Scott Adams talked a bit about this on Periscope. Essentially, if you believe the world is truly about to be brought to its knees with climate change, is it immoral to have children?
I went to check this out and he spends around 20 seconds to misquote AOC on the issue, adding nothing, then goes on to talk about how he wants more transparency in government climate science, and he asserts without evidence that president Trump is genuinely concerned that he has the issue wrong. I’m not going to derail this conversation except to say he basically says nothing of substance on the matter .
1. The world will become a place of suffering. The assumption here is either that childhood is a terrible experience, or that suicide is immoral. Your children can decide for themselves if they don't think it's worth being alive in the future
2. Overpopulation is the cause of this doomsday. In that case, we're asserting that having children today means less children will be born in the future. This implies we need to reduce birthrates to more efficiently invest the planet. Unfortunately this line of thought can quickly devolve into eugenics. There are better ways to stabilize population. Relevant: Does saving kids’ lives lead to overpopulation? https://www.gatesnotes.com/2018-Annual-Letter?WT.mc_id=02_13...
I'm not so sure that it does. I would say the expected cost of climate change to the lives of children born today is still far far less then the expected cost in the past due to disease, war, famine (etc).
So the poster above is noting that if people were, or we would have, been okay with having kids in the past, then we still should today.
>> I would say the expected cost of climate change to the lives of children born today is still far far less then the expected cost in the past due to disease, war, famine (etc).
This is exactly why it misses the point. Having kids is a significant contributor to carbon emissions, and therefore climate change.
At first I was afraid, i was petrified, kept thinking I could never live without stable climate by my side
But then I spent so many nights thinking how my lifestyle did no wrong, and I grew strong, and I learned how to get along. And so they're back, from outer space -I just walked in to find them here with that nihilistic look upon their face. I should have avoided that foolish thread, I should have made those defeatists leave their key, if I'd known for just one second they'd be back from the eighties to bother me
Go on now, go, walk out the door
Just turn around now
'Cause you're not welcome anymore
Weren't you the one who tried to hedonistically accept the long goodbye
Do you think I'd crumble
Did you think I'd lay down and die?
Oh no, not I, I will survive
Oh, as long as I know how to love, I know I'll stay alive
I've got all my life to live
And I've got all my love to give and I'll survive
I will survive, hey, hey
> Yes, the question is in the context of climate change, not other variables.
I don't think you can just separate out climate change from everything else that's going on in the world—and even if you could, the result would be meaningless.
> 50 years ago was the golden age to be born in the West imo.
I disagree. The western world was more violent, racist, and less tolerant of women/minorities 50 years ago. Average life expectancy was also ~10 years lower. None of these are 'perfect' today, but they are much better overall than they were during your 'golden age'.
Assuming it was ok to have kids before it is still ok now. There may be some world where the chance your offspring will be subjected to suffering is high that it may not be the best idea.
Considering the primary purpose of life is to reproduce and continue existing I'd suggest that even in a world of guaranteed suffering that it is our obligation to continue our existence.
Natural selection means that primarily those who think having kids is ok will propagate their genetic material. So in the long run, the answer is necessarily yes.
In the end, the only people remaining would still be those who thought it was ok to reproduce. Unless a world-wide authoritarian government implemented strict population control and decided who would reproduce or not. Scary thought.
It's pretty hard to predict exactly what's going to happen to society in the face of climate change. We know 100% that society will collapse if we stop having kids.
if we 100% stop having kids, sure. but how about slowly reducing to a total world steady state population of 1 billion. Will that necessarily lead to collapse? maybe with that many people a shift to fossil fuels would t matter so much. maybe we could all have good sized homes and yachts.
I’ve always believed that if you’re a smart, educated, motivated person (if your reading this than I’m assuming you are one) that probably the best thing you can do for the world is to have kids. Those kids will likely contribute to the world in all sorts of ways that we can’t imagine.
Obviously genetics and nurture play a massive role in a person's upbringing and largely determine what kind of person they will be. What is the issue here exactly?
