about these ideas a few times, but it was only when Bob [who was supported by EA funding] took the time to sit and talk with me for a few hours that I was convinced." (Again, that's just anecdotal.)
Can we look at the history of the Catholic church during times when new populations of potential converts became accessible through exploration/colonization? What fraction of the church's resources went to missionary work, and did the church reduce its emphasis on having children so that parents would have more free money to give to the church?
Incidentally, these kind of questions are what make me wish we had more EA historians. We could use a lot more data and systematic analysis.
Weird; that's not my memory of it or my perception of the group. The meetup was at Harvard, which meant we had a couple more students than usual, but I think 80%+ of the local people at the meetup were out of school.
At the meetup yesterday night, which I remember better, there were about 15 of us and I think only one student (late 30s statistics grad student).
There's a lot of overlap, but it's a separate group. Looking over the rsvps at our most recent dinner I count 8 people who also go to lesswrong, and 15 who don't. On the same list i count three students.
The history of movements is something I'd like to know more about, but haven't really looked into much. (One thing I found frustrating when I did is that there's a huge amount of survivorship bias.)
Facebook did this, though it's not a movement.
I agree, and am similarly pessimistic. But $100k is still a lot of money, and we don't yet have that much experience trying to figure out how to spend it.
There are very few Bobs who are supported by EA funding, but I can think of several people who switched to EA after lots of talking with existing EAs. Right now we have relatively little personal outreach and relatively more digital/idea-based outreach, so we should expect to meet more people who were receptive to the arguments when they heard them remotely.
I'm not sure the church was strategic or flexible enough to do this, and even then I doubt kids were anywhere near as expensive as then. Specifically, I think the age at which a kid went from net-consumer to net-producer was something like 9 compared to today's 22. (But I'm not very informed on this.)
Yes!
Kant's Categorical Imperative is directly applicable to this problem.
Can you expand on that a bit?
Sure. The principle says
If everyone were to stop having kids so they could donate more money to charity, the following would happen:
So you can't want the maxim "stop having kids so you can donate more to charity" to become a universal law; thus (according to Kant) you shouldn't follow the maxim yourself.
On the other hand, Kant's imperative does not obviously oppose the maxim "stop having kids so you can donate more to charity for as long as the marginal value of another child is lower than the marginal value of your differential charitable contributions." (Nor does it obviously oppose a large number of other competing maxims.)
That's like saying that being a computer programmer is immoral, because if everyone would become a computer programmer, no one would cultivate food, and within a month the humanity would vanish.
It's possible to make a more complex algorithm saying that those who have a comparative advantage in computer programming should become computer programmers and those who have a comparative advantage in cultivating food should cultivate food. This way humanity can survive.
Analogically we should be thinking about consequences of a world where people with a comparative advantage in donating don't have children and instead donate the money to efficient charities, and some other people have children and ensure that humanity survives. -- There are some things that could go wrong in that scenario, but it's not that trivially wrong.
(Also, it is important to note that most people don't behave according to Kant's rules, so even a strategy that would maximize global utility if everyone used it, is not necessarily the global utility maximizing choice for an individual in real life.)
EDIT: I am not deeply familiar with Kant's philosophy. It just seems to me that it makes sense to seek an algorithm that maximizes global utility when used by everyone, but it would be stupid to require that the algorithm produce the same output for everyone. If two people have different comparative advantages, they can both use an algorithm "do what is your comparative advantage and trade with the other person", and yet their behavior will not be identical. Children are valuable, in my opinion; the topic of this discussion is that maybe some people can create a lot more value by doing something else.
From Daniel's post, it seems like the categorical imperative defines whether some behavior could be considered morally required, not whether a particular behavior is immoral. Being a computer programmer couldn't be morally required of everyone, but that doesn't mean that it is immoral for some people to be computer programmers.
It seems to me that the best way to capture Kant's intent and avoid these sort of computer programmer problems is to interpret the first categorical imperative as saying something like "always choose in such a way that your choice can universally rationally be regarded as valuable." This seems to make it possible to endorse some people being computer programmers while others farm, without so far as I can tell endorsing having some people tell the truth while others lie. It also, incidentally, helps slightly narrow the gap between the first and second categorical imperatives, which is an advantage as a matter of Kant exegesis since Kant insists the first and second (and third) CI are in fact the same. I'm not actually certain what this interpretation would say about the choice to be childless, but then one of the reasons I'm not a Kantian myself is that I think it's much harder than Kant pretended, indeed sometimes impossible, to figure out what the CI actually recommends. Only a few cases work out as neatly as Kant's preferred example of lying (and even that case is probably more difficult than Kant admits).
I don't know, maybe a very special case. I'd say rather it's a way of creating new people with their own utility [I see now Lumifer made this point before me], and ideally their own contributions to overall utility. Alternatively, some new people may represent losses to overall utility overall.
