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Next level polygamy

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Total Members Voted: 65

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

Is it ethical to have kids, how many kids?

Sometimes. It is ethical to have x amount of children. ¹

Is it ethical to get others to not have kids?

Sometimes. ¹

Is it ethical to make new threads?

Sometimes.

¹ Optimal number of children
Difficult question to answer: the optimal number of children is limited by availability of land, air, water, and food; availability of a suitable climate; disease risk; the nurturing abilities of the parents and society; war/persecution risk; availability of harmless amusement; supportive divines; etc. (the ordering of these entries should not be considered an indication of priority.) These conditions vary across the world, the universe, and time, so I cannot answer.

Basically, I cannot commit to a single number: people should only have children if the children, parents, and society can have a happy, healthy life.

[MrRoboto75]

Is it ethical to have kids, how many kids?

If you agree that nobody has kids, you might have yourself a problem.

Is it ethical to get others to not have kids?

Only if the others are not involved in the conversation.  Nobody wants to be told they can't have kids.

Is it ethical to make new threads?

no

[Antioch]

Nature doesn't care about ethics.

That what is best at surviving and procreating will exist.

[helmacon]

Nature doesn't care about ethics.
That what is best at surviving and procreating will exist.

Evolution is geared towards reproduction, but natural evolution is a dead end. By evolutionary standards, we are far from the most successful species on the planet. All kinds of creepy crawlies outperform us in both number and bio-mass by literal orders of magnitude.   

We have the technology to take evolution into our own hands. Is it not unethical then, to refuse to use it?

[NullForceOmega]

Natural evolution is nowhere near a dead end, and technology is nowhere near ready to takeover the workload, and won't be for decades at least, and a century or so seems more likely.

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

An heir and a spare is in the lead

[Cthulhu]

I put next level polygamy as a joke because I think people should have as many kids as is appropriate and no fewer.  The issue is what's appropriate.  That's gonna vary based on where you are, when you are, what you do, your individual needs as a family, etc. 

And I know this puts me at odds with a lot of people on the internet who mostly seem to hate kids and honestly kind of seem to hate being alive in general, but I think continuing your lineage, both genetic and cultural, is inherently a worthwhile activity.

Just curious, in this hypothetical, would eating extra babies be an option?

Infanticide has historically been common almost everywhere in the world, and babies were routinely exposed or abandoned even up into the 1800s in Europe.  Not sure about eating them though.  I wouldn't be surprised though, since violence and cannibalism go hand-in-hand with overpopulation.

[Reelya]

Just curious, in this hypothetical, would eating extra babies be an option?

It doesn't seem very ethical to eat your babies, that kills them

I'd argue it might be more ethical to eat the sooner, rather than later, if you're going to eat them at all.

The world is going to run out of Germans, Japanese and Italians before anything else. So bye bye to the Axis powers I guess.

Yeah, to clarify, it's not unethical to want a lot of kids, or to have them when it's socially beneficial. But if you're living in a post-industrial society with decent medical care, it's unethical to actually have more than 2-3, both because of the unnecessary weight on common goods and limited resources (both personally and societally). They're probably not going to die young and some or all of them will have children of their own.

I think there's an issue with externalities as well. e.g. if not enough people are having kids then there's a net societal benefit to having a kid, whereas if too many people are having kids, there's a net societal cost to having a kid. But think about an individual couple. They can have any number of kids. But whether they personally have 0 - 10 kids is unlikely to tip the balance, of the benefit to society, between "net cost" and "net benefit". So if society is underpopulated (or there is a high death rate), then each kid you have will have roughly the same benefit as the last, leading to big families, whereas if society is crowded, then literally every kid you decide to have is costing society about the same as the last one, driving the ethical amount of kids you want to have to literally zero.

[Cthulhu]

Maybe they're disappearing out of self-loathing because people are still calling them the Axis Powers seventy years after world war 2.

[Cthulhu]

The only good book I've read that argued for no kids was Conspiracy Against the Human Race.  I liked it, and I think it had some interesting thoughts on human consciousness, but the argument was based on an Epicurean sort of ethic, specifically that existence entails suffering and the optimal way to minimize suffering is to not exist.

Except that it makes no attempt to justify its own ethic (The argument is prima facie true but you haven't told me why I should want zero suffering) and the rest of the book is morally/ethically nihilist, so it's arguing that morals don't exist and then moralizing at me.

The only time I've seen someone else who read the book I pointed this out and they got awkward and stopped talking about it.

[Reelya]

That's sort of like Catharism then. Basically the Cathars believed that the Old Testament God was Satan, and the New Testament God was the good one. All matter was created by the evil God. So by that theology, you could argue to have less kids.

[Egan_BW]

Zero children. No more reproduction. This provides a motivation, and frees up resources, in order to speed research immortality, interplanetary travel and colonization, and artificial intelligence. After these technologies are completed, a person may create a new mind, either biologically or mechanically, provided that said person is willing to devote the next ~70 years of their infinite existence to raise said mind into a capable member of society.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

You may have ingested too much information supporting utilitarian ethics recently.

[Egan_BW]

tax rate is 100%. all money belongs to the government. but there is no bureaucracy or elected officials, everyone is a member of the government equally. the only action that the government takes is to sponsor whatever its citizens do at any given moment. every citizen carries the amount of money needed to accomplish their current task. if there is not enough money to accomplish all tasks, we pretend that there is.

[Reelya]

tax rate is 100%. all money belongs to the government. but there is no bureaucracy or elected officials, everyone is a member of the government equally. the only action that the government takes is to sponsor whatever its citizens do at any given moment. every citizen carries the amount of money needed to accomplish their current task. if there is not enough money to accomplish all tasks, we pretend that there is.

So you're saying to make money pointless?