Parfit inaugurated several new areas of moral philosophy. The one that has most shaped my worldview, and which is covered in this chapter, is population ethics—the evaluation of actions that might change who is born, how many people are born, and what their quality of life will be. Secular discussion of this topic is strikingly scarce: despite thousands of years of ethical thought, the issue was only discussed briefly by the early utilitarians and their critics in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it received sporadic attention in the years that followed.6 The watershed moment came in 1984 with the publication of Parfit’s book Reasons and Persons.
Population ethics is crucial for longtermism because it greatly affects how we should evaluate the end of civilisation.–William MacAskill (2022) What We Owe The Future, p. 168.
This is the fourth post on MacAskill’s book. (The first one is here which also lists some qualities about the book that I admire; the second one is here; the third here.) MacAskill’s note 6 refers to the Mohists, who are not treated as population ethicists because “they did not discuss the intrinsic and instrumentalist benefits and costs of increasing population.” (307) Let me grant, for the sake of argument, that such an economic analysis (costs/benefits) is intrinsic to population ethics.
It’s unclear why we should exclude non-secular population ethicists (starting with Plato, but not least Berkeley, Malthus, and Nassau Senior all of whom shaped the early utilitarians), although (recall) Parfit has soft-Nietzschean reasons for doing so, but it is left unclear whether MacAskill endorses these. Even so, MacAskill’s historical claim is odd. Some of the most important innovations in early twentieth century social and biological sciences and statistical technique (associated with names like Galton, Pearson, Fisher, Edgeworth, and Haldane)* are intertwined with population ethics (and eugenics). I am almost inclined to joke that in their age we even developed a fallacy, ‘the naturalistic’ one so as to avoid tainting doctrines with their sordid origins.
While undoubtedly some early utilitarians were pioneering population ethicists, it seems unfair to ignore the pre-utilitarian population ethicists of imperialists political arithmeticians like William Petty (seventeenth century), who put the art of managing populations by modern states on a more scientific footing while terrorizing the Irish. The managing of the size and quality of populations was an intrinsic part of the (quite ‘secular’) art of government in the reason of state tradition of the sixteenth century, too. In fact, civilizations (including feudal orders) that emphasize ‘good breeding’ (a phrase that had a positive connotation until quite recently) are generally self-consciously engaged in population ethics (even if their cost-benefit analysis deviates from MacAskill’s).
Of course, MacAskill’s focus is not on the past, but the future. It’s notable that population ethics is said to be essential to longtermism. This is by no means intuitive. If one is attached to, say, the survival of civilization, or one wishes to evaluate if one ought to be concerned with it, one need not articulate this or defend it in terms of (a) population ethics focused on wellbeing. MacAskill often writes as if it’s the only ethical long game in town. But, as Itai Sher notes, there are passages where MacAskill allows for “non-welfarist, non-utilitarian values” but that means that either his population ethics is itself a mixed (ad hoc) bag or not intrinsic to longtermism.
To be sure, in between the lines, MacAskill is aware that some wish to promote perpetual peace (which he seems to associate with Steve Pinker, see p. 297 n. 60), but as I noted before (in part 2), he treats this possibility not in terms of, say, a regime of human rights enforcement, but exclusively in terms of “world government” and, so, as undesirable. (158) Of course, there may be other ends (e.g., elimination of hunger, the promotion of leisure, or, more elitist, the arts and sciences) that might make the extension of civilization worth having. Or, perhaps, civilization is intrinsically caught up in social domination, and the anarchists are right that we should aim to abolish it in the long run.
What’s odd about doubling down on population ethics is that it both encourages us to take an unhealthy amount of interest in the quality of lives of other people’s children and that it encourages us to make calculations that are without any solid ground. On the latter, Itai Sher (who is much more sympathetic to the project than I am) observes that the book makes “too many heroic assumptions and tries to estimate too many things that can’t be estimated.” That is, MacAskill is completely unwilling to take the significance of Keynesian and Knightian uncertainty seriously at all. Keynes (who had a non-trivial interest in population ethics) wrote in 1937:
In some respects, perhaps, our judgments have become more optimistic (we have tools that can help us estimate, say, the price of copper a few decades out), Keynes’ general underlying outlook strikes me as sound. Very long-term forecasting is very difficult. In fact, often the short term calculations are difficult, too. Recently, Peter Singer was unusually sober when asked to comment on the significance of the collapse of FTX and its implications on earning-to-give:
“I think in general, a lot more good has been done by earning-to-give than harm, at least up until the collapse of FTX, which has certainly caused a lot more harm than any other [example]” says Singer. “It’s very hard to reckon up the total balance sheet on that.”–The Guardian (December 23).+
There is an ambiguity here in whether Singer thinks it’s difficult to do a cost-benefit analysis on earning-to-give or on the collapse of FTX. But for my present purposes that’s irrelevant. If we find it so difficult indeed to weigh up the net costs and benefits of known actions today, how much more difficult does it become when we look into the downstream effects of the very long future. (I return to MacAskill’s promotion of earning-to give (pp 232-233) some other time.)
It is worth noting, especially because Itai is too polite to do so, that MacAskill (nearly always) plays the ‘uncertainty card’ in the opposite direction: “uncertainty cuts both ways” (89) Outcomes may sneak up on us before we anticipate it. And this observation is turned into a carte blanche by MacAskill to posit all kinds of estimates (with incredible precision and confidence), for example “I don’t think one could reasonably go lower than a 10 percent chance of AGI in the next fifty years.” (91) As I remarked on his use of the Solow-Swan model, it is notable that such claims are not even made (pro forma) as ceteris paribus judgments. (All the more striking because MacAskill co-authored a highly regarded work on moral uncertainty.)
In general, population ethics generates an unhealthy interest in other people’s reproductive choices. And so, it is no surprise that population ethics is repeatedly entangled in eugenics and race science. And folk who are attracted to this topic tend to take pride in their own steadfast ability to look cold facts into the eyes and their capacity for plain speaking. MacAskill himself is a lot more cautious, and treats such topics in terms of ‘fitness landscapes’ and organism’s and cultural ‘traits.’
The key issue is, of course, how MacAskill proposes to achieve the dominance of certain traits. When it comes to action MacAskill never explicitly suggests that others are directly forced to join in. (He is clearly more interested in building a voluntary social movement.) But it does not mean coercion is absent from the framework. For, MacAskill does promote “political activism” and “voting” (233) to get governments on board with his program. But he is not transparent about how much coercion governments can use subsequently to promote particular fitness landscapes alongside growing populations. (Here it does look like the ends will justify most means.)
Sometimes one is told that inattention to population ethics is also a (de facto) population policy. That’s true enough. But there is an also a cost (even an opportunity cost) involved in paying too much attention to population ethics. After all, most population ethicists of the past were unduly worried about the quality of other people’s children (the poor, the Irish, the Jews, etc.).
At first sight, MacAskill really does better: he phrases his claims primarily in terms of population size (more is better). In fact, throughout the book there is an argument for having more children. And this, in turn, is justified consequentially, “when children grow up they contribute to public goods through their taxes, they build infrastructure, and they develop and champion new ideas about how to live and how to structure society.” (187; he goes on to suggest that sufficiently good lives are also good for children (188)). It is worth noting that, alas, in some political contexts not all children of all political demographics are perceived as future taxpayers (in some contexts this might even count as a dog whistle).
In the text, MacAskill is explicit that governments should not “restrict people’s reproductive rights by…limiting access to contraception or banning abortion.” (188) But one need not be a careful logician to realize that this leaves it wide open for a community of longtermists or, if they can persuade them, governments to engage in population policies that either enhance the posited desirable traits of desirable children (that is, future tax payers, infrastructure builders, and idea generators) or privilege those sub-populations that are taken as would-be-good breeders for the desired fitness landscape. (The latter is not science fiction because parental ‘risk factors’ on the child’s future welfare are already often incorporated into, say, IVF policies.) One suspects MacAskill is strategically, even wisely, silent here.**
- This piece was first published at Digressionsnimpressions.
*In a footnote MacAskill acknowledges this about Haldane (p. 292).
+Trivial aside: I do wonder whether reflecting on SBF’s Bahamian apartment, Singer recalled Flavius Josephus on King Solomon’s palace: ” it is very hard to reckon up the magnitude, and the variety of the royal apartments; how many rooms there were of the largest sort; how many of a bigness inferior to those; and how many that were subterraneous and invisible; the curiosity of those that enjoyed the fresh air; and the groves for the most delightful prospect; for the avoiding the heat, and covering of their bodies.”
**It does not mean he has no interest in the topic as is witnessed by a paragraph on the regional variation of attitudes toward “new biomedical technologies such as cloning and genetic enhancement,” (62)
{ 101 comments }
Alex SL 01.13.23 at 8:46 pm
In general, population ethics generates an unhealthy interest in other people’s reproductive choices. And so, it is no surprise that population ethics is repeatedly entangled in eugenics and race science.
Quoting that here because to me it seems to be the perfect concise summary of the whole issue of this kind of ethics (using that term loosely). These people should frame these two sentences and put them up in their offices to look at a few times per day. Maybe then they might understand one day why so many others are repulsed and frightened by their ideology, as demonstrated yesterday with the reaction to Bostrom. Or maybe not.
