No pain on earth is worse than the illness, addiction, suffering, or death of one’s child.
A lot of dead beat father’s seem to disagree. :dubious:
I for one think there’s a problem worth thinking about here.
Thought experiment: If you push the button in front of you, then a random person somewhere in the world will either have his life improved or… whatever the opposite of improved is… The chances are one in a million for harm, and 999,999 in a million for improvement. Would you feel like you had the right to hit this button? What if the one in a million isn’t just harm, but a life of misery?
If you think you wouldn’t have the right to push the button in either scenario, then it becomes a valid question–why would you have the right to have a child? In that scenario, too, there’s some low chance (let’s grant for the sake of argument that it’s a low one) of bringing it about that an individual will have an unhappy life, and there’s some complementary chance that you’ll be bringing it about that this individual* will have a happy life. What gives you the right? If you don’t have the right in the previous situation, why do you have the right in this situation?
I suspect the question can be answered, but finding the disanalogy isn’t trivial IMO. I mean we can point out differences, but we also have to give an account as to why the differences should matter. For example, in the second scenario we’re talking about bringing about a new life, while in the first scenario we’re talking about changing an already existing one. But does this distinction matter for the validity of the analogy? If so, why? And even if it does–can’t we bring the two scenario’s closer to each other by stipulating, in the first scenario, that it’s not just any random person selected, but some random newborn?
*Does it matter whether we think of them as the same individual? There may be a way to push back here.
Whoa. Mind. Blown.
Great analogy and well explained. This is what I’m trying to debate: why do people assume we have the right to push the button? We don’t have a right to sign other people for risky experiments without their consent nor do we have a right to gamble with other people’s money. How is having children oh so different?
Clearly they do.
In that instance yes. Conversely vaccines kill or cripple about 0.0001% of children vaccinated.
So you contend, since some people will benefit and retain health (+) but others will get maimed and badly hurt (-), vaccinations are thus immoral.
Correct?
Or perhaps you will now take a step back from your absolutist position, and accept that pain and pleasure do cancel each other out at some point, and that an action is not immoral simply because it causes pain, provided that it causes sufficient pleasure.
So how do you make sure that your action of driving car doesn’t cause pain?
I don’t want to know how you have attempted to minimise it, since clearly. parents attempt to minimise the harm that their parenting causes, and you don’t find that acceptable.
I would like to know how you have managed to ascertain that you will never, ever hurt a single person as a result of the action of driving a car.
Because I do not believe that you have invented any way of doing so. And as such you clearly do not believe you have any obligation make sure that your actions don’t cause pain. If you did, you would not drive car.
Cite!
Please provide the statute under which you will be punished if a child runs out from between two parked cars and is crippled by your vehicle striking it.
I call bullshit. I do not believe that there is anywhere in the western world where a driving will be arrested, or punished, or get in trouble for their actions under these circumstances.
Nonetheless, the simple act of driving a motor vehicle carries such a risk. And yet you drive a motor vehicle.
So clearly you do believe that you have a right to gamble with someone else’s well being?
And **lankyBlonde **you seems to have missed the most substantial part of my post, so I will re-post it so you can address it:
You must know that posting this sort of material has the capacity to make people feel depressed or angry. Right? I mean, you’re not so self-absorbed that you didn’t realise that posting material of the sort in your OP has a chance of making at least one reader unhappy. Right?
And yet, realising that posting such material has a chance of making at least one reader unhappy, you posted it anyway.
Therefore, you took a gamble with the well-being of every single person who reads this thread. Your actions made every single reader of this thread prone to pain.
So you clearly accept that you have a right to gamble with someone elses well being? QED.
I’m sure you are not suggesting that you will be arrested and punished for posting on this message board. Right?
And I assume that you have the empathy to realise that posting such material has a chance of making at least one reader unhappy. Right? And yet knowing this, you posted it anyway. So it seems you were prepared to take a gamble with the wellbeing of other people.
Can you please explain how you reconcile this with your assertion that you have no right to take a gamble with the well being of other people.
Your actions do not seem to match your claims.
If the parents have super-powers like precognition, then the equation changes.
What if they have the power of flight? I wonder how that would figure in.
Yeah, then they fly into a building and die, and it’s your fault.
Please provide the statutes to support this outrageous claim.
I do not believe this repeated claim that if a child runs out in front of my car, I can ever land in jail or in some cases be charged with murder and get executed.
And if you have a child in the car with you, and the tyre blows out, and he undergoes tons of pain, ends up hating life, undergoes tons of pain, blah blah.
You are also not in any trouble.
If you believe otherwise then please provide the statue under which you will get in trouble for having a blowout with a child in the car.
And if you can’t provide such a statute then your argument is falsified right there.
Barring unusual circumstances (like rape or forced breeding programs ala Ceaușescu Romania), people don’t have children when they are living in hell. If a person is being tortured within an inch of his or her life 24/7, they aren’t going to be in the mood for sexual intercourse. So I think it is safe to assume that a person who has the time and energy to think about sex, let alone children, is probably no where close to living in hell (at least in their mind). Thus, they aren’t being immoral in their decision to have kids.
It could be careless, though. If you don’t have any money to feed yourself, then it would be careless to bring another mouth into the world. But it wouldn’t be immoral unless they intended to cause suffering. Most parents do not intend for this to happen.
Are you speaking from experience?
