When I was a child, my parents spoke to me frequently about the evils of racism. Some people, they said, judge others by the color of their skin, but we don’t do that, and you mustn’t either. And when you meet the people who make those judgments—and you will, they told me—you must never ever ever give them an ounce of credence because we’re right and they’re wrong. There were many discussions of this topic, but in my memory they all ended with the same refrain. We’re right and they’re wrong.
I’m not sure how old I was at the time, but I must have been very young because I already knew the refrain by heart when my father first told me about foreign languages. In other countries, people use different words than we do. We say “cat”, but in Spain they say “gato” and in Russia they say “koschka”.
Well, I could easily see where this was going. Before my father could finish his sentence, I jumped in to announce that yes, those people might use other words, but we’re right and they’re wrong—right, Daddy?. I’m not sure whether he recognized his own refrain, but he looked quite taken aback as he gently explained that, well, no, there is no right and wrong, and one word is as good as another as long as the people around you understand what you’re saying.
In that moment I decided that the world made absolutely no sense and there was no point in even trying to understand it. Yesterday we were right and everyone else was wrong. Today everyone’s equally right. Was there no pattern here?
Somehow I outgrew my disillusionment. Today I dare to hope the world does make sense, or at the very least that it’s worth trying to find some sense in the world. I believe that racism is evil, that foreign languages are benign, and that, the mental limitations of four-year-olds notwithstanding, it’s not too hard to find a moral framework that can reconcile that paradox. Other paradoxes seem much harder. Here’s one that I keep coming back to: How can it be okay to remain childless but not okay to have children and treat them badly—given that the children themselves would presumably prefer being treated badly to not being born at all? (I am assuming here, for the sake of argument, that if you couldn’t treat your children badly, you’d choose not to have them. Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone, but it does apply to some people. Those are the people I’m calling “you” in this question.)
I don’t know the answer to that question. I do persist in thinking about it. Feel free to address it in comments (or to share your own favorite moral paradox), though it’s not the focus of this post. Mostly I just felt like telling you this story.
Couldn’t there be an externality argument here? Parents do not incur all the costs or receive all the benefits from having children. I think children who are treated well are more likely to become productive members of society and children who are treated badly are more likely to become less than productive. This would mean that too many bad parents and too few good parents are having children.
Paul, when thinking about this sort of question you should try to put yourself in the Least Convenient Possible World. I have no idea whether the evidence suggests that bad parents have less productive children (controlling for genetic effects), but let’s assume for a moment that they don’t: that people who are treated badly as children grow up to be just as happy, healthy and productive as children who are not. Now everyone, the child included, is better off if you give birth and treat them badly than if you decide to use contraceptive, and yet we would still (presumably) feel no compunction about not spending our entire lives attempting to sire as many children as possible.
In other words, ask yourself if the externality argument is really the reason you don’t like Steve’s point. If someone produced a convincing study that said that badly treated children do turn out to be generally happy, healthy and productive, would you then say it was just as morally acceptable to have children and treat them badly as it is to have no children at all?
Reductio: Why are you blogging instead of having more kids?
Paul
>Couldn’t there be an externality argument here?
I was going to mention the same thing.
“…given that the children themselves would presumably prefer being treated badly to not being born at all?”
I think this premise, often used in various arguments for childbearing or against abortion, is fundamentally meaningless. Like the silly assumptions in economic models we can see what purpose it’s intended to serve, but like those assumptions, if it’s false, the resulting model does not really describe the world we live in. For an economic model that may be OK since what we’re after is usually predictive power, but for a moral model it’s not OK. An alternate universe where beings who don’t exist can have preferences which we can know and give weight to might be interesting as a thought experiment, but has no relevance to this our actual universe.
I think Steven’s point is the focus on the actual child.
ie would you rather be born and treated badly by your parents, or not be born at all? Obviously the degree of “badly” matters here but I’m fairly sure that a significant proportion of the population that have been treated badly by their folks (probably some that have been mentally, physically and even sexually abused) don’t wish that they were never born. There is no doubt that they could have had a and deserve a far better childhood but in the balance, the joys of life and living have kept them from commiting suicide (and I know that some do take their lives or attempt to or contemplate it).
That’s not to excuse horrible or even bad parenting by any measure, it just makes the point that given a choice, some people would choose life. Yet the childless are seen as far more benevolent than those that smack their kids around.