If you think you can produce net-positive children...parents of Isaac Newton, I'm looking at you...it's worthwhile to spend all the time and effort and money to raise them. It may be immoral not to have kids. If your children are likely to be sociopaths, or merely net drains on society, then maybe you should just get a cat or something.
But how do you tell in advance whether a child is going to be extraordinarily good or bad in advance? Probably you can't, but I'd bet you can take a good Bayesian guess in advance as to whether the product of a given union is going to be above or below some given point for contributions to society.
Considered as an altruistic endeavor, you probably do better to find existing kids with the potential to be net-positive and help them reach their potential.
I have my doubts, or rather, I think it depends on a lot of things. I take it Steve Jobs' parents were decent average people who went out of their way to raise their brilliant adoptive son as best they could, with great success. But, of course, this involved for them almost exactly the same expense of time or money as it would to raise a biological child of their own, which nullifies a good chunk of the original argument, as I understood it. Maybe "finding existing kids with the potential to be net-positive and helping them reach their potential" is as expensive as raising children in the ordinary way.
What about targeted vaccinations and other health interventions for smart kids? I don't think this is a good idea, partly because it's going to be so much less efficient than just helping everyone, but you may. Alternatively tutoring is free and with a similar level of time costs to raising your own children you could tutor a lot of others.
Yes! The school system in my state spends far more on remedial education than on GT. Education is seen as a status symbol instead of a costly investment that should be allocated in a manner that gives the highest returns (in terms of innovation, prosperity, and sane policy decisions).
Not at all, that sounds great, if it were possible. Certainly generally effective health interventions sound even far more likely. But if there were a health intervention that only benefited smart kids, I would definitely consider that a net plus as to not having it exist at all.
[ETA] If it imposed some extrinsic cost on everyone else, that would be a different matter, but that's not how vaccines work, is it?
I'm curious as to what conditions you think allow colleges to price discriminate. Do you assert that colleges have monopolistic control over prices? Is a Harvard education considered to be a good distinct enough from a Yale education that each can set prices independent of the other? Or is there some sort of collusion?
They have been rising exponentially at about 6% for 60 years. I don't think it's fair to call that a "state of flux" or a sudden realization.
I previously made a comment that mistakenly argued against the wrong thing. so to answer the real question- no.
the person who commented to my response said "$50 to the AMF gets someone someone around an additional year of healthy life."
but here's the thing- there's no reason it couldn't give another person- possibly a new child- an additional year of healthy life.
a life is a life, and $50 is $50, so unless the charity is ridiculously efficient (in which case, you should be looking at how to become more efficient) the utility would be the same (when comparing giving to AMF vs. doing the same thing as AMF to someone who may or may not be your child)
however with the having a child option, there is one more life- and all the utility therein- than the charity option- the people the charity would benefit would exist in either case. and since we've just shown that it doesn't really matter whether you donate to AMF or do the same thing as AMF to someone, that puts having a child at greater utility.
Very much not so. You have to look at how the AMF goes about providing that year of healthy life (QALY). They distribute antimalarial nets to places where malaria is a large problem. Their distribution keeps down malaria rates, fewer people get malaria and suffer or die. If you child grows up in a rich area, they're really unlikely to get malaria, so this efficient way to keep people from getting malaria doesn't apply.
Why wouldn't having children in areas without malaria be just slightly more efficient than distributing malaria nets in areas with malaria, ceteris paribus?
Huh? The idea is distributing five hundred $5 malaria nets averts the death of one person who would otherwise live 50 quality-adjusted years (on average) so $50 per QALY. By contrast, you deciding to have children in an area without malaria costs $100k-$500k for maybe 75 quality-adjusted years or around $3k per QALY. Or are you saying something else?
(This is not "don't have kids" this is "having kids is not a particularly efficient way to bring about more quality adjusted life years".)
It costs the parents $100k to $500k, but the child living 75 QALY produces an economic surplus including, lets say typically, another child living 75 QALY who produces another child living 75 QALY etc etc. Whereas the subsidized malaria net children do not appear to produce sufficient economic surplus to purchase a $5 malaria net, so are they producing enough economic surplus to produce children with 50 QALY, who are then likely to produce an economic surplus?
My point was if you are going to have people forego having children, it would make sense to forego having children where people can't afford to keep their children alive. Environments where people can afford to spend 100k to 500k to have children who can then afford to spend 100k to 500k to have children etc etc seem like precisely where you would WANT to have children.
I think subsidizing children who will never produce an economic surplus over children who will produce gigantic (by comparison) economic surpluses is a foolish proposition.
" if you are going to have people forego having children, it would make sense to forego having children where people can't afford to keep their children alive"
But you don't seem to be talking about foregoing having children, but about letting more children die by not having mosquito netting. Ignoring the morality of that for a moment, I think it's been shown that when a people has to worry less about children surviving to adulthood, they have fewer children even beyond the rate of compensation for the deaths, and population growth slows. Though I don't have such statistics at my fingertips and maybe my impressionistic memory of this is unreliable, don't be too hard on me unless you can produce statistics to the contrary -- i.e. that higher child mortality rates lead to a decline in population.