Exactly? Education happens in school, college, friends, community and, partially, at home.
The concept that "my kids" are better than other people kids because they are like me is extremely silly on many levels. They might not share your ideals and even if they do, it promotes a single line of thinking.
I think so. There isn't anything controversial being said here.
Children given education, good home lives, and goals are more likely to succeed than those without access to those opportunities. It isn't fair, but that doesn't mean we can't look for other ways to improve outcomes across the board.
> the best thing you can do for the world is to have kids
...yet what is the best thing for the kids? That's a harder thing to know - you can't really compare "not existing" with "living in a world that has a ton of issues". You can debate how bad the issues will be, but that really dodges the inability to make that comparison.
Most people would rather exist than not exist, and although it can sometimes seem like it, not everyone in the entire world is severely clinically depressed. Parents make decisions for their children all the time, and existence is one the the safest bets.
Do you have the maximum number of children biologically possible? If not ( and I assume you haven't ), then you've made choices that have prevented others from existing. Assuming you are okay with that ( and I assume you are ) then the decisions involved are not a simple as you portray.
>Do you have the maximum number of children biologically possible?
You can't reason about ethics from the standpoint that whatever you are doing right now is known to be ethical. If you did that, you'd just be constructing post-facto justifications for decisions you already made. There are plenty of things I should be doing from a utilitarian standpoint that I don't do (I'm not saving the maximum number of African children, for example).
> You can't reason about ethics from the standpoint that whatever you are doing right now is known to be ethical.
An excellent point...but we DO reason about ethics. We can draw parallels from our decisions in other areas to see if we are being consistent. Even if we can't achieve objectivity we can try for it and thus get closer.
And from this I find I feel bad about the good to other living creatures I COULD be doing and am not....but that I don't feel sorrow for the lack of of sorrow and joy from creatures that are merely potential.
Perhaps you feel differently. Others certainly do. I just want to point out that it's something worthy of thinking about rather than tossing out a facile "existence is always better".
> ...yet what is the best thing for the kids? That's a harder thing to know - you can't really compare "not existing" with "living in a world that has a ton of issues".
LOL! I certainly can 'compare "not existing" with "living in a world that has a ton of issues"'.
In the "don't exist" case, there is no possibility of anything good happening.
In the "exist" case, there is a possibility of something good happening.
Easy choice, and that's entirely outside my belief that the human race should continue, thrive, and expand across the stars. Climate change is likely not as severe as the alarmists portray, and is very likely to be solved by market forces. The future is bright!
See, this FEELS like a simple choice - but think of the implications of what you're saying.
If existing is flat out always better than not - and I want to note this is NOT about suicide (ending existence) but about creating the existence in the first place) - then you're saying the moral thing is to have as many children as possible. For everyone.
Taken to a hyperbolic extreme, this is clearly ridiculous. But this isn't a strawman argument - the point is not to say "I'm right", but to find what we're really valuing. If we can all agree that drowning the world in babies that live short lives of misery is laughably ridiculous, then where is the serious argument? Finding a happy medium where we should have as many people as we can sustainably?
Is creating distinct human existences REALLY something of inherent value? Are those of us choosing to be childless for whatever reason immoral?
I'm not sure you realize that the values that gets in one's mind and govern one's decision towards procreation is one form of current natural selection. It's funny to see some of the world's best and most promising getting bogged down by or getting utterly lost in some "smart people problem" instead of using their capacity to come ahead in the game of life.
> using their capacity to come ahead in the game of life
I, as an independent conscious entity, don't get a benefit from "coming ahead at the game of life".
If someone has a child that they love and cherish, that's great. I'd rather them have a child for that reason over having one because it represents the statistical viability of their collective genetic sequences.
I don't think the examined life is something to mock and put down...nor must it result in self-sterilization.
I get your argument, but in terms of environmental impact on climate change, those ‘smart, educated, and motivated’ kids will likely have a greater negative impact on climate change than less educated kids.