As a natural-rights libertarian, I’d reply that by not having a child you aggress against no-one, because the child you don’t have doesn’t exist, so it’s moral (it may not be advisable; but that’s a different issue).
When you abuse a child that you do have, you are aggressing against someone, so it’s immoral (it may however be advisable; but that’s a different issue).
It depends on what you’re judging for morality: the outcomes or the process. I distinguish the terms “good” and “moral” on this basis; moral acts can have bad consequences, and immoral acts can have good consequences.
Why do you say it’s a paradox, Steven? If your moral standard is utilitarianism, then I don’t see any paradox — it is “okay” as long as the child’s utility is net positive. I guess your intuition that it’s really not okay is disagreeing with the logic that says it is?
Without getting into details, my moral standard says that God is responsible for creation and destruction, and I am responsible for caring for what he’s created and entrusted to me. I don’t know why God didn’t create more children (and better conditions for them) — maybe Leibniz’ idea of the best of all possible worlds?
Does it matter that it’s impossible for anybody to decide (prefer) to not have been born ex post? I think I’m with Noah on this one.
I’ve never considered that a moral dilemma. But each to his own. My peculiar moral dilemma is “what species of life are not okay to eat?” Many draw the line at our own–all others are fair game. But one could ask why another human is off limits, but not a chimpanzee. Others draw the line between animals and non-animals. If asked they are asked why it is okay to eat non-animals, there is a simple utilitarian answer.
I draw my own line, and the okay species includes some animals, even mammals, but it seems arbitrary, and I feel a sense of moral hypocrisy about it.
If everyone becomes vegetarian (as many vegetarians advocate), no one will eat pigs, no farmer will raise pigs, and pigs will go extinct. Wouldn’t pigs (as a species) prefer to be raised and eaten than not exist at all?
This argument is reminiscent of some that appear in Derek Parfit’s Reason & Persons. It also brings to mind an argument Nozick made in Philosophical Explanations in arguing for vegetarianism.
But mostly it suggests an argument for torture. Torture is bad, but surely not as bad as actually killing the prisoner you hold. If you have a right to kill opponents in war rather than take them prisoner, surely then you’re allowed to torture them.
Perhaps the following principle simply isn’t true: “If you can do X to A, and Y is less than X, you can do Y to A.” Perhaps there are “side-constraints” that prohibit Y yet not X, even though on utilitarian grounds Y is less bad than X.
I didn’t know that the childless were not looked down upon. I generally don’t like to prejudge them – for all I know they have spent lots of time and money trying to have children but just can’t. Those who choose not to have children, however, I’ve always seen as selfish.
When, as a kid, my family would visit other families, I was happy. When we would visit childless couples, I was bored. Their motorcycles and fancy furniture gave me no positive externalities.
“Those who choose not to have children, however, I’ve always seen as selfish.”
Implying that people have children for unselfish reasons?
@RL: In war you may not kill people who have surrendered, and you (obviously) can’t torture them unless they do. There is no contradiction there: Lawyers are applied moral philosphers after all, so one should not be surprised that the people who wrote these rules would have thought of the obvious.
The main attraction to intellectuals of consequentialist systems of ethics, is, I think, that they are easy to reason about. They are not easy to apply however, since in practice it is impossible to predict the consequences of one’s actions. It is for that reason that deontological ethics is the rule in practice.
If you insist on a utilitarian starting point, think of this as a cost-of-information problem, where the cost is effectively infinite. Heuristics are required, and that is what a deontological system is.
Deontological systems import concepts of consequenciality, where they are practical, through the idea of “duty of care”. Where you have the ability to look after people’s interests, and where they might reasonably expect that you will, you have a duty to do so. But most of the time, moral codes based on heuristic instincts of empathy and reciprocity that are so proven in practice that they are ingrained by evolution to the extent that a chimpanzee would recognise them.
Can this double as my answer to your question, in, I think, the Armchair Economist: Why should judges not be responsible if suspects granted bail commit crimes?
Why is it so puzzling that we value the preferences of people who exist over the hypothetical preferences of people who might’ve existed but don’t? Maybe you disagree with that frame, but surely you can at least imagine it and imagine why many people hold it.
I cannot imagine why anyone would put any positive weight on the well-being of people, or animals, that don’t exist, but in principle could have. There is a practical infinity of such potential beings. To put any weight on their well-being is like putting weight on the well-being of the dead.