We do have the right to push that button. And you push it every single time we have an election.
Politics plays with the button all the time. Everybody accepts that because of the money spent on National Parks or the upkeep of the White House, thousands of people will die because of poor road conditions, or lack of health care or lack of clean drinking water or a thousand other soluble problems. That is simply the reality of the modern world: there are far more proven ways to save lives then there is funding available to implement them.
And every election we are forced to make a choice about where we allocate funds. And we make that choice knowing that where we allocate funds will cause people to die.
So how do we decide? Well we vote for candidates and their policies by pushing a button. And we try to make the decisions that will result in the greatest good for the least harm. But no matter what decision we make, some people somewhere will die or live in poverty when they would not have if we voted the other way
If you push the Republican button in front of you, then a random person somewhere in the world will either have his life improved or… whatever the opposite of improved is… The chances are one in a million for harm, and 999,999 in a million for improvement.
Would you feel like you had the right to hit this button? Well of course you would. And you push that button every single election.
I honestly can’t see how this is supposed to be some big, hypothetical moral dilemma. We live in this world. We have access to this button. And we use it regularly.
Yes we do have that right. We do it all the time.
Obamacare is a risky experiment, and we have signed millions up to it without their consent. The War on Drugs was a risky experiment, and we signed millions up to it without their consent. The New Deal was a risky experiment, and we signed millions up to it without their consent. Shit, we send conscripted soldiers off on suicide missions without their consent, how much riskier can an experiment get?
Wherever did you get this bizarre idea that that we don’t have a right to sign other people for risky experiments without their consent.
Uh huh.
So which do you believe:
That there was no element of financial risk in the state acquiring GM?
Or that the state acquisiton of GM did not involve the use of taxpayer money?
Because if you accept that the acquisition was risky (hint: every economist on the planet acknowledges it was risky) and you accept that it involved the use of taxpayer money (hint: congressmen didn’t pay for it out of their own salaries), then clearly we do have the right to gamble with other people’s money.
Your question is blood in the water and almost demands a flippant response, but it got me to thinking while I was suffering thru a dinner of fresh Gulf shrimp cooked in classic Tempura style, my girlfriend’s son has lived in Africa teaching in village schools for years and has seen over and over every bad thing you can imagine happen to his students, yet him and his wife just had their first child. Pretty wild.
In the Tibetan Book of The Dead we read of the soul encountering the perfect compassion of the 4 great Buddhas and fleeing from them in ignorance, terrified the soul desperately seeking shelter sees a womb opening before it and dives right in and is thus reborn. The fault, then, is not with the parents creating a life but with the soul for ignorantly choosing another incarnation. Suffering is the need to take the next breath.
On the other hand there’s at least one important disanalogy between the two scenarios. If nobody ever had a child, there would be no more human race after a while. So to really make the analogy work, you’d need to build that into the button scenario. Maybe something like: If you don’t push the button within some given time frame, then the human race will lose the ability to reproduce and will go extinct, while if you do push the button, some random newborn will either be cause to have a miserable life (one in a million chance) or a normal life (the complementary chance).
In that scenario, I feel a lot better about pushing the button.
If the numbers were indeed as ridiculously black and white as the OP suggests, then I can imagine a scenario where humans voluntarily go extinct. A society where 50% of the people live in unbearable suicidal situations and the other live in gloriously divine situations sounds like a bad deal.
Prussic acid… 
No, really.
OP, you’ll live long enough to regret this thread and you’ll be incredibly embarrassed by your ego. I wish you the good grace and luck to have children and treasure every moment of pregnancy/adoption and marvel at your good fortune to experience growth and tolerance.
It is possible (though unlikely) that someone has wired the enter key on your keyboard to nuclear bomb. Does that make it immoral to use your keyboard?
No, because when evaluating the consequences of an action, you should use the expected utility, rather than straight utility. That is, you should multiply the goodness or badness of an outcome by the probability of that outcome actually occurring.
You probably use (an approximation of) this reasoning already. Driving is dangerous. There’s a chance you’ll get into an accident and die. But your probably still drive anyway, because the probability of that happening is low, and the probability of you getting to your destination faster than otherwise is high.
So the question isn’t whether a bad outcome is possible, because of course it is. The question is whether the probability of a bad outcome outweighs the probability of a good outcome.
lankyBlonde, it appears to me you have a fixation on pain. You’ve used the word “pain,” often modified by the word “excruciating,” in so many of your posts. What is your obsession with pain?
Do you have a right to gamble with someone else’s well being? No.
Do you have a right to make someone prone to pain? No.
Bringing a child into the world, however, is neither of these things, no matter how many clumsy analogies are espoused. But let’s try…
If I work in a factory that makes kitchen knives (intended only to prepare and serve food, an honorable intention), and then some psycho uses one of these knives to kill another (or many) people, am I now morally culpable? Even if you would like to argue that I SHOULD have known that the knife COULD be used that way, no logical, right-thinking person would believe that I was in any way responsible for that evil.
If your argument hinges on the fact that the chances of an evil outcome are so great that the endeavor (making knives, making kids, whatever) is not defensible, then that simply means you are an pessimist of the highest degree, and you are not likely to understand any opposing point of view since you are starting from a radically different premise.
Oh, and here’s hoping that the Top 100 university you are attending improves your critical thinking skills, or you will be forced to rely on your exceptional good looks for as long as they last.