It is the successful people who harm the environment the most.
I still don’t believe that we should stop having kids, but let’s not pretend that OUR kids won’t harm the environment.
Probably the best result would be a soft leveling off rather than abrupt stoppage in reproduction anywhere.
Interestingly, some historians claim the Black Plague in Britain/England caused a disruption which later on cascaded in such way to allow the the transition from feudalism to more capital intensive economics (same wealth distributed among fewer heirs).
Step 1. Move outside the US
Step 2. Watch your kids's CO2 emissions get divided by 3 by pure magic.
The lifestyle the US society pushes on you and your children pushes you to have much higher CO2 emissions than really useful (airplanes to go everywhere, higher salaries and higher consumption, ...).
The "adopt" kids usually are the kids of alcoholic parents, who gave them a subtle but unrepairable "drink" too much. You will not be informed about that by government- and you will go through hell trying to repair what alcohol made unrepairable.
Summary of the story: Government knowingly passed retarded children - who destroyed several marriages and familys- simply because that sort of damage is not fixable with love and understanding. You can only tolerate it and adapt your lifestyle to the new member of the family.
Children is the worst thing you can do for the climate and for the planet in general. Utopian hope that future generations will magically save the world is naive and plainly misleading.
Reproduction is <chaos>, considering that we are actively altering/murdering natural selection process among humans, there’s no way "more humans" is a solution.
Some optimists have theorized that population growth will stabilize at 9B, but in no way that can be true. Gene is selfish, after all.
Furthermore, from my perspective I think that it is one's duty to have as many children as they think they can have within as long they it does not negatively effect the raising of their other children to a large degree, and it does not put one below the poverty line.
Raising children who are moral/ upright, and positively add to the economy adds to the world by an exponential factor.
My ancestors thought it was okay to have kids during times in which many scholars where certain the apocalypse was due in the next 25 years, during periods in which the plague killed more than half of the population, during the 30 years war and in a time when there was a realistic chance of nuclear annihilation in the next 10 years.
"The Population Bomb" was a pretty fashionable scientific prediction back in the 1960s which had a significant following in the academic and policymaker circles at the time.
It extrapolated from data about population growth, farmland capacity, etc, to reach the irrefutable conclusion that there is going to be mass starvation and famine in the 1970s. It led to calls for China-style population controls, to articles about whether it's ethical to have children, etc.
What happened instead is that population growth has slowed down quite a bit without government intervention, and that we've gotten a lot more efficient at growing food.
This does not prove anything when it comes to climate change, but is an interesting anecdote.
Malthus lived in the 1700s. The 1970s neo-malthusianism (Limits to Growth, Club of Rome etc) didn't predict apocalypse in 25, rather "Given business as usual, i.e., no changes to historical growth trends, the limits to growth on earth would become evident by 2072" [1]. But they did indeed think population growth was a major problem and they were right of course.
The neomalthusian ideas didn't you should have no kids, but rather that you should not have a lot of kids.
Imagine you were somehow able to choose:
1. Either never exist at all, or
2. Exist as a human in the world of 50 years from now
To me, the clear choice is #2. If the moral question is whether human life is worth it to continue in the future, it's obviously worth it.
If the moral question is whether our own domination of the planet harms too many wildlife animals, and is therefore immoral, that feels like a more reasonable tradeoff. However it feels odd to me to that the same people advocating stopping having children continue to eat meat.
I will advocate for continued human growth regardless. I feel like there are few "long, slow" problems we cannot overcome.
It's not about whether human life is still worth it, it's about whether we should have fewer children to lighten the cost.
There are plenty of people who are vegetarian who feel this way too. It isn't just meat eaters. Having a child is far more impactful than eating meat or driving electric cars.
> If the moral question is whether our own domination of the planet harms too many wildlife animals, and is therefore immoral, that feels like a more reasonable tradeoff.
We have already killed over 80% of all wild mammals and half of all plants on this planet. And brought hundreds of species to extinction (that we know of .. and an unknown number of those we don't know of).