Surely this is obvious, right? Children aren’t possessions or art projects, they’re people. Before you have a child, you’re a person with a certain right to control what happens to your body. After the child is born, that child has some of the same rights you do, including the right not to be mistreated.
I would prefer not being born at all to being born and treated badly.
Sierra: But—-usually, we think that the reason it’s good for people to have rights is that it’s *good* for them to have rights. In the case I’m imagining, if you give the child the right not to be mistreated, then the parents will decide not to have that child—-so the child has been made *worse* off, not better off, by being given this right.
I am more than a little sympathetic to your view that people have rights and rights should be respected. But it is, to me, at least a little disturbing that in this case, granting rights to the child is actually *bad* for the child—and yet it still seems pretty clear that we want to grant those rights. That’s what strikes me as paradoxical.
Lawrence: there’s a very close parallel between the arguments ‘pigs would prefer us to eat pork so they don’t become extinct’ and ‘children would prefer that we allow them to be abused so that they are able to be born in the first place’. Are there any other moral dilemmas that fit this same pattern?
I am strongly inclined to go with Sierra on this one. Dr. Landsburg, I’m not sure the “usually” in your comment is quite true, and I’m absolutely certain it’s not always true. People who talk about rights are quite often not consequentialists.
Some here are arguing that it’s as simple as stating that we just don’t have to value the welfare of those who don’t exist. Doesn’t the sort of reasoning imply the “social preferences” here aren’t complete and transitive? (It seems isomorphic to the problem of someone trying to maximize the utility of citizens, when immigration policy is endogenous.)
I don’t know that anyone here has said “we just don’t have to value the welfare of those who don’t exist.” I see nothing wrong with valuing the welfare of those who do not yet exist but WILL exist (future generations). But it is absurd, IMO, to value the well-being of those who might have existed (whatever that means) but didn’t.
Neil,
Fine, but that’s what I meant. Why does your rephrasing explain why, yes, social preferences are complete and transitive (aside from when births are entirely exogenous, which is truly absurd)?
As for “putting weight on the dead”, I think Robin Hanson had a good post on that. It’s pretty straightforward, so long as you accept (a) people care about what happens after they die, and (b) their expectations about what happens after they die affect what people do when they’re alive. (Actually, I think either one is probably sufficient.)
I am not sure why you think social preferences (whatever they are) need be complete and transitive. It is simply a matter of standing. I do not give hypothetical beings standing.
People who exist may certainly care, while they exist, about what happens after they die, and have the right to put into effect those living concerns with contracts available to them. But other than that, the “earth belongs in usufruct to the living”, as a very famous dead person once said.
Because unless preferences are complete and transitive, they can’t really “make sense” in the sort of way that, as Ben pointed out, is the main draw of consequentialist ethics. We’re basically starting with the assumption that the system that functionally defines what are good outcomes and what are bad ones is internally inconsistent or at least doesn’t really tell us the important stuff.
For instance, if you literally aren’t allowed to compare nonexistence with existence, then the answer to “is this person’s birth an externality” is “mu”. It’s neither true nor false, and cannot be answered. Among all the changes that happen when going from one scenario to the other, one big one (or at least one that seems very big) can’t really be talked about. And if you can’t talk about the relative magnitude or direction of this very big impact, why are we bothering with consequentialist ethics in the first place?
Neil,
Can you simultaneously agree with Jefferson there and also agree that we should honor the contracts entered into and social rules established by the dead? I understood him to be saying quite the opposite.
Yes, to the extent that the contracts of the living pertain to the disposition of their property after they die. We should be able to spend our money in a way that, although it must be spent after we die, gives utility to us while we live by knowing that it will be spent thusly. Such contracts benefit the living, not the dead. Jefferson was worried about the living being able to spend money that is not theirs and indebting future generations.
Quite simply, my philosophy does not require “social preferences”, just individual preferences, and even those need not be complete or transitive. I give moral standing to insane people.
Just because you only care about individuals doesn’t mean you don’t have “social preferences”. What if something is good for some people and bad for other people? Are you necessarily indifferent?
If you’re giving standing to the preferences of people who are insane (in the sense of having self-contradictory preferences), then I’m guessing what you mean is, you give standing to the preferences you believe they’d have if they weren’t insane. Suppose someone has Rock-Paper-Scissors preferences — what does it mean to say you care about those preferences?