Now, alas, for the rant.
The other worrying aspect, even if there was no eugenic element to their thinking, is that MacAskill and followers believe more population is always better at a time when our single species already makes up 2.5% of the animal biomass on the entire planet (note that the total includes >12,000 species of ants, all fish, corals, and animal plankton in the ocean, etc), plus nearly twice that again is taken up by our livestock; natural habitats are increasingly rare and fragmented by farms, cities, and roads, which will sooner or later drive most other land-living species to extinction even without climate change; despite all the growth in regenerative energies we recently set another CO2 emissions record, with only global economic crises causing a little blip every few years in that otherwise continuous trend towards civilisational collapse; our consumption and waste production are completely unsustainable; and even with all that most people on the planet have not yet attained first world living standards (i.e., consumption and waste production), but most of them would very much like to do so at the earliest opportunity.
This only works for him because, as mentioned before, he understands nothing and elegantly assumes that with a bit more research or maybe a benevolent super-AI problems like competing interests or hard, physical constraints can be STEM’d and armchair-philosophied away: if we were just smart enough, we could figure out within minutes how to have twenty-five or even thirty billion people live comfortably with resources that would just about allow ten billion to live in misery while wrecking their children’s future to maintain even only that misery. Oh, and of course all the other species don’t concern him, because he understands nothing, including, say, ecosystem services.
John Q 01.13.23 at 9:16 pm
A lot of these problems go away, or at least become tractable, if the objective is average utility/welfare[1] rather than total. In particular, there is no general reason why the decisions of families trying to promote their own average welfare should not be in line with the social objective.
There are plenty of specific reasons why this might happen. For example, inadequate public provision of education and child care is likely to reduce birth rates, absence of a retirement income system likely to increase rates. But these are among many illustrations the kinds of problems where private and social incentives differ.
The arguments against average utilitarianism (eg the space hermit) seem to me to miss the point pretty thoroughly. Average utilitarianism isn’t an individual ethical code or a way of evaluating the goodness of the universe, it’s a political philosophy. It’s concerned with the set of people who actually exist in a given society (bearing in mind that this set itself will be influenced by policy choices) and not about hypothetical people who don’t exist as a result of policy choices.
fn1. Leaving aside arguments about what “utility” and similar terms might mean for the moment.
J, not that one 01.13.23 at 10:30 pm
Reading this series of posts, it seems to me that McAskill says things that aren’t strictly true but might be useful if one wanted to start a discussion about certain things. Maybe it’s useful to think about the reasons philosophers can be categorized in ways that are strictly speaking inaccurate or misleading (say, excluding nonsecular population ethicists, because it leads us to a greater understanding of something else. But not surprisingly, they’re read as if they were academically impeccable pronouncements from on high, because after all, he’s an Oxford don and we respect expertise. The rest of have little choice, really, until someone like Eric Schliesser and someone of the same stature as McAskill are one and the same person. All we can do is flail in a “political” way, at best, and point out that McAskill ends up in the wrong place. Meanwhile McAskill is, as Alex points out, waiting for us to get smarter so we can work out the details. This seems to me to be a very dangerous state of affairs.
Of course, a truly conservative person might say that recognition of the triple-bind and its inevitability is the point.
steven t johnson 01.13.23 at 11:13 pm
Shrinking the population automatically threatens the continued existence of individuals cultures/nations. It seems plausible at first glance, cultural/national continuity requires a certain number of people in sum and in generational cohorts. Also, if as also seems plausible, a certain numerical predominance in a sufficient geographical area is the best guarantee of cultural/national survival, shrinking the population turns into a zero-sum game for all that people say they hold most dear.
Or to put it another way, in operation, eugenics is about fewer people of the wrong sort, so it is not at all clear that advocating fewer people with out specifying which are not to be reproduced genuinely avoids the eugenics problem. This seems to me to be true even if advocating population growth is somehow represented as eugenics.
Personally given my political sympathies an internationalist approach that puts other values above cultural/national survival in the old sense seems appealing. The long run goal of reducing such things to esthetic schools (riven by the seemingly endless clash between purists and syncretists?) seems attractive. But that’s a minority view of no interest to anyone else.
Matt 01.14.23 at 6:53 am
John Q has made this point in this thread, and some earlier ones: Average utilitarianism isn’t an individual ethical code or a way of evaluating the goodness of the universe, it’s a political philosophy. It’s concerned with the set of people who actually exist in a given society (bearing in mind that this set itself will be influenced by policy choices) and not about hypothetical people who don’t exist as a result of policy choices.
I’m sympathetic to this! But, I think that lots of people will see it as question begging. That’s because they are not just interested in what a particular government should do. (This is clearly the case of MacAskill, as the above discussion shows, but was also the case for Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick, [probably Smart, though I’m less sure], Singer, and Parfit.) If the project is to work out not a theory of government, or a political theory, but a comprehensive ethics, then making this move will seem like it simply ignores the important question. On these accounts, the point of a political philosophy is to find ways to best reach the goals of the underlying moral philosophy. But if the underlying moral philosophy favours some version or other of total utilitarianism, then any approach to government will be acceptable only insofar as it, too, promotes that. The reason why I’m somewhat sympathetic to JQ’s claim is that I don’t think it’s the proper role of government to promote a particular comprehensive moral theory, but of course that needs argument, not just fiat. The question can’t be answered by assuming it away.
John Q 01.14.23 at 10:48 am
Matt @5, Agree on Sidgwick ,Parfit and Singer, not on Bentham and Mill. From the Fragment on Government on, everything Bentham wrote is naturally interpreted in terms of public policy, and similarly with Mill. AFAIK, none of the early utilitarians considered the obvious problems with utilitarianism as a system of individual ethics, such as whether it’s inappropriate to place more weight on your own family than on strangers. Singer worries a lot about this, IIRC. But if you are talking about public policy, it’s taken for granted that nepotism is a bad thing.
Coming to MacAskill, I’ve taken him to be talking about public policy, rather than simply telling people to have more kids. But as Eric says, it’s a bit ambiguous.
engels 01.14.23 at 12:00 pm
none of the early utilitarians considered… whether it’s inappropriate to place more weight on your own family than on strangers… if you are talking about public policy, it’s taken for granted that nepotism is a bad thing
In the context of national policy there are issues about partiality towards citizens which are very similar in nature I think.
engels 01.14.23 at 12:51 pm
If population ethics generates an unhealthy interest in other people’s reproductivechoices does environmental ethics generate an unhealthy interest in their consumption choices or sexual ethics generate an unhealthy interest in their sex lives? This seems wrong to me. Each subfield is based on a recognition that consequences in a particular domain, or actions themselves, have implications for others that governments and societies can rightly seek to shape and constrain. Surely it it can pass over into prurience or noseyness but it’s not inherent to the topic.
J, not that one 01.14.23 at 7:23 pm
“ that I don’t think it’s the proper role of government to promote a particular comprehensive moral theory, but of course that needs argument, not just fiat. The question can’t be answered by assuming it away.”
Surely the burden of proof is on the other side. Existing governments don’t, in fact, claim to promote a particular comprehensive moral theory. The assumption that one’s own government does, carries with it an automatic assumption that one’s own morals are encoded in law, and that people one doesn’t like are criminals – not an appropriate attitude for a citizen of the modern world, and not one many people will appreciate encountering. If the claim of neutrality is suspected to be a lie, surely that is what requires argument.
Matt 01.14.23 at 9:47 pm
JQ wrote: gree on Sidgwick ,Parfit and Singer, not on Bentham and Mill. From the Fragment on Government on, everything Bentham wrote is naturally interpreted in terms of public policy, and similarly with Mill. AFAIK
That’s just not right on Bentham or Mill, insofar as you mean it not as what they spent a lot of time on, but on the extent of utilitarian obligations for them. Consider this, right from the start of the Principles of Morals and Legislation: “By the principle of utility is mean that principle which approes or disapproves of every action whatsoever , according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or dimishish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, waht is the same thing in other words, to promote or to oppose that happiness. I say of every eaction whatsoever; and therefore not only every action of a private individual , but of every measure of government.” (Chapter 1, sec. II). It’s clear that Bentham cares a lot about government policy, and with good reason. But it’s impossible to read this (and lots of other passages!) without seeing that he applies the principle of utility geneally, including to “every action of a private individual”.
The same is true of Mill. In On Liberty he spends a good deal of time talking about not just government action, but suppression of unusual opinion or action by “society” – that is, but private individuals, and argues that it’s bad. This is justified by the principle of utility. There are several examples in Utilitarianism, too, and even more so in The Subjection of Women, where it’s “private” family life he’s especially interested in. So, while both are, rightly, deeply concerned with public policy, it’s just false that they don’t extend their views to individiaul actions and people – in fact, it’s only because of the power of government to impact over-all utility that they care so much about it.
(And of course Sidgwick wrote as much or more about public policy as he did “personal” ethics.)
J, not that one – I’m afriad your comment is not really lining up with the point I was trying to make, so I’m not sure what to say to it.