137 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] thread1. The world will become a place of suffering. The assumption here is either that childhood is a terrible experience, or that suicide is immoral. Your children can decide for themselves if they don't think it's worth being alive in the future
2. Overpopulation is the cause of this doomsday. In that case, we're asserting that having children today means less children will be born in the future. This implies we need to reduce birthrates to more efficiently invest the planet. Unfortunately this line of thought can quickly devolve into eugenics. There are better ways to stabilize population. Relevant: Does saving kids’ lives lead to overpopulation? https://www.gatesnotes.com/2018-Annual-Letter?WT.mc_id=02_13...
So the poster above is noting that if people were, or we would have, been okay with having kids in the past, then we still should today.
"Is it still OK _for the planet_ to have kids...", not "Is it still OK _for the kids_ to have kids..."
EDIT: actually, I'm not sure which one of those the representative was getting at.
That's a strange question. The planet doesn't have feelings, so it doesn't really care whether or not we have kids.
Other living organisms on the planet may care. But the rock we're on surely doesn't.
This is exactly why it misses the point. Having kids is a significant contributor to carbon emissions, and therefore climate change.
I don't think you can just separate out climate change from everything else that's going on in the world—and even if you could, the result would be meaningless.
50 years ago was the golden age to be born in the West imo.
[0]https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count-zero
I disagree. The western world was more violent, racist, and less tolerant of women/minorities 50 years ago. Average life expectancy was also ~10 years lower. None of these are 'perfect' today, but they are much better overall than they were during your 'golden age'.
Results in the last thirty years don't really back that up.
Considering the primary purpose of life is to reproduce and continue existing I'd suggest that even in a world of guaranteed suffering that it is our obligation to continue our existence.
Raising kids and teaching them well is one of the best hopes humanity has.
island mamnal populations can take wild periodic swings of explosion and collapse. not necessarily the ideal way of going about it.
in any case we shouldn't confusebindividual fitness with group level fitness
Only some countries should stop reproducing?
Who should stop reproducing?
Do we follow the Kyoto protocol and set a date back in time as the target goal? What can we afford, the year 2000, 1980, 1887?
This sound like it would be the perfect type of issue that could be addressed via a 5 year plan.
Yes.
It is absolutely not ok to mindlessly have children.
Economics need to change, "more" is actually "less" and we will start to see a more extreme shift in the next 5 years.
The concept that "my kids" are better than other people kids because they are like me is extremely silly on many levels. They might not share your ideals and even if they do, it promotes a single line of thinking.
- That happens to every country - One in three top US professors educated overseas https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/one-in-three-top-u... - Most of their classmates will be foreign students too https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...
Both your sources are for the US only. How did you get to 'every country'?
Children given education, good home lives, and goals are more likely to succeed than those without access to those opportunities. It isn't fair, but that doesn't mean we can't look for other ways to improve outcomes across the board.
...yet what is the best thing for the kids? That's a harder thing to know - you can't really compare "not existing" with "living in a world that has a ton of issues". You can debate how bad the issues will be, but that really dodges the inability to make that comparison.
You can't reason about ethics from the standpoint that whatever you are doing right now is known to be ethical. If you did that, you'd just be constructing post-facto justifications for decisions you already made. There are plenty of things I should be doing from a utilitarian standpoint that I don't do (I'm not saving the maximum number of African children, for example).
An excellent point...but we DO reason about ethics. We can draw parallels from our decisions in other areas to see if we are being consistent. Even if we can't achieve objectivity we can try for it and thus get closer.
And from this I find I feel bad about the good to other living creatures I COULD be doing and am not....but that I don't feel sorrow for the lack of of sorrow and joy from creatures that are merely potential.
Perhaps you feel differently. Others certainly do. I just want to point out that it's something worthy of thinking about rather than tossing out a facile "existence is always better".
LOL! I certainly can 'compare "not existing" with "living in a world that has a ton of issues"'.