Presumably there are also people with preferences
treat children badly > treat children well > don’t have children
and all children have preferences
be treated well > be treated badly > never be born
If that’s correct, then it becomes unclear whether it is good or bad (for the children) to force parents to treat them well. Some parents who would have had children even if they had to treat them well, will now treat their children badly. The children then face something like a choice between two lotteries; be born more often into a worse world, or less often into a better one. It is not clear in this case which situation is worse (for the children). In fact it likely depends on the relative frequencies of different preferences in the population of parents.
I think John Rawls discussed dilemmas like this, or at least posed them, of deciding which world is better: a world with 10 million suffering people or a world with 100,000 people living well. Which would you rather be born into if you were born into the suffering world with 100 times the probability? Clearly it may (should) be sensitive to the meaning of”suffering” and “living well,” but it’s an interesting choice to think about nonetheless.
John Faben:
As discussed here before: poor people preferring (very) low wages and bad job conditions instead of higher standards which will result in no job.
Or in general, are we, in this complicated world, sometimes doing what feels morally good at the moment, instead of thinking through the implications?
Disclaimer: this comment is not taking any stand.
Steve: “Well, I could easily see where this was going.” At which point I burst out laughing.
Ryan,
To the extent I give the preferences of an insane person any weight at all, I take them as I observe them and not as I imagine they might be if he were not insane.
To me, a moral philopsophy is simply, in taking actions, one should give a “decent regard” to the preferences of others. This need not lead to a complete and transitive anything. Although examining the consistency of one’s beliefs may be useful as a “hypocrisy detector”, it is not needed to frame a moral philosophy.
For example, out of umpteen years of wasted bible study, I was able to distill only one worthwhile moral lesson, which is “don’t do things to others that you would not want them doing to you”. I interpret this as “treat harm done to others by your actions as equivalent to harm done to yourself”. Thus, you cannot be moral and be a thief. You have to treat the loss to your victim as equal to your ill-gotten gain, so you’ve expended effort for naught.
This “silver rule” does not require me to treat gains to others as equivalent to gains to myself, and I don’t, so there maybe some hidden inconsistency there given the asymmetry. I don’t care.
Stephen: In your response to Sierra, you’re making the same mistake that I pointed out. Your claim that something is “bad” for the child assumes that we care about the desires and well-being of a hypothetical person as much as we do about those of a real person. You can’t will an existing person out of existence by giving them the right not to be mistreated, and if that person had never come into existence in the first place, then nothing is good nor bad for them, because they’re not a real person. It’s very strange to me that you can’t see this distinction between real people and imagined maybe-would’ve-been people.
Neil,
My problem with inconsistent preferences isn’t hypocrisy, it’s that there’s no there there. If someone prefers apples to bananas to cherries to apples, it’s no good to say you don’t care about hypocrisy & you just care about what they care about — “what they care about” doesn’t really mean anything. Or suppose they literally have no preference (including indifference) — what then? I’m not just imposing a consistency requirement here; I’m saying that w/o consistency, this moral philosophy doesn’t actually say anything.
Suppose you were thinking of having a child. Suppose that once the child is born, the child would wish he’d never been born (and prefer that to killing himself), and further that this is entirely predictable. By the logic given above, you aren’t allowed to care about this fact until after the child is born (at which point there’s nothing to be done). This seems like a very odd way of valuing the preferences of others.
One reason it might be wrong is because it is illegal. Abusing children justifies criminal punishment for several distinct reasons. First, if we know that someone abuses their children, we also know they are more likely to commit other crimes, which they will not be punished for because it is too difficult to police everything. Punishing people for abusing their children is preventative because it locks people up (where they can’t commit any more crimes) and gives them a strong incentive not to commit more crimes (if they are afraid of punishment).
Parents who abuse their children also deserve criminal punishment because they have broken the social contract. In our society, we do not allow parents to physically abuse their children in exchange for giving birth to them. We also don’t allow an adult to punch another adult in the face in exchange for a favor.
There are some good reasons why we don’t allow these types of behavior, but I think it is sufficient to say that it is wrong to behave this way because it is breaking the social contract and the law.
You present a false dichotomy. If we are concerned about the preference of the child then why artificially limit the decision to two choices.
I would think that a child would prefer to be treated badly rather than not be born, but I would think that the child would also prefer to be born to someone else who would treat them well rather then be born to an abusive parent.
