= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
jkaufman comments on Is it immoral to have children? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (317)
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.)