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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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My utility function has very high weighting on the rights of people not to be forced to raise children they don't want to, which as far as I can tell grossly overrides that.

Of course that's entirely contingent on circumstances, if the human race was near the brink, such that abortion or foeticide had a much larger impact on outcomes, then I would strongly disapprove of that, but with 8 billion people swimming about, individual babies are worth very little in my eyes.

Of course, I have libertarian sympathies, so if people do things I disapprove of but my principles suggest are simply not my business, then in most circumstances I swallow my affront and live and let kill. That's priced in.

My utility function has very high weighting on the rights of people not to be forced to raise children they don't want to

Do you live somewhere where they would be forced to raise those kids? Basically everywhere I know of allows for consequence-free abandonment of children at hospitals etc. "Don't force people to raise kids" sounds very noble, but really the objection is "Don't force people to experience the trauma of knowing that someone else is raising their children. Allow them to kill the children instead."

I'm not quite sure what the child abandonment process in India is like, but even with the availability of orphanages and no questions asked surrenders, I still advocate for the right of the parents to perform infanticide. It's their choice which one they avail, and as I've said before, I don't consider that any of my business. If they want to hand the child over, good for them, but they're still inflicting negative externalities on the rest of us in the process since the government has to raise the kids (or adopt them out, which is not a given).

By all means, I'm not going around killing kids, or suggesting anyone do so to their, but if they did, I'd just cock an eyebrow and continue about my day.

The original question was:

if their life was going to be better (under your utility function) than the harm to whoever wanted them never to become sapient, you should disallow killing them?

Your response invoked the rights of the parents to not be slaves to their children, and it seems that now we're on the same page that actually those rights aren't really being violated. So which of the following is your actual position?

  1. These children's lives are not worth living.

  2. These children's lives are worth living, but not enough worth living to justify the additional negative externalities.

The latter as far as I can tell.

My guess is that that is less due to actual utilitarianism, and more due to reasoning like "they have no right to my money." Not that the latter is wrong or bad but I think it's very rare and unnatural for people to reason these things out from first principles. It simply feels wrong to be forced to donate lots of money to lowlifes' children rather than your own.

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