Alex SL 01.14.23 at 10:30 pm
steven t johnson,
I agree that this kind of dynamic where a behaviour that is harmful to humanity or global ecosystems as a whole is rational for a single nation or even a single human in competition with others of their kind is at the root of many of our problems, and also with your suggested solution.
But surely it is self-evidently ridiculous to say that person A’s observation that our problems would be more manageable if we were fewer in number is eugenic because some other person B somewhere else could say, against person A’s protests, that other races should have fewer children while their own race should have more. It is no more logical than to say that I am sexist for observing that biological women as opposed to men bear children because some other guy, against my protests, might say that therefore women should not be allowed to have jobs.
It must be possible to state facts without being lumped in with whoever is the worst bigot who happens to agree with the statement. Otherwise the only facts that one can still safely state are any that everybody on the far right rejects.
John Q 01.15.23 at 1:18 am
Matt @10 I don’t think the argument works wrt Mill. Except for Margaret Thatcher, “Society” isn’t “private individuals”; it’s the community acting collectively, but not through government. Mill was concerned that social pressure might inhibit freedom of speech and thought even if government didn’t – still a live issue today.
As for Bentham, your quote suggests that he thought of maximising utility as being an appropriate goal for individual morality as well as for government, but as far as I can tell, he didn’t worry much about the implications, let alone engage in any active advocacy for personal utilitarianism,.
Finally, both Bentham and Mill were (with some qualifications) Malthusians. That only makes sense if you are worried about average utility, as our current debate shows.
John Q 01.15.23 at 4:28 am
Looking for common ground with Matt, I agree that for lots of people “the project is to work out not a theory of government, or a political theory, but a comprehensive ethics,” Viewed as a theory of individual ethics, utilitarianism is both excessively narrow (in its conception of the good), and inhumanly demanding (in its demand for perfect and impartial altruism). But these problems largely dissipate in the context of political theory. Impartiality is generally accepted as a good thing, and so (to a large extent) is the view that individuals should be the best judge of what is good for them personally.
John Q 01.15.23 at 4:33 am
And this ambiguity seems to be a crucial part of the problem with McAskill/Bostrom. Are they saying that we are each, individually, obliged to bring into existence as many of our infinite set of potential descendants as possible? If so, they seem to be setting a poor example (one child between them, AFAICT), reflecting the fact that most people don’t find the idea of a large, poor family appealing for themselves, whatever they may think about other people’s choices.
Or are they saying governments should pursue pro-natalist policies? In this case, we are back with the question of whether a utilitarian public policy should aim at maximising total rather than average utility.
Alan White 01.15.23 at 7:02 am
I have long thought that nothing rivals hedonism + utilitarianism as a basis for a reasonable ethics. Ethics requires two things: (i) an account of intrinsic good(s) that ground theory, and (ii) an instrumental means of implementing that. There are two serious contenders. One is Kantian, in which (i) is rational personhood and (ii) is the second formulation of the categorical imperative. The problem with that is that his (i) seems self-serving in its source (like Kant himself), and that with his (ii) the second formulation is an expression of emphasizing ends over means in an almost utilitarian fashion. But the second contender, Bentham/Mill/Singer utilitarianism, of course agrees that only ends count intrinsically as with Kant, but extends the concept of intrinsic good to the larger moral sphere of all sentient beings (with Mill naturally extending things beyond mere sentience, but equally including that) as (i), and some form of the greatest (i) for the greatest number as (ii), with the former “greatest” interpreted quantitatively (Bentham) or qualitatively (Mill/Singer). A world without sentience at all seems morally mute, literally and figuratively, and so with this overlap between Kant and the utilitarians, I have to go with sentient hedonism of some form. What else could possibly qualify for being intrinsically worthy, and how else except for some kind of Kantian/utilitarian universalization can we get to an ethical theory that extends beyond the individual? (Unless there are Vulcans, of course, to pry apart sentience from feeling, which I acknowledge as logically possible.)
Bruno 01.15.23 at 9:45 am
In this suffocatingly masculine space, it’s quite breathtaking how simple ethical notions, such as the needs of women and children for social responsibility to be taken for health, education, security, justice, freedom from fear of destitution, war, are ignored. And could be achieved by men standing down from positions of power and ceasing to dominate ethical discussion.
reason 01.15.23 at 10:52 am
John Q – not average utility – median utility surely?
engels 01.15.23 at 1:49 pm
I haven’t read MacAskill but people here seem to be confusing two ideas: one is that there will be lots of future people and their interests matter more than most present people realise, the other is that we should seek to bring this about, or maximise their number. Afaik the first is central to MacAskill’s thought, the second has nothing to do with it afaik.
steven t johnson 01.15.23 at 3:43 pm
Alex SL@11 “In general, population ethics generates an unhealthy interest in other people’s reproductive choices. And so, it is no surprise that population ethics is repeatedly entangled in eugenics and race science.” Person A here claims that Person B’s advocacy of population growth somehow implicates B in eugenics even though fewer people of the wrong kind is eugenics. Person A simply ignores any differences in which populations get shrunk—which, again, is what eugenics is about—which is handwaving. Sorry, I think that is more self-evidently ridiculous than pointing out shrinking populations automatically entails eugenics programs.
You cannot criticize a pro-growth population stance as eugenic while advocating your own unacknowledged eugenics programs. I suspect that a sane society may well move toward a smaller population but advocating fewer people without saying, which fewer people, is shady.
The imaginary example, that it’s ridiculous to say that the biological women have babies can’t justify other men saying that they can’t have other jobs? Condemning women to have babies is oppression, according to the renowned feminist writer Joanna Russ. (See her novel “….we who are about to…” Motherhood like marriage is rape institutionalized?
This series on McAskill is useful in teaching me I don’t need to read the book.
Also, a human rights regime? The primary human right acknowledged by the cultures/nations of the world today is property. For obvious reasons, most proponents of human rights regimes don’t want to analyze the issue any more than Person A wants to analyze the eugenics issues intrinsic to shrinking populations.
Lastly, all sensible ethics are utilitarian, as there are no valid authorities for deontological ethics. It’s always the ends that justify the means and only reactionaries think differently. (I would add that ends and means transform into one another in the contradictions of real life, but that’s probably smacks too much of dialectics to be acceptable.) The whether total or average or median utility seems not to exhaust the analytical difficulties. Aside from the aforementioned role of property as a utility, there are the issues of transitivity of categories of utility (agency versus wealth for example.) There’s also the commensurability of individual utilities (try measuring interpersonal utility of sexual services in a polygynous marriage, for example.) But most of all there’s the problem that the equality of individuals is not assumed, even though there’s no scientific evidence for invidious distinction of any kinds of groups. Market equality, where any person’s money is as good as the other’s, is not at all the same thing, I believe.
Thomas Jørgensen 01.15.23 at 8:20 pm
The entire eugenics debate should be thoroughly invalidated by the looming inevitability of Genetic Engineering.
If we assume human civilization is going to survive on an well organized footing for long enough for any eugenic efforts to do anything at all, then over the same timescale it becomes inevitable that the technological short cut of just rewriting the code directly gets taken. Someone is going to legalize it and work out the bugs. The political consensus against doing this simply cannot hold up over multiple centuries on a planet wide scale and once the kinks have been worked out it will spread.
Breeding programs are slow. Even with absolute control over who has children with who, which seems very unlikely when talking about human beings ! They take many generations.
Technological intervention gets results in one. Or less, if you manage to “retro-fit” the already born.
John Q 01.15.23 at 8:55 pm
Should mention that my former ANU colleague Bob Goodin makes all my points, much better, in Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy
Patrick S. O'Donnell 01.15.23 at 9:30 pm
Thanks to John Q for mentioning Goodin’s book, which I think has been unduly neglected, in part because of its explicit utilitarianism (although there are possible and necessary constraints on same as Goodin makes clear). I am not a utilitarian (accounts of which of course range from the fairly crude to the more sophisticated, especially those of the welfarist variety), but do think democratic government/governance often cannot avoid utilitarian considerations (which are not reducible to cost/benefit calculations, even if these are part of the equation) in public policy, a view I finally arrived at after reading his book. And, for what it is worth, I think utilitarianism is not viable for individual ethics or ways of life/living but more than plausible or reasonable with regard to achieving public goods of sundry sorts. I would, however, hope that politicians as legislators and judges alike bring to their endeavors additional moral and value considerations (associated with, say, individual dignity, moral psychological autonomy, the pursuit of justice, an overlapping consensus with regard to the Good, and so forth, even if such considerations are not as amenable to ex post facto and other evaluative exercises) than those circumscribed by utilitarianism as a public philosophy.
Patrick S. O'Donnell 01.15.23 at 11:42 pm
I have not read all the posts in this series and I might have missed its mention but why cannot we shift the presuppositions and assumptions of population ethics (agreeing to its disagreeable if not morally repugnant features) to those found under the rubric of intergenerational justice or simply intergenerational welfare (economics) either one of which might include the natural world as well?
MisterMr 01.15.23 at 11:55 pm
I think that we shouldn’t look at the total sum of utility, nor at the average, but to the quadratical mean of single utilities, multiplied for the total population, discounted by a temporal rate equal to the average duration of a generation divide by the square root of love.