But that’s is only the smallest logical fallacy in your argument. You are asking a child this question who has already been born and thus has his life (however lousy it may be) to lose. But at the point in time where the issue actually presents itself, the child does not yet exist and does not have a life to lose.
What is better, that I gather up the raw materials to build a house knowing that I will hate it and burn it down? Or that I leave those materials where they lay and let someone else gather them to build a house they will love and cherish?
Daniel,
Surely causation should run from being wrong to being illegal and not the other way around. Otherwise all laws are self-justifying — once something is a law, it becomes unethical to violate it and therefore the law is banning unethical behavior.
Benkyou,
The entire premise of the question pertains solely to the case where the person will only have a child if they can treat the child relatively poorly, so no, it’s not an artificial choice. That’s not a fallacy, and you’re not answering this question, but another, uninteresting one. Furthermore, you seem to be missing the assumption that we can care about the hypothetical preferences of a child before it is born. It’s fine to disagree with this assumption (a number of people in this chain have done), but you’re not identifying a hidden claim here.
ryan-
No. The question he asks is self contained, “How can it be okay to remain childless but not okay to have children and treat them badly—given that the children themselves would presumably prefer being treated badly to not being born at all?”. Steven voices the assumption that those who would treat their children badly would rather just not have them if they were somehow barred from treating the kid poorly.
I say that answers the question. Treating your child badly is bad because it causes more suffering than the alternative. Which is the child never having existed at all.
But his argument hinges on the preference of an already existent child, yet only considers 2 conflicting options from the myriad of reality. Treating your children badly is bad because presumably the children would rather have been boor to kind parents than be born to abusive ones or be not born.
The question as posed only provides two answers “If A can not happen then B must” while failing to also consider a host of other possibilities. Which is the textbook definition of a False Dichotomy Fallacy.
The larger issue I pointed out was the framing. Asking a child if he would rather be born to his abusive family or not at all will likely provide Stevens predicted answer. But only because you are asking the person to compare having a bad life to not having the life he possesses now. Your asking him if his lousy life is worth less than giving it up entirely. Keep something bad or throw it away. He will choose the option where he looses the least.
But before his parents decided to have a child he did not have anything, even the capacity to value what he might have in the future so there is no loss from the potential child’s point of view if the adults decide to put a rubber on and remain child-free.
Benkyou,
I’m sorry, but you’re just not understanding the question. If I ask whether, hypothetically, A is better than B, and you answer C, you’re not providing a wise third alternative. You’re just refusing to answer.
@Benkyou
“What is better, that I gather up the raw materials to build a house knowing that I will hate it and burn it down? Or that I leave those materials where they lay and let someone else gather them to build a house they will love and cherish?”
Absolutely correct. That’s exactly what I think whenever the question comes up “is it OK to have an abortion because the child would be disabled”. Well, if that birth will cause you to choose to have no other able-bodied children, when you otherwise would, then surely that should weigh? To me having a child is a good thing, with positive externaliies.
@ryan:
You are assuming that a practical moral philosophy has to make sense in theory. There is no justification for assuming that.
Further you are assuming that it is even possible to create a sensible theoretical moral philosophy. Not only is there no justification for assuming that, it is provably not true.
It is a mathematical fact of the universe in which we live that no utilitarian moral philosophy can ever make sense. Look up “utility monster”.
Hence any system of moral philosophy must be adopted axiomatically. They are anyway. While this looks like a recipe for conflict, it has no practical consequences, since even if you could come up with a provably correct morality, this would not help you persuade anyone to adopt it and live their lives by it – yours would still be only one morality competing with many.
Ben,
I’m not being hyper persnickety about moral philosophy. I’m just saying that if someone is advancing a moral philosophy as the answer to certain questions, they should at least make sure that it has something to say about those questions. I also think you’re misinterpreting me as a pure consequentialist — I’m not, really.
I’m really not sure what you mean by the “mathematical fact of the universe” here, and I’m fairly certain that “utility monster” doesn’t prove that consequentialism can’t make any sense (it might say that it says something counterintuitive or that you think is a bad moral rule, but that’s not the same thing).
ryan-You say, “I’m sorry, but you’re just not understanding the question. If I ask whether, hypothetically, A is better than B, and you answer C, you’re not providing a wise third alternative. You’re just refusing to answer.”
But in this case I’m not being asked which is better A or B. The child is and then that answer is used to support a position. I’m being asked why that position, supported by that answer, is a bad one.