In the "don't exist" case, there is no possibility of anything good happening.
In the "exist" case, there is a possibility of something good happening.
Easy choice, and that's entirely outside my belief that the human race should continue, thrive, and expand across the stars. Climate change is likely not as severe as the alarmists portray, and is very likely to be solved by market forces. The future is bright!
If existing is flat out always better than not - and I want to note this is NOT about suicide (ending existence) but about creating the existence in the first place) - then you're saying the moral thing is to have as many children as possible. For everyone.
Taken to a hyperbolic extreme, this is clearly ridiculous. But this isn't a strawman argument - the point is not to say "I'm right", but to find what we're really valuing. If we can all agree that drowning the world in babies that live short lives of misery is laughably ridiculous, then where is the serious argument? Finding a happy medium where we should have as many people as we can sustainably?
Is creating distinct human existences REALLY something of inherent value? Are those of us choosing to be childless for whatever reason immoral?
I, as an independent conscious entity, don't get a benefit from "coming ahead at the game of life".
If someone has a child that they love and cherish, that's great. I'd rather them have a child for that reason over having one because it represents the statistical viability of their collective genetic sequences.
I don't think the examined life is something to mock and put down...nor must it result in self-sterilization.
It is the successful people who harm the environment the most.
I still don’t believe that we should stop having kids, but let’s not pretend that OUR kids won’t harm the environment.
The lifestyle the US society pushes on you and your children pushes you to have much higher CO2 emissions than really useful (airplanes to go everywhere, higher salaries and higher consumption, ...).
Would advise that only if government guarantees no https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alcohol_spectrum_disorde...
Summary of the story: Government knowingly passed retarded children - who destroyed several marriages and familys- simply because that sort of damage is not fixable with love and understanding. You can only tolerate it and adapt your lifestyle to the new member of the family.
Children is the worst thing you can do for the climate and for the planet in general. Utopian hope that future generations will magically save the world is naive and plainly misleading. Reproduction is <chaos>, considering that we are actively altering/murdering natural selection process among humans, there’s no way "more humans" is a solution.
Some optimists have theorized that population growth will stabilize at 9B, but in no way that can be true. Gene is selfish, after all.
Raising children who are moral/ upright, and positively add to the economy adds to the world by an exponential factor.
Hans Rosling actually talked about this, that a way of stopping over population is by investing more in education in poorer areas.
Our planet is just one of many... Technology is advancing at an incredible rate. Who knows where we will be in 50 years.
I am glad they did.
Let's not draw false parallels.
It extrapolated from data about population growth, farmland capacity, etc, to reach the irrefutable conclusion that there is going to be mass starvation and famine in the 1970s. It led to calls for China-style population controls, to articles about whether it's ethical to have children, etc.
What happened instead is that population growth has slowed down quite a bit without government intervention, and that we've gotten a lot more efficient at growing food.
This does not prove anything when it comes to climate change, but is an interesting anecdote.
So: yes. Many times. In fact it would be accurate to say that a portion of the population has believed this, now for hundreds of years.
The neomalthusian ideas didn't you should have no kids, but rather that you should not have a lot of kids.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth#Conclusio...
To me, the clear choice is #2. If the moral question is whether human life is worth it to continue in the future, it's obviously worth it.
If the moral question is whether our own domination of the planet harms too many wildlife animals, and is therefore immoral, that feels like a more reasonable tradeoff. However it feels odd to me to that the same people advocating stopping having children continue to eat meat.
I will advocate for continued human growth regardless. I feel like there are few "long, slow" problems we cannot overcome.
There are plenty of people who are vegetarian who feel this way too. It isn't just meat eaters. Having a child is far more impactful than eating meat or driving electric cars.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-...
Most of the West has had sub-replacement-level fertility for several decades, so we already have fewer children.
We have already killed over 80% of all wild mammals and half of all plants on this planet. And brought hundreds of species to extinction (that we know of .. and an unknown number of those we don't know of).
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-ra...