This is sarcasm obviously. While utilitarianism frames stuff as a sum of utilities, there is a question of why should I care about other people’s utility to begin with. From a different point of view, there are some people who have title for a right, and this right is that I care for their utility. So who has this right? Do unborn children have this right? Do dolphins? Do Jews? What about women?
These are not questions that depend on the choice of a mathematical function over the other (plus we cannot really count utility, so utility calculus will allways be fuzzy).
engels 01.16.23 at 12:55 am
“Nothing to do with it” (total utilitarianism) was probably too emphatic based on my limited knowledge but here’s MacAskill on the differences between effective altruism and utilitarianism:
Alex SL 01.16.23 at 1:12 am
steven t johnson,
Either I do not understand what population ethics is, or you are twisting my words. I am not claiming that being in favour of population growth is eugenics, but being in favour of shrinking population is not. Neither of them are eugenics, of course, it is just that infinite growth is insanity on a finite world with finite resources.
But, and here is where I may be going wrong, I thought that population ethics is more than just number should go up, or maybe I should just say that I would be surprised if number should go up is a complete subfield of ethics, just like more pineapples isn’t generally considered sufficient to describe an entire subfield of agricultural research; it would need to deal with a few more details than that, such as soil and climate parameters, fertilisers, supply chain logistics, labour availability, etc.
In this case, a key aspect seem to be people’s motivations for either pop shrinking or pop growing. What motivates people who want us to shrink our collective population size? Worry that we are overusing resources (or, in other words, population will go down anyway one day, but it would be nice if it goes down gently because of condoms instead of going down brutally because of mass starvation, wars, and plagues once 12 billion people try to live on 5 billion people’s worth of resources and there have been three bad harvests in a row) and/or worry that we are driving many other species to extinction. Nothing there implies ‘fewer of that kind of person in particular’.
But what motivates people who want us to grow our collective population size? I can’t say I really understand them, because I do not think that the number of future people enters any moral calculus in the first place. (I.e., we should leave the world in a good place for those who we can assume will follow us, but we have no moral duty to ensure personally that they come into existence.) But it seems pretty clear that their motivation isn’t the opposite of the first group, “let’s overuse resources” or “let’s drive all other land mammals to extinction muhahaha”, which would likewise carry no implications for what kind of people should come into existence.
Instead, they believe that an additional person adds value to the world, and they have to, because that is the only way of getting to their conclusion. If that is one’s motivation, it is extremely difficult not to get tangled up in considerations of what value this or that person or mind has or contributes in comparison to a different kind of mind or person. In marked contrast to the shrinking stance, which is completely orthogonal to those questions.
And that is exactly what happens. When these kinds of EA, futurist, long-termist, transhumanist people do population ethics, they do variously end up with ideas like future transhuman or simulated minds being superior to our inferior current existences, which therefore then not only will but morally should go the way of the Dodo, or how it is important to encourage children being born that provide maximal value to the world and discourage children being born that provide less value, and also (Bostrom kerfuffle) “by the way black people have lower IQ that’s not racism that’s just science* and hey let’s just very carefully place that idea next to the previous one on that list and see what people conclude why are looking at me like that help the woke are coming after me”.
On the other hand, although every environmental activist saying there are unsustainably many humans or that we are pushing other species against the wall is immediately accused of being racist, I have actually yet to see one of them say anything that makes that interpretation plausible. Every one I have seen thinks in terms of a humanity as a whole and wants to use the levers of access to contraceptives, empowerment of women, and empathy with other lifeforms. To a degree that is, of course, because these are the kind of people I would be following.
*) Narrator’s voice: it isn’t.
engels 01.16.23 at 1:12 am
As I understand it (and as I’ve already noted, I probably don’t) long termism attaches over-riding importance to improving the likelihood of the continued existence of humanity because of the moral goods that it believes (not unreasonably) to be dependent on that condition; that doesn’t seem to me to entail an imperative to maximise population size, especially in the near term, and might entail its negative.
steven t johnson 01.16.23 at 11:33 am
Alex SL@26 says the claim is, neither population growth advocacy nor population shrinking entails eugenics. My comments were directed against the proposition in the OP that population growth advocates of “population ethics” do entail eugenics/eugenics adjacent thinking. It was not clear that Alex SL disagreed with the OP in this regard.
Nonetheless I still see an asymmetry between the two: People advocating population growth indeed cannot logically be accused of necessarily advocating the differential growth of groups. If all groups grow in numbers it’s not eugenics. But—despite the claim shrinking the population is “completely orthogonal”—when populations decline, omitting to explain how all groups are to decline proportionately yet none are to decline beneath a reproductive minimum is handwaving away the eugenics. Again, eugenics is shrinking the population of bad groups, which is why population shrinking does necessarily entail eugenics of some kind.
It is I suppose the city dwellers who have no roots in nature who should go? Agrarians have long threatened that grass will grow in the streets of cities, after all. But the unkind persons will wonder if the connection to nature is first of all, a deed title to land?
As to whether I understand population ethics? I don’t even see how this is connected to transhumanism, so evidently I don’t.
reason 01.16.23 at 12:47 pm
It occurred to me that it might be good to point out that almost nobody is really a pure utilitarian based on observed behaviour. If we were we would all be pushing drugs and a brave new world type of existence. But we don’t. We actually value other things.
engels 01.16.23 at 1:52 pm
This is what a eugenicist looks like
TM 01.16.23 at 2:52 pm
I don’t understand the use of the term “population ethics” instead of “population politics” or probably most fitting”biopolitics”.
TM 01.16.23 at 3:53 pm
stj: “Nonetheless I still see an asymmetry between the two: People advocating population growth indeed cannot logically be accused of necessarily advocating the differential growth of groups. If all groups grow in numbers it’s not eugenics. But—despite the claim shrinking the population is “completely orthogonal”—when populations decline, omitting to explain how all groups are to decline proportionately yet none are to decline beneath a reproductive minimum is handwaving away the eugenics.”
I cannot make any sense of this. Are you concerned that Italians or Japanese will go extinct because their birth rates are so low? If that is your concern, you have joined the racist club.
TM 01.16.23 at 4:47 pm
Alex: “But what motivates people who want us to grow our collective population size?”
Pro-natalists in my experience mostly argue from two perspectives. The first is economic: without population growth, there will be labor shortages and pension shortfalls (dumb misperceptions promoted by pro-corporate, mostly right wing thinktanks and dutifully parroted by statistics challenged mainstream journalists, that totally ignore the relevance of productivity and labor force participation rate). The second is international competition. In its crudest form this is the old racist fear that those of the wrong skin color are “outbreeding us”. When I did some work on sustainability and demographics a few years ago, I was shocked how widespread old-fashioned mercantilist thinking still is, see quotes below. The good news is that pro-natalist propaganda (absent actually coercive state measures) has proven mostly ineffective. Wherever people are in the position to make their own reproductive choices freely, they opt on average for few children. Nobody seems inclined to subordinate their own family planning to any perceived national interest.
The claim that population increase is an ethical good in itself, or even an ethical imperative – regardless of resource constraints – is new to me. If that is indeed MacAskill’s position, it’s hard to overstate its foolishness.
Joel Kotkin “400 Million People Can’t Be Wrong”:
“the United States has recently developed a key strategic advantage versus most other countries in the world: the U.S. population is growing,… , while a significant number of other large countries have declining populations… the United States should be able to exploit its vibrant demography to assure its preeminence over the next four decades”
http://joelkotkin.com/00209-beyond-census-americas-demographic-advantage/
Cf. https://www.slideshare.net/amenning/the-human-population-challenge 46-62
Mercantilism
“Mercantilists and the absolute rulers who dominated many states of Europe saw each nation’s population as a form of national wealth: the larger the population, the richer the nation. Large populations provided a larger labour supply, larger markets, and larger (and hence more powerful) armies for defense and for foreign expansion. Moreover, since growth in the number of wage earners tended to depress wages, the wealth of the monarch could be increased by capturing this surplus. In the words of Frederick II the Great of Prussia, “the number of the people makes the wealth of states.” Similar views were held by mercantilists in Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. For the mercantilists, accelerating the growth of the population by encouraging fertility and discouraging emigration was consistent with increasing the power of the nation or the king. Most mercantilists, confident that any number of people would be able to produce their own subsistence, had no worries about harmful effects of population growth. (To this day similar optimism continues to be expressed by diverse schools of thought, from traditional Marxists on the left to “cornucopians” on the right.)”
https://www.britannica.com/science/population-biology-and-anthropology/Geographical-distribution-and-urbanization#ref60680
LFC 01.16.23 at 5:32 pm
Sorry if this repeats the substance of some some earlier comments — I haven’t read the whole thread w care.
I don’t see how one can purport to make a general argument that “more (population) is better” (which, according to the OP, MacAskill does) without considering, among other things, (1) the demographic facts about fertility and replacement and pop growth rates in different parts of the world, (2) facts about environmental degradation, non-human-species extinction, and in general the effects of population pressure on the natural environment, which in turn affects rates of absolute poverty and quality of life (e.g., severe drought means that herders and shepherds can’t make a living bc their animals die en masse, also affects small farmers among others), (3) the scope of the current refugee and displacement situation, for which the term “crisis” seems very appropriate: see e.g. here and here.