Besides which, giving people $5 mosquito nets is something one can actually do, while "having" people "forego having children" is meaningless verbiage unless you mean to take over the world, and trying to do that has always had a shitload of unforeseen consequences.
Sure, saving other culture's children is a luxury consumer good, and a nice one at that. I am in favor of a program which would divert some of our entertainment dollars towards seeing if we can pull the poor parts of Africa out of its animalistic black hole.
The original discussion suggested diverting resources from having children locally so that mosquito nets could be provided to existing children elsewhere. That is what I was arguing against, somewhat elliptically I'll admit. Some of what I left unstated is that I think it is foolish for a culture to not sustain itself. For us to provide mosquito nets to others may be sensible for a variety of reasons. But for us to provide mosquito nets to others at the expense of our own pre-eminence is long run suicide.
Cultures compete like organisms do, and in some sense as mindlessly. The cultures that survive will dominate all future discussions. If "we" stop having children so we can toss mosquito nets over the transom to other loser cultures, we will not be meaningful participants in the future of humanity, and given the mosquito net recipients failure to even be able to afford mosquito nets for themselves, neither will they. That makes it a loser proposition in my opinion which makes it stupid in my opinion.
ITYM “Is it immoral to have children in the US?” Having children is cheaper in other parts of the world.
Should we be telling effective altruists "stop living in the Bay Area because it is cheaper to live in other parts of the world?
Well, if by living in the Bay Area they manage to earn so much more than even after the higher expenses they can donate more...
I think it's quite clear (even without calculating) that having children is less moral than donating the equivalent number of funds to charity under the average Lesswrong-human morality.
However, if we want to use the word "immoral" and keep its traditional connotations intact, we have to show that having children is less moral than not having children and taking the money you would have spent out of circulation. (And that would be a problem we could realistically be uncertain about)
This argument against having children is framed within a flawed economic and social system of belief and behavior, and suffers under the basic assumption that there is actually a famine, one whereby donating money to charity will provide a relief of and has moral value, and therefore falsely concludes that choosing to procreate over donating to famine relief charities during this perceived famine ( what i refer to as the famine problem) is bad for humanity.
In reality, the famine problem is predominantly caused by one moral problem split in two and will persist as long as our relief efforts are focused on the more indirect causes and therefore on more uncertain solutions :
ONE MORAL PROBLEM SPLIT IN TWO :
A LACK OF :
1/ moral education (thought/values/beliefs)
2/ moral behavior (resource sharing habits - intent/action/effects)
MY REASONS:
1/ It takes basic resources (not necessarily money) to raise a child ( Imagine the wide variety of people that are raised all around the world - from the isolated jungles to the congested cities) (i am not aware of the world being in any shortage of resources)
2/ Scarcity and greed are only mindsets and psychological states (beliefs) , which the existence of the famine problem depends on , therefore mindset substitution ( thought/values/beliefs) through proper education, and developing resource sharing habits (intent/action/effects) through moral behavior is the only true moral relief of the perceived scarcity and by extension the famine problem
3/ Conceiving and raising children properly (i.e. with moral eduction and behavior ) is a necessity condition for the continuous existence of a moral humanity and by that measure is a virtue . Its virtuous nature does not depend on a practitioners decision to chose it over addressing the the famine problem ( Though In the case of the actual argument against children and for famine relief donations, i don't believe either of these two (2) choices/actions are moral in and of itself as i think action or choice is only one subcomponent to assessing the moral aspect of human behavior (intent,action,effect) , and i can imagine many situations when the act of conceiving and raising a child, or making donation to a famine relief charity can be considered immoral - On reflection of these situations, the following proverbs came to mind - all that glitters is not gold ; don't judge a book by its cover)
4/ In Conceiving and raising children you have more and direct influence over the moral effect or outcome of your behavior than you would have when making charitable donations for famine relief. There is more moral value uncertainty (many more variable at play) with the charity option due to the fact that one has less and indirect influence over second and third order moral effects in the causal chain of the expected moral goal (e.g. whether the charity will distribute fairly, whether the real cause of the famine problem (i.e a lack of moral education and behavior) will get worst or better regardless of charity donations , whether the beneficiaries are or will be morally abiding citizens, etc) ( On Reflection of the moral value certainty of both options, i imagine pouring water into a cup with holes at the bottom, where the donate option has many more holes that the procreate option)
NB: I also believe there are some condition under which procreation and raising a child can be immoral: 1/ Done by people with immoral beliefs and behaviors (the kid and society will suffer) 2/ Done by people with high genetic and biological predispositions to giving birth to infirm offspring (the kid and society will suffer)
But even under these conditions, the immoral attribute or value is causally independent of a practitioner's decision to choose it over addressing the famine problem through charitable donations.