If I said that healthcare reform is a bad idea based on a poll I just made up that asked 10,000 people whether they would prefer the current system to being raped by a polar bear and the overwhelming majority opposed being raped by the bear. And then I asked you to tell me why my reasoning on this matter is wrong. How would you answer?
So far, what you have said is that when asked to judge an opinion (beating children doesn’t seem worse then not having them) that the methodology of arriving at that opinion cannot be challenged. Ergo, universal healthcare not only must be bad but it must because people find it more desirable than animal sodomy.
I would hope that you would point out that my argument is based on a false dichotomy and that just the opposite conclusion could be reached if I had asked if they prefer Universal Healthcare, Polar Bear Rape, or Leaving Healthcare the way it is. and the exact opposite conclusion would be forced if I had left out that middle choice.
Sorry-
“and the exact opposite conclusion would be forced if I had left out that middle choice.”
Should read:
“and the exact opposite conclusion would be forced if I had left out that FIRST choice.”
I just made an incorrect correction:
FIRST
should read:
LAST
Can you name for me an instance where a consumer existed that received more total utility from a scarce resource with each additional resource consumed?
I skipped through most comments, so this might have already been mentioned.
THere could be a way to resolve this be looking into the capacity issue.
Basically, we can say that mistreated children do not actually have the mental capacity to decide whether they would be better off not having been born at all. To me having a miserable childhood sounds worse than not having one at all, but that might only be because I actually had a good one.
Therefore, when children claim that they prefer having a miserable life to not having a life at all, they do not necessarily have the capacity to make an informed statement. And they certainly do not have any knowledge of the latter alternative (well, no one does really). Therefore, they might be wrong when they claim that they would not be better off not having been born. And then it does make sense that not having kids is fine, whereas having them and treating them badly is not.
So I’d say that it is indeed a paradox if we assume that children can actually soundly decide whether they would be better off not having been born, but you can easily reconcile it if you accept that assumption with the capacity qualification.
To me, it does sound plausible that some children would be better off not being born at all since some parents treat them in too heinous a way.
@ryan
I think we may be more in agreement than not. Like you, I say “there is no ‘there’ there”. There is no reason a priori to assume that morality will make sense. And it doesn’t, indeed it cannot (fsvo sense).
But this *doesn’t matter*. It doesn’t mean we have to do without morality, which is good because we cannot, it just means we can’t systematise it. And in practice we can get along perfectly fine without a consistent moral philosophy. Heck, we get along fine without an *agreed* moral philosophy. Some might say better than we would with one.
As I read it Benkyou is essentially saying that to be useful, moral philosophy doesn’t have to be able to cope with problems which don’t occur in practice. Or even problems that are rare. Therefore to your question, he is saying:
“That’s a dumb question to which you have no reason to expect a sensible answer. Here is a related, but better, question, which does have an answer.”
Which is a perfectly legitimate response, if that is what he means.
My point about consequentialist morality is that, if it is universally applicable, it always has unacceptable conclusions. I.e. it doesn’t make sense for any value of “sense” that I recognise. All purely consequentialist systems of moral philosophy suffer from the utility monster or an equivalent problem.
That’s not to say that some moral philosophers haven’t taken the view that having adopted utilitarianism (or whatever), they are then morally obliged to feed the utility monster – for they have! – and what is more a new crop of them comes along ever generation.
All that shows is that people can become so intoxicated by ideas that they lose track of reality.
But we knew that.
Ben,
I largely agree with you. My comments in re consequentialism should be taken largely as a hypothetical — I’m saying, if you use consequentialism and then are trying to answer this question, then there are certain answers you can’t give. It may be that you’re not a pure consequentialist, which is fine, but that’s not my point.
I don’t read Benkyou’s answer that way, and I don’t agree that it’s a question not worth answering. This isn’t a “trolley” question having to do with a scenario you’ll never be in. We actually *do* have to decide how many kids to have. That’s a meaningful question. Part of Benkyou’s answer is “well, that kid should be born to someone else” — talk about answers to meaningless questions! Or alternatively, that the child would rather be very happy than just barely preferring existence, which is of course true but kind of misses the question.