And the argument that more pop is better bc it will mean more taxpayers, builders of infrastructure, and generators of ideas is absurd bc, even in the richer countries, not all people become taxpayers and/or generators of ideas, and certainly not all build infrastructure. Either the OP is not representing MacAskill’s arguments accurately, or the level of his argumentation is laughably bad.
LFC 01.16.23 at 8:42 pm
To clarify one part of my previous comment: Severe drought is not a function of population growth itself but an effect of climate change, largely caused by behavior in richer countries but having its most destructive impact in poorer ones. But the prescription for more overall pop growth still seems not the right one.
Alex SL 01.16.23 at 10:38 pm
steven t johnson,
This is really odd. Now you are doing exactly what you criticised before but the other way around. No, somebody who wants fewer humans but sees humans as homogeneous class without superior or inferior subclasses is clearly not a eugenicist. Also, as TM points out, what groups are you referring to that would disappear if population shrank to, say, 20% of its current size? To the best of my knowledge the Bantu, the Maori, and the Sami all existed when global population was under one billion, so why would they disappear if one were to return to that number? (Except to the degree that cultures change over the centuries, and I must admit I find it unethical to try and freeze cultures in stasis by e.g. restricting intermarriage.) Or are you thinking of a particular village of 500 people?
TM,
Agreed, those are the usual nationalist pro-natalists, and to be fair, they are probably much more politically influential than the globally- (or even galactic-scale-)thinking futurists at the focus of this thread.
TM 01.17.23 at 8:49 am
“Population Falls in China, Heralding a Demographic Crisis”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/16/business/china-birth-rate.html
1.4 billion Chinese are simply not enough to make all the consumer goods the world needs. Clearly, Chinese women need to be coaxed into having more babies. (But they probably won’t because they have reasons for their reproductive choices).
“‘A Cautionary Tale’: An Arizona Suburb’s Water Is Cut Off”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/16/us/arizona-water-rio-verde-scottsdale.html
Arizona’s population doubled in 30 years, water sources didn’t magically double. Pointing that out is, what, eugenicism?
roger gathmann 01.17.23 at 9:01 am
You would think that history should count a lot if we are discussing pro-natalist policies. As I understand it, utilitarianism embraces a consequentialist ethos, and thus, since the past is a vast minefield of consequences, if we want to advocate pro-natalist policies, maybe we look back at past periods when such policies were openly advocated? Mazower’s Dark Continent – his history of Europe in the twentieth century – has a very fine chapter that takes off from the interwar anxiety about population decline (and contains such suggestive nuggets as this one: Richard Koherr, who wrote a Weimar tract entitled Geburtenruckgang, all about the German crisis, later went on to produce statistics for Himmler about the elimination of the Jews). Surprise surprise, the anxiety about declining birthrates was accompanied, in the thirties, by ever more stringent bans on abortion and birth control. Who woulda thought? Of course, intellectuals, paid to not think, are discussing our need for more “population” in the shadow of the overturning of Roe rights in the U.S. as though that is happening in another world, one where people aren’t having a good, healthy discussion about Derek Parfiitt. In spite of Mussolini trying to develop policies that would guarantee a nice 11 children (Italian of course) from Italian women, the birthrate actually started dropping in Italy. In Mazower’s po-faced prose: “Across Europe, the wishes of the state and women remained far apart.” The pro-natalist welfare policies tried out in Scandinavian countries did not, according to Mazower, effect population growth either. The post-war population boom was followed by a decline in births, under the same legal regime. All the talk about population growth is, to my mind, just a sotto voce way of suggesting that women get back into line as breeders. It is not just an accident that some of the big proponents of population growth – like the Oxford philosophers Macaskill and Bostrom, or like the comic EA friendly substacker Matt Yglesias – think their own households of one child are just fine. The interest in “other people’s babies” boils down to, really, the interest in keeping women in the breeding line. Cause the “other people” who have wombs just happen to be women. So: when are EA-ists gonna make their doctrine more fun, and suggest a holiday to celebrate June 24 – the day we turned around that horrible Roe stuff and got back to breeding for our infinitely valuable future! Or is that too… utilitarian?
steven t johnson 01.17.23 at 5:02 pm
TM@32 ignores the part about reproductive minimum, then pretends to misunderstand. And agrees with the OP that pronatalism is eugenicist/eugenicist adjacent, despite the fact that growth of population is not eugenics.
Alex SL@36 believes humanity is homogeneous. I believe humanity is essentially homogeneous. Current differences in culture/nationality however will continue to play a role. Alex SL may imagine that a simple decree will suffice to shrink all populations and any resistance to differences in the results will simply be…crushed? I believe a socialist society will have a great task to undertake in devising laws of population that are just but I am not ignoring the problem. The abstract wish for fewer people without addressing the real issues is empty chatter. It doesn’t even contribute to a debate because it ignores the real issues.
For examples, Alex SL asks “Also, as TM points out, what groups are you referring to that would disappear if population shrank to, say, 20% of its current size?” Bantu is a language family, not a people, by the way. But if the economies of Finland and New Zealand shrank by 80%, the ability of the real live Sami and Maori people would in fact have their existence as it is now much harder to reproduce.
Now I might think that their culture is going to change anyhow and that in the long run it is up to them to add their contribution to the common human culture. But of course, the bourgeois commitment to intellectual property rights means that sort of thing is cultural appropriation and entirely unacceptable. And frankly, the survival of island cultures, whether oceans or mountains, would indeed be imperilled. And I might think the genetic purity of the Sami and the Maori is probably mostly imaginary and trivial insofar as it is real (there’s a reason why descent groups are traced using junk DNA instead of DNA responsible for phenotype traits.)
But equally I think a general distaste for people doesn’t wish away the problems in shrinking the population. And worse, pretending there aren’t such problems tacitly ignores the eugenicist/eugenicist-adjacent forces that do actually exist.
Discussing mercantilism instead of Zionism and China’s One Child policy seems to be more about trying to excuse capitalism by pointing at another villain. And the whole discussion of natalism seems to forget that having children has something to do with surviving old age. That’s not the BS about enough young people to pay the Social Security. The problem would really be, the young people aren’t being paid enough now, after too many old people weren’t paid enough through their working lives. But if you shrink the population by 80%, there are likely going to be real issues of insufficient numbers of people.
People struggling over a shrinking economy is a real problem. We see it already in the short term in periods of mass unemployment. Saying the problem is people who aren’t wanting to wish away billions the worst because, eugenics (like the OP basically does,) is obfuscation, or at best confusion.
TM 01.18.23 at 8:32 am
stj 39: “TM@32 ignores the part about reproductive minimum, then pretends to misunderstand. And agrees with the OP that pronatalism is eugenicist/eugenicist adjacent, despite the fact that growth of population is not eugenics.”
I don’t “ignore the part about reproductive minimum”, I explicitly state that I can’t make sense of it. I don’t at 32 say anything about eugenicism. Unfortunately your comments are often like that and for that reason I rarely engage with them.
engels 01.18.23 at 1:34 pm
Has anyone thought of setting up an Effective Anti-Capitalism (I know, confusing initials) movement that encourages high-flying graduates to go into banking, consulting, law, etc for the purpose of sabotage?
LFC 01.18.23 at 1:52 pm
stj @39 refers to Zionism. I’m not sure what Zionism has to do w this discussion. Even if stj is using the word incorrectly to be synonymous w Israeli govt policy, I still don’t see the direct relevance to the issues raised, in however non-straightforward a way, by the OP.
stj makes a glancing reference to unemployment. It might be worth noting that very high rates of unemployment or underemployment esp for young people (i.e. in 20s and even older) exist in many countries in various parts of the world, e.g. across much of the Middle East just to mention one region. Whether one attributes this to capitalism, as stj presumably would, or to more specific dysfunctions in these economies and polities, or to some complicated mix of factors best analyzed by specialists conversant w the data, it’s not clear that the problem has much to do w demography, except in the general sense that many of these are very “young” societies. (Somewhat separately, there also is still a bias toward male vs female children in various societies.)
Lastly, it’s not clear that discussion of demography and even the “management” of population has anything necessarily to do w eugenics. It wd help to look at the (infamous) writing of eugenics advocates from the early 20th cent ( e.g. Lothrop Stoddard or Madison Grant) to put this in context.
steven t johnson 01.18.23 at 8:35 pm
LFC@42 seems to think Zionism was a sentimental journey. The claim of course was that statehood was necessary for survival of a people/race/religion/culture/language. And that does bear directly on the arguments for shrinking the population, namely how to ensure a proportional shrinkage doesn’t change the balance. I would say that’s more of a non-issue than most would say, but since most disagree with me, I—unlike the OP and others—am reluctant to ally with others who see an opportunity in the crissis.
The reference to mass unemployment was to remind people that shrinking economies cause huge social strains, to say the least. Getting rid of 80% of the population is shrinking the economy with a vengeance. That is after all the whole point of getting rid of all those people. And the inevitable outcome, thus the prescription of the population shrinkers, will be sharply intensified conflicts on an even greater scale. If you want to get rid of so many people, answering the simple question, “Which people?” is elementary political honesty. Evading the question, isn’t.
