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fundamental_th comments on Is it immoral to have children? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (317)
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.
I'm parsing "morals" and "values" as equivalent terms (and I think you are too), so this statement doesn't convey me any information about your definition of "moral" and "value". I share your reading of "ethical" as more behaviorally focused.
I don't perceive the point at which we disagree or diverge. Can you elaborate on what "values" mean to you and what distinguishes them from other preferences?
Well, the most obvious divergence is that for you morality is "not about what you would do. It's about what how you wish people would act...". For me morality is mostly about what I would do or would not do.
As to differences between values and other preferences, hmm... Let's see:
For me, "acting morally" is acting in such a way which is consistent with how you would have others behave (after removing the pathological "I wish others would give me cash" cases). It applies to myself and others
If for you, morality is only about what you would do, then you have no bases to judge the morality of others. This causes your definition of morality to diverge from the common one. Most people treat morality as something by which all people can be judged. You've got an unusual definition.
By your description, your "values" are analogous to my "terminal preferences". The difference is that I have terminal preferences unrelated to morality (my learning, my fun, my loved one's happiness, etc) as well as terminal preferences related to morality (human learning, human comfort, etc with extension to some non-human entities), whereas all your values seem to class as moral. In my terms, you define yourself as one whose terminal preferences are all moral - a person who prefers to be maximally good by their own standards.
Unless you wish to be a perfectly moral person, with every action crafted to bring about good and none towards personal gain, either your values cannot be equivalent to morality, or your definition of morality includes selfish behavior.
(If you really do strive towards perfect morality, and if your morality is similar enough to mine, then that's admirable. That implies that you are a force for an incredible amount of good.)
I see major problems with the Golden Rule (mostly stemming from the fact that people are different) but that's a separate discussion.
Mostly correct. I can still judge the internal consistency of their morals as well as the match (or lack thereof) between what they say and what they do.
Yep. That's fine.
Most people also treat morality as a set of rules sent from above. And, of course, I can and do judge people on the basis of my own morals. I just accept that they can and do have morals different from mine.
Yes, that's close enough.
Yes, but remember that my understanding of morality is different from yours.
Well, of course, but I think I understand that sentence a bit differently from you. The problem is in the word "good" which I treat as pretty meaningless unconditionally and which has meaning only conditional on some specific morality which defines what is good and what is evil. Different moralities define good and evil differently. So technically speaking this sentence is correct, but in practice people with different morals will not perceive me as "preferring to be maximally good".
Why, yes, it does. I am not an altruist.
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".
While there are several flavors of utilitarianism, they all involve some definition of utility which is computed per individual and then aggregated over the whole society. When making choices the moral option is the one that gives the highest aggregate utility. The most common variants for utility are "happiness" and "preference satisfaction" while the most common methods of aggregation are summing and averaging. Wikipedia may be helpful.
Note that Utilitarianism isn't required for the argument in the post. You just need to think that others matter and do the multiplication.
It is widely used in public health, but I don't see why we should have a different morality at large scale than small.
So how do you go about determining whether something is moral?
Oh...that's not what I meant, but I can see why you thought that. My fault for phrasing it that way. Bad communication on my part.
I initially phrased it as "average Human morality", but then I realized that I lacked confidence in the resulting statement. There are humans who see the maintenance of the reproductive family unit as an intrinsic good, and there might be a sufficient number of such people to make the average human morality more reproductively-centered
I'll edit the parent comment. Would WEIRD+liberal suffice to capture what I mean?
A post-edit comment: "liberal morality" is not utilitarianism. Classic liberalism is concerned with individual rights and liberties and not with self-sacrifice to improve the lot others. I don't believe that having children instead of donating to a charity is "less moral" under liberal morality.
In fact, doing good works instead of having children sounds like straightforward traditional Christian morality: enter the monastery and do as much good as you can.
That's because Christianity as practiced is a religion of WEIRD-liberal people, as is Buddhism, Islam, post-classical Hinduism etc. The environments that produced those religions were relatively affluent and cosmopolitan.
For an example of non WEIRD-liberal thinking, read the Old Testament, or Norse texts, or the Rig Veda...all produced in harsh, scarce environments.
I know that neither Liberal nor WEIRD isn't the right word, but what is? I'm talking about people who care less about in-out group boundaries, who care less about loyalty, less about tradition, less about retributive justice, and more about avoiding pain, increasing pleasure, keeping things fair, and preventing coercion.
I'm talking about the sorts of values which tend to increase with plentiful resources and education. Such values are over-represented on Lesswrong, and over-represented within the social bubble that Lesswronger's tend to inhabit.
I would estimate that more than 90% of human population would disagree with the statement "It is more moral to give money to an effective charity than to have children".
Are you sampling from general humanity or from the LW crowd? They are very very different.
Let's just say for now that my estimate is for everyone with sufficient English to understand that poll. Americans would be an acceptable sample population.
Among Lesswrong, I suspect only 1%-40%|95%CI would disagree with the statement
However, for my estimate it is required that the questions are posed separately (so that a given respondent only sees one of the two questions, and so must make a judgement relative to absolute scale rather than a side-by-side comparison. Asking questions one at a time and counterbalancing would achieve this.)
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.
That's kind of the whole point of Rachels' paper.
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 don't know that this is the place or format to come to a conclusion, but I would argue your views as expressed are in close correlation with Rand's Objectivism. Broad strokes, limited sample. But correlation.
Is it possible that people must refrain from acting in remarkable selfish ways, at least in regard to physical resources, in order to bring about an improvement in net global conditions (poverty rate, etc.)? Is it possible that "greed (or selfsihness) is good" in terms of leading to financial growth, technological progress, etc...but it also leads to an eventual extreme inequality in wealth?
Can poverty be defined as (one aspect of) an extreme inequality in resources? If no, why not?
Didn't you just say you didn't want people to stop behaving selfishly?
No.
Let's say there was a day, tens of thousands of years ago, when the wealthiest human alive owned nothing more than a sharp stick and a basket full of raw fish. That was still a condition of poverty, despite the lack of any more-successful rivals.
Poverty is not a comparative thing, for all that the formally recognized thresholds have been adjusted as conditions change. It is the condition of scarcity so severe as to perversely inhibit using any remaining resources at all efficiently. Poverty is jamming the round peg into the square hole because there's ice-cold water coming through that hole, you need to block the flow somehow, at least a little bit, it's up to your knees already. You don't have a square peg. The last time you had a square peg, using it up was the only adequately expedient way to deal with some other goddamn ridiculous deathtrap mechanism.
Good point. So it is possible for 100% of the world to live in poverty.
However, the earth bears sufficient resource for this to not be the case. In fact, it bears sufficient resource so that no one need be impoverished.
Inequality in wealth at extreme levels is often the product of systemic issues -- the rules allow for, and in some cases even encourage, oppression.
In this case, it might be worthwhile to conceive of the poverty/wealth spectrum as being a separate dimension from the oppression/power spectrum.
Wealth can be positive-sum, but social power isn't. It might be interesting to see how they correlate - it seems that a large component of the debate between various political ideologies, for example, is over what effect a given level of social power disparity has on the amount that wealth is positive-sum vs. zero-sum. (Ugh, that's an ugly sentence.)
Hm. I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around this. Please elaborate, if you will?
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.
Because having children is just so incredibly expensive!