= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ShardPhoenix comments on Happiness and 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 (29)
Personally, I'm not exactly thrilled with life, so I don't necessarily want to replicate that anyway. But at the same time it's not like I want humanity to die out. So ethically it seems complex.
Your attitude is constantly being bread out of the species, on the margin. People who want children, and to a lesser extent people who want to make children, define the future of the species. Anybody who wants to can opt out without either fear of the species disappearing, but also without the ability to cause the species to disappear by opting out .
I was thinking more about principles (ie, what would I want people to do) rather than what is actually likely to happen.
In my opinion, there are no principles that are not tied to outcomes. There is no point having a principle against doing X if it will never be the case that the people doing X are going to get a bad result.
Should there be a principle against homosexual sex because we don't want to run out of humans? I'd venture to say more bad than good arises from principled thinking like that. More utility is lost than is gained when principle is not tied to outcomes.
Humanity isn't going to die out anyway just because people with such an attitude decide to have no children, so I think you shouldn't worry about that.
It isn't, but Idiocracy while arguably not as bad as humanity dying out is still pretty bad.
If we devolve to the extent of no longer being able to cope with anything more complicated than chasing animals with sharp sticks, that would amount to humanity dying out.
It has been suggested that Homo floresiensis devolved from a bigger brained hominid -- the ultimate in idiocracy.
With 7 billion people on the planet, there are plenty of people smarter than you having children, so no worries.
I don't think idiocracy follows from people who think that life kind of sucks not having children. There seem to be plenty of intelligent people who don't think so.