It was, lest we forget, the OP that ventured to connect population growth with eugenics/eugenics adjacent thinkers and planners. Eugenics is the shrinking of the population of the wrong sorts of people, fewer such births. Population growth is by definition not shrinking any population, of any sort, more births of the wrong sort. Therefore it is impossible to say population growth is in and of itself eugenics/eugenics adjacent. Every attempt to conjoin eugenics and population growth has to either add on imaginary crises in cultural/national survival or straightforwardly posit a future of permanent conflict of cultures/nations.
By contrast, every attempt to shrink the population, especially by the numbers desired, really does require fewer births. That the process of eugenics, which is why population shrinking really does require some address to eugenics/eugenics adjacent programs. The population shrinkers are offended by the question rather than concerned with the answer.
But probably the comment by TM@40 pretending not to understand is the only feasible rebuttal. Furnishing an explanation is to no avail when the hostile interrogator refuses to furnish an understanding.
Alex SL 01.18.23 at 11:00 pm
stephen t johnson,
I find it difficult to understand how growing would have no eugenic implications if shrinking does. Your only argument for the latter is that populations may shrink differentially. Well, they may also grow differentially, and they may even differentially fluctuate while the sum is constant, and in both cases the same logic would apply. Apart from that, you mention minimum reproductive levels, but again, that’s estimated to be around 200 people (assuming inbreeding is the issue – if we are talking culture, it would be one family willing to hang onto a language, clothing style, and recipes), so not really a consideration that applies to anything but individual villages.
But well, I have made my arguments above. I would be more interested, if the thread doesn’t get closed down soon and you are ready to do so, if you could expand on your own position beyond “people who urge everybody to do family planning because they worry about a future of starvation and war if population grows too much are really just eugenicists”.
What do you think is the standard of wealth and living we should all aim for, on a scale from garbage collector in a shanty town with a contaminated well as the only water supply to six-bedroom mansion, three luxury cars, and two overseas holidays per year?
How much space do you think we should leave for other species/biodiversity, on a scale from trying to maintain most of the planet as natural areas to converting everything into intensively-managed farms and densely packed towns, so that the only land-living species that remain are a few pests, weeds, livestock, pets, pot plants, and crops?
At your preferred level of wealth and biodiversity, what do you think is the sustainable global population number*, to the nearest billion?
Once you have estimated your own number, I assume you will want humanity to remain just under it, because exceeding it leads to some combination of undesirable human misery and permanent loss of biodiversity beyond your preferences. How would you achieve that, on a scale from gas chambers to education and provision of contraceptives?
What would you think of people who, when you answer “education and provision of contraceptives”, nonetheless conclude that you are a racist, because clearly the only non-racist thing to do is to grow global population to infinity?
If your estimated sustainable number is infinity, how does that work, given that everything from arable soil to sweet water is limited? Are you aware that starting from today’s level, a mere few percent of economic growth over a few centuries would see sufficient waste heat from mechanical and electric processes that the oceans would boil off? Or are you thinking in terms of settling other solar systems? (This paragraph is where MacAskill comes in again, of course, because he and his lot are this kind of cornucopian: if we were smart enough, we could ignore physics, biology, distances, time.)
*) For the record, my own is somewhere between one and two, mostly because I would everybody, including those today still living in poverty and with food insecurity, to be able to live in comfort without wrecking the world through doing so, and in fact I am not optimistic about selling the idea of living frugally to people without dystopian-levels of enforcement. But if everybody is happy to live rather more frugally and we all turned vegetarian, we might get away with a bit more.
engels 01.19.23 at 12:27 am
My two chromosomes on the eugenics debate is that eugenics means trying to “improve” the human “stock”, which can be attempted by encouraging “superior” groups to breed or preventing “inferior” groups from breeding (or living) and both could be consistent with overall population growth or decline (a one child policy would be a way to shrink the population without eugenics; financial incentives for tall blonde people to have lots of children would be a eugenicist way to grow it).
TM 01.19.23 at 10:25 am
The OP says:
“In general, population ethics generates an unhealthy interest in other people’s reproductive choices. And so, it is no surprise that population ethics is repeatedly entangled in eugenics and race science.”
This is generally true but to turn this into an argument against MacAskill, imho the OP needs to be more specific about how MacAskill’s philosophy is “entangled in eugenics and race science”.
On the face of it, just advocating for global population growth/shrinkage is neutral. But in the real world, populations obviously do grow/ shrink differentially:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate
Which is precisely the reason why white nationalists/racists freak out about the prospect of whites being “outbred”/”replaced” by brown people, and which is the main motivation behind most calls for pro-natalism. The less obviously racist version is to lament the differential low fertility especially of the more educated people (or the more developed countries) – here we get close to the thinking of the original eugenicists. I don’t know whether this applies to MacAskill. I happen to think that the light yellow areas on that map are good and not bad news. I’d like to see them expand.
Coming back to stj: “Eugenics is the shrinking of the population of the wrong sorts of people, fewer such births. Population growth is by definition not shrinking any population, of any sort, more births of the wrong sort.”
Eugenics can involve both the “shrinking of the population of the wrong sorts of people” and the growth of the population of the “right sorts of people”. To leave out the second part is dishonest.
stj also claims that population decline will cause mass unemplyoment and “sharply intensified [economic] conflicts on an even greater scale”. I cannot make sense of this either. The more people there are the easier it will be to satisfy their economic needs? Sounds counterintuitive. Sounds like magic thinking, really.
TM 01.19.23 at 11:11 am
Do I need to mention that this “more people = good for the economy” is empirically utterly untenable (but still amazingly influential)?
India should be far more prosperous than Switzerland. Not the case.
Ok perhaps we need population density not raw number?
But then Bangladesh should be prosperous and Canada poor. Not the case.
Ok it’s not the population level, it’s the growth rate.
But then Angola should be prosperous and Japan poor.
We need to be more sophisticated: Instead of the crude growth rate, perhaps what matters is the right demographic structure, wide at the base and narrow at the top?
But again, most of the countries with the kind of population pyramid that demographers think is desirable (expansive) are poor, and most of the rich countries have stationary or constrictive population structures.
engels 01.19.23 at 1:28 pm
The natalism debate is really missing the basic point for total utilitarians that happiness = good so more people = better (as long as they’re reasonably happy).
If you want to talk about house prices or whatever instead you need to either (a) explain why this logic is wrong or (b) why it will have such an impact as to lower aggregate happiness. Otherwise you’re just talking past them.
engels 01.19.23 at 2:28 pm
The idea that we shouldn’t talk or think about population issues when designing policy because some Bad People do this (and/or because it creates theoretical problems for utilitarianism) is about the dumbest possible approach to all this it is possible to come up with.
MisterMr 01.19.23 at 3:13 pm
@TM 47
“Do I need to mention that this “more people = good for the economy” is empirically utterly untenable (but still amazingly influential)?”
There are various studiers that show that a lower population growth (not a low number of people in absolute terms) is bad for the economy becuse it discourages investiment.
I blame this on capitalism honestly, however it is a keynesian/underconsumption thingie, not a quantity of resources thingie.
steven t johnson 01.19.23 at 4:42 pm
ALex SL@”…if you could expand on your own position beyond ‘people who urge everybody to do family planning because they worry about a future of starvation and war if population grows too much are really just eugenicists.'”
But that’s not my position: My position is that population shrinkers are not only ignoring the necessary question, which population groups shrink, they won’t even admit there are eugenics/eugenics adjacent programs which advocate shrinking populations. Instead, like the OP, they project this onto population growth advocates (or even neutralists who don’t advocate restricted population.) They seem to me to be inviting a tactical or even strategic alliance with eugenics/eugenics adjacent forces with a politic silence. And lastly, my position on family planning is that not being able to afford children is the number one driver, which is why the developed countries tend to have lower birth rates. (Yes, I am aware this last is a divergent opinion.)
Your observation that differential change in populations can occur in net growth if correct…but the eugenicists’ imaginary problem of interbreeding the “good” with the “bad” is left. The purity of the good is always threatened by the existence of the bad and that is why population growth is not eugenics/eugenics adjacent, absent the surreptitious addition of false facts, like the imaginary threats to a culture/nation. It is not eugenics if it doesn’t get rid of the bad group.
I don’t think descent group purity is an issue (to put it crudely, miscegenation is just people having sex in my view…but I am fully aware that many people find this objectionable.) So the genetic minimum of 200 non-related people, even though I suspect that’s harder to find in low population density areas than you might think, I view as irrelevant. But I do find the notion any group of 200 can be comfortably assumed to be economically viable hard to swallow.
Similarly, the notion that a single family can perpetuate a language/culture strikes me as depending on a falsely view of culture as a mental phenomenon, rather than a way of life. It certainly is a sign of a dying language. [The issue of mechanical translation and the survival of languages is interesting but too far above my head, I suspect.] If “culture” is a psychological process, I don’t believe we can be sure “culture” is continuous from one person to another even within the same generation. Even worse, this presumes a conceptual distinction between “culture” and nation that has some kind of inarguable reality that will drive people. Sorry, no, people will and many, many do conflate the two.