@ Ben
Many formulations of consequentialism can avoid the “Utility Monster” problem. Utility monsters are only a problem for those forms of consequentialism that suppose that one individual’s life can have the CAPACITY for more value than another’s life. But some–including Bentham–take it to be axiomatic that each individual’s capacity for suffering and enjoyment is equal, which means assuming that a utility monster’s greatest possible pleasure is no greater than my greatest possible pleasure. Others suggest that we calculate utility by aggregating social preferences, using people’s preference rankings, rather than cardinal measures of utility–which means, again, the utility monster’s top preference does not outweigh my own. Still others–especially “objective list” utilitarians–think an individual’s overall well-being cannot be reduced to any one valuable feature, and that an increase in one sort of value (say, pleasure) cannot replace a loss of other sorts of values (like rational agency, enjoying meaningful relationships, etc.) At least some versions of the objective list will make utility monsters no problem. And utility monsters are not a huge problem for consequentialist theories that recognize some acts as supererogatory.
But, more to the point, the “utility monster” thought experiment is quite weak. It tries to show that we should reject consequentialism because our intuitions about the situation are contrary to consequentialism. But even if we should reject every theory that has counterintuitive implications (which I doubt, because some people’s sets of intuitions are incoherent), we should probably only trust our intuitions about situations we can imagine clearly. But we cannot imagine clearly a monster whose capacity for enjoyment and suffering massively dwarfs our own–by hypothesis, the utility monster’s experiences would have to be more or less unimaginable to us. (Parfit makes this point about thought experiments, Reasons and Persons sect. 131.)
@ the main question:
“How can it be okay to remain childless but not okay to have children and treat them badly—given that the children themselves would presumably prefer being treated badly to not being born at all? (I am assuming here, for the sake of argument, that if you couldn’t treat your children badly, you’d choose not to have them.[)]”
Since I’ve never heard of any kind of proof that moral philosophy CANNOT be sensible, I’ll give the moral theory overview. My own view is vaguely consequentialist, with some herbs and spices thrown in, but I take a number of rial views seriously. The challenge Landsburg poses is no problem for most of them.
The question does not pose a problem in principle to rule-, rights- or virtue-based theories. Most intuitive sets of rules permit abstinence, but forbid mistreatment of children. According to any version of the Categorical Imperative, abstinence is OK, but child abuse isn’t. Most rights-based theories will agree that only beings that do or will exist have rights. And, while virtue theories seem light on reasoning, most conceptions of virtue are compatible with childlessness, but not with child abuse.
So this is only a problem for theories that take their cue from the value of competing outcomes.
There is nothing paradoxical about the following:
Value of not having a child=0
Value of child’s life if mistreated is somewhere between -100 and -1.
The longer the child lives, the closer the value of the child’s life is to 0–hence, the longer the child lives, the better, but it would have been better the child never existed.
If the child prefers her mistreated life to never having existed, she might be making one of two mistakes; (a) thinking never-existing is like dying, which the child has good reason not to prefer; (b) failing to properly imagine never-existence. If people like Heidegger are right, it is absolutely impossible to imagine our own non-existence. Heidegger is usually wrong, but he might be right on this one.
(At the same time, I think some people, who find their lives overall burdensome, might be able to rationally prefer non-existence, even if they can’t properly imagine it. In that case, Freddie Mercury can coherently say “I don’t want to die/ but sometimes wish I’d never been born at all.”)
(And, as others have pointed out, the child’s preferences may not even be the major issue; if the child’s life causes more harm than good, it might be best that the child never existed even if she prefers her mistreated existence to non-existence–the intrinsic value of her life might be outweighed by the extrinsic disvalue of her life; she might be a real jerk.)
So, theories that compare value alternatives only have a problem in cases where the child’s life really is more valuable than nonexistence. There is still no problem with those theories allowing a person to choose not to have children, and forbidding them to then mistreat the child. If the two decisions are considered separately, they fare differently; the choice to have children or not might be value-neutral (or so uncertain it might as well be), while the decision to mistreat a child is decidedly value-negative. So the problem only concerns the case in which someone chooses between not having a child, and having it but mistreating it, when the value of the mistreated life is greater than the value of not having the child.
Many value-based theories will also take motivation into account. Motive- or rule-utilitarian theories, for instance, say it’s alright for me to decide not to have children, even if my misbegotten spawn would have been, as it turns out, happy, because it is (suppose) generally best that people who do not want children refrain from having them. But that justification depends on my preference for a childless life being fairly innocent. If my motives for not having a child are as bad or worse than the motives I would have for mistreating my children, I should follow the motives that are better (or less bad.) So, it would be worse to refrain from having children if the reason I did so was to relish the thought of all the joys I was denying the unborn, or so that I could taunt the non-existent. (Even then, little harm is done when I heap scorn upon those who could have been, so the choice is worse only if it is an expression of a more general motivation to prevent valuable lives from coming into being.)
