Comment by csb6

Comment by csb6 2 days ago

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> Every moral duty is owed to a real, identifiable someone. You can’t have a duty to “a possible person” who does not yet exist.

This doesn’t hold up. It is effectively denying that people will be born in the future, which of course they will be since antinatalism is not universal and fertility rates are above zero. There are valuable things that can be done today that will help those people but not anyone alive today (e.g. preservation of media that is well-known and widely distributed today but may not be in the future when it is more historically valuable).

It is safe to assume that new people will be born at some point in the future (given current conditions) and will then be “identifiable”, so you have to account for their future existences when making moral decisions with future consequences.

dusted 2 days ago

I'm not arguing against the moral duty of making the future better for those that are created in the future, I agree with that perspective.

I only try to enhance the argument that there is no moral duty to create them.

Moral value is for those who exist, and given that we know more will come to exist, even though their creation itself is (in my view) morally negative, it does not conflict with acknowledging that they will, and to make the world as good as possible for them.

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dragonwriter 2 days ago

> This doesn’t hold up. It is effectively denying that people will be born in the future

No, it merely denies that people that do not exist can have moral duties owed to them.

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  • esafak 2 days ago

    We could destroy the planet leaving all future generations screwed and that's okay because they are owed nothing? If that thinking passed muster we wouldn't be having this conversation. It's obviously maladaptive.

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    • voxic11 2 days ago

      I don't think that is the argument, because it presupposes those future generations exist. The argument is that if we somehow prevented those future generations from existing (without violating our duties to any currently existing peoples) then we wouldn't owe a duty to them. I think this is pretty obviously true. But some people do disagree and say that we have a duty to ensure that future generations do exist.

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      • esafak 2 days ago

        *You* are the future generation of your ancestors. I assume you would not have wanted to live in a universe when humanity was wiped out aeons ago, or left to some Mad Max existence. The people making that argument do so from the luxury of not having had many ancestors that held such misanthropic beliefs.

        I would ask them to contemplate Kant's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative

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    • dusted 2 days ago

      Nope, I'm saying that that which is not born, is owed nothing. There's no "future person" that you owe it to, to create..

      There will be persons in the future, and those persons, you do have an obligation toward.

      But the argument here, is about whether there is a duty to create a person, so that they can have good.. And, as there is no person before that person has been created, there is nobody to be owed this good, therefore, there is no obligation to create that person..

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      • esafak 2 days ago

        If your anti-natalism does not harm people with the intention of having children, that is fine. People who have an intention to have children do have moral obligations to meet before the child is conceived.

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        • dusted a day ago

          I don't believe in harming anyone who exists. I do think that it is in principle, less wrong to harm someone by denying them the right to violate another. It has been shown elsewhere that it is a fundamental violation of the created, to create them, regardless of their life-outcome.

          The Value-null perspective is that it's not needed to consider the life-outcome, the moral wrongness of creating someone stands without it, and so, eliminates the weak side of Benatar's asymmetry argument.

          However, I don't believe morality and policy should always go hand in hand, and my stance on policy is that, people should be allowed to have children if they wish so, but they should do it with the implications in mind, and they must be able to stand up to the duties involved.

          I am a parent myself, I feel a tremendous responsibility, duty, towards my child, I do not regret having them, I do not wish that they were never born, I love them more than anything. People do wrong things all the times, often for the right reasons, but people should understand what they're doing, and why it might be wrong, before making the decision, they should understand the responsibility, both practical and morally, that comes with their actions.

          I'm not arguing that this means to prevent your child from all pain in the world, but to prepare them for life in a way that maximizes the likelihood that they have a good life. I'm merely arguing that life in and off itself is not inherently a gift (though it can certainly be a net positive), and that there responsibilities therefore reach widely beyond the fact of having created the kid and kept them alive.

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    • dragonwriter 2 days ago

      > We could destroy the planet leaving all future generations screwed and that's okay because they are owed nothing?

      I’m not saying it is okay, I’m saying that, for people who reject a moral duty to non-existent people, any argument that it is not okay must rest on something other than a duty to hypothetical people that may or may not ever come into existence depending on events that have not yet occurred (and which may include the very thing whose moral acceptability is being debated.)

      > If that thinking passed muster we wouldn't be having this conversation. It's obviously maladaptive.

      I mean, if chattel slavery never existed, we (the specific people having this conversation) wouldn't be having this discussion, either, but I don’t think “it is in the course of history leading up to the present discussion” is an argument for an idea being correct.

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      • esafak 2 days ago

        This is confused thinking. People who support slavery would not want to trade places with their slaves. A moral position that depends on such accidents of birth are not worthy of consideration, and this applies to the anti-natalist argument. Only people where anti-natalists haven't wrecked the planet could and would support anti-natalism. Who wants to be worse off?

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  • csb6 2 days ago

    If the actions I take now will affect someone I know will exist in the future and who will be owed duties, I effectively have a moral duty. You can say the moral duty is not in existence until the person is actually born, but my duty to that future person has to be taken into account now so it already exists in a meaningful sense.

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    • dusted 2 days ago

      The argument is specifically treating the duty to create new people, not any other duties. A common argument against antinatalism, is that we have a duty to create new people, because if we don't create them, they can't have good lives..

      That would be true, if there was an actual pool of unborn people, like, some metaphysical vault of people yet to be born, waiting for their turn.. In _THAT_ case, we _would_ have a duty to create them, so that they can have good lives, and experience all the amazing stuff we get to experience..

      However, since there's no such vault, there is no duty to create them, there is nobody that is owed life on the grounds that if they do not get it, they are deprived of it.. because people that are not born yet, do not actually exist in any way.

      That does not eliminate any duty towards the unspecific mass of people that will indeed be born in the future, regardless of whether creating them is wrong or right, there is still a moral duty to attempt to make the world as good a place for them to be in..

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