Most your specific questions I don’t dare answer. I tend to cheat in making comments by trying to restrict myself to topics to which I know something if only that I’ve thought about them a lot. But I don’t know enough to even guess at numbers. I think the current capitalist production system is so warped and distorted that the actual carrying capacity of the world biosphere is unknown. I think that it is probably already beyond what the decaying capitalist system can adapt to, which is why systemic crisis (“polycrisis” seems to be the trendy phrase) threatens a massive die-off via the usual processes of war, disease and the occasional famine, all of which will be excused as usual as unrelated acts of God or nefarious people or whatever.
Capitalism isn’t going to boil off the oceans, it’s going broke already. But real capitalism depends on good bankruptcy laws, for orderly liquidation of debt. As of now, population shrinkers have no interest in how excess population will be liquidated…which leaves them in my view as de facto allies of the population liquidators, no matter what they may think.
All social systems depend on social discipline, no matter what libertarians (and that includes “anarchists,”) say. What a sane society would impose in terms of population control I dare not project. But the disinterest in China’s One Child Policy, which to my knowledge is largely criticized for limiting female population, says something. (Maybe just that anti-Communism is still the first and greatest priority?)
That’s why I darkly suspect is why a deep and sullen anger at people eating meat is building in the academy. The theory that vegetarianism is a viable way of life for everyone including children and the elderly strikes me in a small way as much a willful disregard for mere technical possibility as the looniest capitalism-in-orbit types. The dutiful performance of the academy in working out the ideas suitable to the ruling class seems unfortunately to play a role here: In the need to shrink the excess population, it’s okay to make a tacit alliance with the fascists, we’ll just be shocked, shocked when the usual suspects are gambling with lives. I’m sure every wise and good academic will instantly reject such dark fantasies as my irrationality.
Previous mass extinctions have not managed to end biodiversity. Maybe a general nuclear war can, but I not at all sure of that. The primary issue has never really been the survival of life, much less the planet. The issue has been the survival of humanity. This weary world will roll on without us.
The emphasis on biodiversity as the goal in itself is in some respects a way of devaluing human life, though I suppose the proponents think of it more as putting humanity into perspective. But insofar as biodiversity is a code or metaphor or whatever for a balance of nature, I do not think the biosphere has ever been balanced in the quasi-mystical sense that seems to underlie the invocations. Yes, there are climax communities but even they are temporary.
Again, I don’t dare give numerical estimates because I don’t know enough.
TM 01.19.23 at 4:57 pm
MisterMr 50: “There are various studiers that show that a lower population growth … is bad for the economy becuse it discourages investiment.” I’m glad about all that investment flowing into Congo and Niger instead of Germany or China. They definitely need it more.
engels 48: “The natalism debate is really missing the basic point for total utilitarians that happiness = good so more people = better (as long as they’re reasonably happy).” But the “reasonably happy” part (or technically the condition that the increase in number of people won’t be offset by a decline in average happiness) needs some justification right?
TM 01.19.23 at 5:16 pm
stj 51: “My position is that population shrinkers are not only ignoring the necessary question, which population groups shrink, they won’t even admit there are eugenics/eugenics adjacent programs which advocate shrinking populations.
For the record, I am not a “population shrinker”, just somebody who thinks that a) population decline due to low birth rates is not a bad thing to be feared but a positive development, and b) that regardless of our opinions, global population will by mathematical necessity (*) at some point – hopefully soon – stop growing and probably start declining, and I agree with Alex that “it would be nice if it goes down gently because of condoms instead of going down brutally because of mass starvation, wars, and plagues once 12 billion people try to live on 5 billion people’s worth of resources and there have been three bad harvests in a row”
Regarding the question “which population groups shrink”, I did quote a reference that helps answer that question. Regarding the last point, I am well aware that eugenicists have advocated coercive measures like forced sterilization to prevent certain groups of people from procreating. Hope that helps.
TM 01.19.23 at 5:19 pm
stj: “That’s why I darkly suspect is why a deep and sullen anger at people eating meat is building in the academy. … The dutiful performance of the academy in working out the ideas suitable to the ruling class seems unfortunately to play a role here: In the need to shrink the excess population, it’s okay to make a tacit alliance with the fascists, we’ll just be shocked, shocked when the usual suspects are gambling with lives.”
What is this? It’s not regular trolling but what is it? Anyway I think I should leave it there.
engels 01.19.23 at 8:21 pm
TM, you can argue about it but it’s a different discussion from the one people here seem to be having (pointing out growth has downsides and ultimately limits).
Alex SL 01.19.23 at 9:20 pm
TM @46: to turn this into an argument against MacAskill, imho the OP needs to be more specific about how MacAskill’s philosophy is “entangled in eugenics and race science”.
and
engels @48: The natalism debate is really missing the basic point for total utilitarians that happiness = good so more people = better (as long as they’re reasonably happy).
As I argued above, IMO that is the connection. EA style pro-natalists want to bring more people in the world because they look at a scoring chart that says ‘total number of happy people’ on it. It is at least very difficult to then avoid others in the movement immediately concluding that those classified as more likely to end up happy should be preferentially reproduced or saved over those that are classified as less likely to end up happy; thus statements such as that saving a life in a developed nation is more important than saving a life in a third world nation. And this is not the case if your scoreboard says ‘total human population number sustainable yes/no?’ Thus, EA style pro-natalism is logically eugenics-adjacent but concern about resource limits is not. (And the usual kind of “our nation needs more babies” pro-natalism is eugenic by definition, of course.)
From my perspective, we have a moral duty to share with those around us and those that we can reasonably assume will follow us, but the idea of having a moral duty to bring more people to follow us into existence is somewhere between an absurd category error and horrific (forced breeding implications), so I would find it difficult not to talk past EAs. There just isn’t enough shared ground to start from. Could just as well try having a chess game with a pigeon.
steven t johnson,
Thanks for that comprehensive answer. We have more in common than I thought, but my main reply is: what engels wrote @49.
And if concluding that something is deeply skewed and unfair about a world where one single species, humans, make up 36% of land mammal biomass, and humanity’s livestock make up another 60%, leaving 4% for all the other thousands of species of land mammals from elephants to pygmy possums, is a way of devaluing human life, then I guess I have to be guilty of that. I cannot and do not want to shed empathy and love for life other than human.
MisterMr 01.20.23 at 10:10 am
@TM 52
So I’m not much into population growth, however I’ll try to explain the problem of population growth VS economic crisis at best of my understanding (yes this is quite OT).
Effective demand is: wages + the part of profits spent on consumption + increase in debt + investiment + net exports.
But wages also are costs for businesses, so total profits are:
capitalist consumption + increase in debt + net investiment + net exports
But capitalist consumption tends to be low, so a large part of ythe business cycle is driven by increase in debt, net investiment, and net exports.
Net exports are important but evidently in the world as a whole net exports are 0, so the fact that Germany or China (two big net exporters) have a good economy is quite irrelevant for the argument.
Increase in debt has other problems that I’ll ignore here.
Net invetiment depends on many things, one of which is expected future demand, which if we exclude exports largely depends on future population.
So in a developed capitalist economy where demand is largely internal (like the USA for example) it is possible that a slowing down or reversal of population growth might cause a secular stagnation (or generally a worse economic climate).
Another problem is that of retirement benefits: in a country with high population growth many youngsters are paying retirement for few oldsters, in a country with population decline few youngsters have to pay retirement for many oldsters (this is I think a problem in various psotcommunist countries in eastern Europe with high emigration rates).
This dynamic is not the same of the previous one but it is analogous to a situation where there is a growth in debt during population growth and a forced shrinlkage of debt during population decline (that forces down profits).
All these problems come from the fact that lower population growth means lower profits, so this is literally a “capitalism” problem, as capitalism basically need continuous growth to keep profits high and justify continuous investiment.
I don’t know about Congo and Niger, however this is a problem of keeping profits high, not people happy and well fed.
There are presumably ways to avoid this problem (since it is not a material problem but a social organisation problem) but they pass through heavy government intervention in the economy and possibly a big loss of financial wealth IMO.
engels 01.20.23 at 11:43 am
I don’t understand why an increasing number of retirees relative to workers is only a problem in capitalist economies…
From my perspective, we have a moral duty to share with those around us and those that we can reasonably assume will follow us, but the idea of having a moral duty to bring more people to follow us into existence is somewhere between an absurd category error and horrific
Does your perspective tell you how much we should share, who qualifies as “around us”, what projects we should allocate it to… and give reasons for the answers?
MisterMr 01.20.23 at 12:00 pm
@Alex SL 56
“saving a life in a developed nation is more important than saving a life in a third world nation”
However most utilitarian theories have an idea of falling marginal utility, so generally for an utilitarian givin 1$ to a poor guy in a third world nation is better than giving 1$ to a middle income guy in a rich nation, which in general would translate in saving more lives in third world nations (if it really was the case).