So the problem only concerns the case in which someone chooses between not having a child, and having it but mistreating it, when the value of the mistreated life is greater than the value of not having the child, and the theory takes only the actual or expected value of the choice into account in deciding what’s more or less moral. And on that point, I have little new to add. Some would say that the only value we should take into account is the value for people who do exist, or will exist, not the value for people who might or might not exist depending on our decision. Others think the value of possible lives should be included in the tally. Parfit argues that the latter leads to a “Repugnant Conclusion”: for any given state of affairs S1, we should prefer some state of affairs, S2, in which everyone’s life is just barely worth living, because the number of people with barely-worth-living lives in S2 is enough greater than the number of people alive in S1 that the total value of S2 is greater, just spread around more people. For those interested in the Repugnant Conclusion, and various strategies for avoiding it, see
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
ryan- if you are going to quote me please use cut and paste and you will avoid putting words into my mouth.
You are acting as if the question posed is whether A child should be bore to abusive parents or not at all. That question has not been asked of us by the author.
What has been asked is “How can it be okay to remain childless but not okay to have children and treat them badly—given that the children themselves would presumably prefer being treated badly to not being born at all?” (see that’s how cut and paste works).
What I pointed out is that nothing of value can be based on that presumption because that presumption is based on a fallacy. It is a conclusion based on an incomplete data-set. It is a political talking point based on a slanted poll.
It is semantically identical to this question: How can it be okay to have kids and never buy them toys and not okay to have kids and buy them lots of toys and also secretly sell naked pictures of them to pedophiles them – given that the children themselves would presumably prefer the option with toys.
Please just answer these three questions:
1->If I asked you whether you would rather have never been born at all or die young and you answered ‘die young’ would it be “okay” to kill you?
2->Is the question above about whether you would prefer to die young or not be born? or is it about whether it is okay to kill you based on your answer to that question?
3->How is my question different than the one asked by the good Professor?
(per your own guidelines please don’t try to introduce any new criteria to this decision making process — unless you concede that the process is flawed)
Benkyou,
#3 is extremely straightforward. #1 would be isomorphic to the question if it were ALSO assumed that you brought me into existence AND that you would never have brought me into existence unless you could kill me when you were young. That part is extremely critical.
Did you read the very next sentence after the part you copied and pasted? I am assuming here, for the sake of argument, that if you couldn’t treat your children badly, you’d choose not to have them. Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone, but it does apply to some people. Those are the people I’m calling “you” in this question. So yes, that does mean that’s the question he’s asking.
Then there’s the theory that unborn children have some say in choosing their parents – and that any soul as yet unborn may make wise or poor choices depending upon their experiences in a previous incarnation – but will be reborn eventually regardless as the wheel of karma turns in relentless cycle.
Why not then better to skip the parents who do not truly want children, and be born to ones who can give the love a child needs?
There are many ways to look at the universe.
Perhaps being alive and suffering is better than never having existed if you are certain that there is no alternative to non-existence. Seeing that we don’t know, I personally prefer to err on the side of caution and at least consider that quality of life is as important to the not-yet-reborn as it is to the living.
All manner of excuses for poor behavior can follow from the logic of “any suffering is better than being dead or never existing”.
I think we can do better than that.
“Yet the childless are seen as far more benevolent than those that smack their kids around.”
Smacking your kids around drastically increases the odds of creating adults that smack their kids around and are happy to address most other problems in life by smacking someone or something around.
There is such a thing as not contributing to an ongoing cycle, and there is a possibility this is a noble thing. The decision to not have a child – or to smack that child around – does not exist in a frickin’ vacuum.
There are consequences for others in all actions. My decision to not engage in further child-bearing is a DIRECT result of confronting my own past abuse and the resulting decades of depression. If you haven’t experienced this, then perhaps you are merely dealing in theory about what an abused child thinks and feels and how that affects one as an adult.
Having largely conquered this depression, I may someday again reconsider child-bearing. But in the meantime, please be aware this is not just an interesting philosophical discussion to everyone.
I am fiercely pro-choice.