The Problems of Population Ethics
Parts 1 & 2
From 2025:
The problem with population ethics is the problem of all human “thinking” – we start with the end we want, and then work backwards.
We are rationalizing animals, not rational.
Any “ethics” we endorse first must justify our personal existence and support our personal desires. If we have (or want) kids, “ethics” has to support that. And vice-versa – if you dislike kids and / or had a terrible childhood, or have made Doom your dogma, your “ethics” insists that no one should have kids.
If we have a child or loved one with a disability, “ethics” demands we “value” that life equally to any other person, no matter what. (Including if the person kept alive is suffering.) And society is “ethically required” to provide resources to our loved one without any regard to happiness or even a hint of cost / benefit calculations.
The topic of children will trigger “logical” contortions in even the most hardcore, first-principles “rationalist.” And not just the misanthropes! I’ve often heard that having kids is something “we should experience” (and not just from me*), all the way to claiming that personally having kids is essential for continuing humanity’s imperative existence in the universe.
Yeah, OK, sure.
This is not to pick on people regarding kids. This is just how we work, no matter how “rational” we consider ourselves. It is true across the board, from carbon to free will. (It also applies to the delusion that you can sum pleasure and pain across discrete individuals.).
Highly educated people have cruelly exploited untold quadrillions of electrons to argue that our personal wants are actually universal musts.
I’m not saying, Everyone is stupid except me. I’m just noting we are all hugely flawed. When we learn about some cognitive biases, we think we have freed ourselves from all cognitive biases. That’s even worse than not knowing we have biases!
I don’t bring this up because I find it frustrating or amusing. Rather, refusing to recognize our inherent and unavoidable shortcomings makes us less effective at having an actual positive influence in the world.
If (emphasizing: if) we really want the world to be different than it is, we need to stop asking, “What do I want?”
To change the world, start by asking: “What do other people want?”
The question isn’t, “Can we reason with them?” Rather, it is, “Can we make them happier?”
*In a shocking twist, I was now the one who wanted kids. Psych! We talked about it that season, sitting by the fire. I waxed philosophical, asking, “Isn’t it something we should experience?”
2026:
Meet Morgan, Yet Another Failure of Population Ethics
One day, Morgan, 24 years younger than me, showed up at my door. They informed me that I was their father; “Mom said you didn’t want me, which is why she married Jamie so quickly after I was conceived and you left for Illinois.”
Morgan was right – as much as I desperately wanted Diane to stay with me, I didn’t want to have a child with her, at least while I was unemployed and she was a failing grad student (and we were so obviously incompatible). If she had told me she was pregnant, I would have wanted her to have an abortion. Yes, Morgan wouldn’t have existed, but Diane and Jamie would have had their own children (who wouldn’t have had my unhappy genes).
Now, this never happened, but theoretically could have. But if Morgan did exist, I would only want the best for them, regardless of how they came into existence.
This is yet another problem with Population Ethics - we start with the baseline that the people who exist should exist.
Consider, for example, if you say 13-year-olds shouldn’t have children. (And you should say children shouldn’t have children! Unlike the crazies I document in Losing‘s chapter “God, the Greatest Murderer of All Time.”) Saying that children shouldn’t have children doesn’t mean you don’t want a 13-year-old forced mother to suffer, and it doesn’t mean you hate her baby.
This really happens. My memory is that Peter Singer once wrote that it was a good thing that teenage pregnancies are down. Someone – let’s call them Jessie – angrily wrote that they had been born to a teenage mother, so Peter was saying Jessie shouldn’t have existed. True! But that is entirely irrelevant to Jessie. Peter only wants Jessie to experience the most utils possible (while not causing others to suffer).
The same is true for disabled individuals. Or me. (“My parents definitely should not have married, nor my siblings or I been born.” p. 145)
This remains one of the most insightful statements ever:
You know, Mrs. Buckman, you need a license to buy a dog, or drive a car.
Hell, you need a license to catch a fish!
But they’ll let any butt-reaming asshole be a father.
–Tod Higgins as played by Keanu Reeves in the movie Parenthood
These two thoughts are entirely compatible:
Children should only be conceived and born to people who can provide the child a fair start.
Children should not be born by children, or drug addicts, or mentally disturbed individuals, or people in crushing poverty, or people who have horrific genetic diseases, or people who don’t want to have a child. “Every child a wanted child.”Society should do everything possible to provide every child who is born with as close to a fair start as possible, regardless of the birth circumstances.
The first bullet is not discriminating against 10 year olds, or people with bipolar disorder, etc. This is just to say the rights of potential new individuals should supersede the rights of potential parents.
We don’t let just anyone be a surgeon, or drive a truck, or open a daycare. We want to protect people from being harmed by unqualified individuals. But we turn a blind eye when it comes to people breeding. We do nothing to protect the most vulnerable - new individuals.
This is the greatest failing of philosophy (and policy). We pretty much stop at, “If you can reproduce, then you have the right to.” To which I say, “Won’t someone please think of the children?”
Peter Singer has had the audacity to say, basically, it is better for children to be born with as few handicaps as possible. (Life is hard enough!) For that, he’s been vilified, smeared, attacked as a Nazi.
But again, it is entirely consistent to think it is best for a child to be born with an intact body and brain into a positive environment, while also wanting society to care for all children and provide them with equal opportunities, regardless of how their bodies and brains function.
Similarly, I can recognize that it would be better if humanity is Children-of-Men-ed into extinction and yet still want each existing human to be as happy as possible. Despite humanity’s utterly incomprehensible inhumanity to each other and other sentient creatures, I still recognize that each of us has a vast capacity for suffering, and alleviating extreme suffering is the most important task.
Another banger!