Even if we think in terms of “maximum number if lives”, since there is a minimum level of consumption for keeping someone alive, this implies squeezing the consumption of those who consume more, who are generally those in rich nations (there might be a situation where this maximum number logic means taking away resources from people who are poor in terms of income but whose style of life implies the use of a lot of natural resources, like people who still live in tribal communities).
MisterMr 01.20.23 at 12:40 pm
@engels 58
“I don’t understand why an increasing number of retirees relative to workers is only a problem in capitalist economies…”
In, for example, a soviet style economy, an increased number of retirees will strain the system and either force the young to work more, force them to work for less, or force the retirees to accept less benefits, or a combination of the three; but it will not cause unemployment.
In a capitalist system, it does create the same problems that it does for the soviet system, but in addition to this it also causes unemployment, because it forces down profits (unless it is counteracted by a sharp increase in debt, for example in public debt). This is counterintuitive because one would expect the smaller number of potential workers to force unemployment down, but in reality if the government doesn’t stimulate or some other entity pumps out demand it may cause higer unemployment.
engels 01.20.23 at 1:00 pm
“saving a life in a developed nation is more important than saving a life in a third world nation”
But much more expensive. And it’s worth putting this worry in the context what most Westerners who aren’t evul EAs do with their money (hint: they aren’t giving it all to Oxfam…)
reason 01.20.23 at 10:25 pm
Mr. Mister – your logic has an obvious flaw. Ceteris Paribus never applies. If there are less workers, investment will increase in order to increase productivity and wages will rise. We know this because this is what happened after the 2nd World War.
William Berry 01.21.23 at 6:01 am
@reason:
You are not responding to our original “mrmister”. The commenter you are responding to calls himself “MisterMr”.
[M]rmister was/ is a very smart and respectable, hardcore liberal, who always made/ makes reasoned comments. I am no economist, but from faithfully reading the other fellow’s posts (the one you’re actually responding to), I think I sense a kind of middle-of-the-road Neoliberalism, but I might be wrong (it’s happened before!).
The names confused me, too, at first. I think I’ve got it now!
LFC 01.21.23 at 2:49 pm
My impression is that “EA types” have given significant amounts of money to global public health initiatives. (I’m not sure whether the Gates Foundation counts as EA, but it has certainly done that.)
Thus, while a “total likely happiness” calculation might – and I emphasize “might” – bias one toward saving lives in developed countries, that does not appear to be influencing how “EA types” give their money. And as engels pointed out, it’s very cost-effective to, e.g., buy malaria nets and save lives that way, compared to, say, an expensive new drug therapy for a disease more prevalent in a rich country.
MisterMr 01.21.23 at 5:18 pm
@reason 62
It is not my opinion, it is a somewhat common theory (search for secular stagnation and demographic inversion).
In the immediate postwar years the government of the USA feared very much a return of the great depression so stimulated the economy a lot, also other countries had a largely goverment funded reconstruction going on, also there was a baby boom, so it is not really comparable. The theory that demographic decline leads to economic stagnation exists, but it is not a proven theory, it is a common ipothesis.
Also, as William Berry says, I’m MisterMr not mrmister, two different persons. I’m the “class exclusionary” one (or whatever the term is, I’d say old fart marxist).
J-D 01.22.23 at 7:42 am
I don’t know whether it’s correct to calculate that a slowing or halting of population growth will result in declining demand–I don’t know enough about the subject to judge. That calculation might well be correct as far as anything I know goes. What I wonder about is why you refer to that as ‘stagnation’, which is a term that’s negatively loaded, implying that there would be something bad about such a development. Would there, though? That’s something else I don’t know.
Well, there you are then! If ‘stagnant’ demand means difficulty keeping people happy and well fed, then I know what the problem is; but if ‘stagnant’ demand means lower profits, why should I care?
In a country with high population growth, few adults have to pay to support many children; in a country with population decline, many adults support few children.
MisterMr 01.22.23 at 2:45 pm
@J-D 66
“why you refer to that as ‘stagnation’,”
“but if ‘stagnant’ demand means lower profits, why should I care?”
There is a misunderstanding here. I’m not particularly pro population growth. Steven T. Johnson (who also AFAIK is not into population growth) noted among other things that population shrinkage might cause unemployment, and TM @47 said that this is illogical. I just tried to explain the reasoning about it.
My personal opinion is that we should go with much higer government control/influence on the economy anyway, and that we are already going into secular stagnation (because of high income inequality), so the change in demographics is not the determinant fact.
That said: I call it “stagnation” because it is the general term for a pweriod of low economic growth and ghigh unemployment, it is a pretty obvious use of the term, are you just playing with words?
And also: why should you care for lower profits? Well you shouldn’t, in fact I think profits should be lowered, but this implies that the government has to do something to counteract the increased unemployment and increased income inequality that comes from it when companies start to lay off workers. Keynesianism, in case nobody noticed it, works by pumping up profits to keep investiment (and therefore employment) high.
engels 01.22.23 at 3:42 pm
In a country with high population growth, few adults have to pay to support many children; in a country with population decline, many adults support few children.
Children are cheaper than old people.
John Q 01.22.23 at 8:00 pm
Engels @68, “Children are cheaper than old people.”
Do you have evidence to support that claim?
engels 01.22.23 at 9:25 pm
Do you have evidence to support that claim?
Not really.
No frills kid: £72K from M+D and £73K for 13 years state education
No frills oldie: £13K/year for 20 years (from state pension topped up with savings)
…leaving aside health care, home care and housing, neither of which can be cheaper for kids I’d imagine (even if you use the higher price tag in the article of £153K per kid the all-in cost is still cheaper than a pensioner).
steven t johnson 01.22.23 at 10:17 pm
The difference in medical costs between a pregnancy and rehabilitation for a broken hip;
the difference in cost between a week of day care and a week in a nursing home;
the difference in cost between a kid’s meal and an adult’s meal; the difference in costs between a kid’s sneakers and a walker; the difference in cost between a babysitter and a nursing assistant…all seem like reasons to suspect children are cheaper than old people. The notion children are more expensive is maybe the one needing more evidence. On the one hand there’s historical precedent of private pay for all education (historically, mostly none, by the way) and on the other hand, there’s the benefit of child labor. How to decide?
John Q 01.23.23 at 5:27 am
Engels @70 “No frills is the pension for people without savings to draw on, which looks to be about 7000 a year. If that’s right, then the cost over 20 years is almost identical to that for a kid.
More importantly, the discussion, including the list from STJ, omits the biggest labour input into raising kids, which probably outweighs all the items mentioned. This seems to be a common problem for male lefties of a certain age: I try to keep alert to it, not always successfully.
TM 01.23.23 at 10:30 am
MisterMr: I understand you are presenting “a somewhat common theory”. I find the theory unpersuasive and lacking in empirical support. We could discuss this further if you wish, I personally don’t care too much.
Thanks to J-D for pointing out that children also require economic resources. We could try to quantify whether children or retirees are “cheaper” but unquestionably, children are expensive. Not only do they need food and consumer goods like clothing, they typically take up a significant part of their parents’ time and resources, parents often have to reduce their paid work hours to commit to unpaid child care work. Children need care and education facilities, trained caregivers and teachers, and crucially the time they spend in those education facilities (in developed countries often 20 and more years) they cannot take part in the labor market, pay taxes and pay into the pension system to support retirees.
When you take all this together, the often heard argument that “we need more children to support all the retirees” is bizarre. Pro-natalists like to point out that the retiree ratio of developed societies is increasing, but the relevant metric is the dependency ratio (*). Societies with high birth rates typically have very high dependency ratios, and often lack the resources to adequately care for and educate (let alone provide jobs for) all the children and youths.
(*) The ratio of non-working age to working-age population. The latter is often defined as ages 15-64 but (in developed countries) should at best be 20-64. Also, the labor market participation rate should be included. What really matters is the share of the total population that actually participates in the labor market, regardless of their age. This metric is typically much higher in societies with low birth rates.
engels 01.23.23 at 11:03 am
I think the £72K figure for a child was supposed to be “basic” but decent but surviving on the (old) state pension alone in old age would not be decent. I’ve also seen much higher estimates though (there must be better research about this).
By “home care” I meant to include paid and unpaid child care and elderly care. I agree it makes a big difference how you value unpaid child care but unpaid elderly care is also very significant and its gendered distribution is changing.
engels 01.23.23 at 11:51 am
Another important difference is that people choose to have children, so there’s presumably some kind of pay off for them. Perhaps it should be assigned a monetary value (even if not conceptualised as “emotional labour” on the part of the child…)
steven t johnson 01.23.23 at 2:10 pm
The difficulty of feeding and bathing and putting to bed kids versus the difficulty of feeding and bathing and putting to bed an invalid adult? I’ve done both and it was harder to do this for my invalid wife and invalid mother. I spent a couple of years getting about five hours of sleep a night but the sleepless nights waking to feed infants only seemed endless. But it was more like one or two months.
As of now kids are optional while already existent old people are not. And kid-ness has a term limit, while old age has an indefinite but expensive end-of-life set of costs. Funerals versus first cars, which is more expensive?
Unpaid labor is usually regarded as cheap, isn’t it? That’s why state-subsidized child care is usually regarded as an expense needing justification, rather than a solution in its own right.
reason 01.23.23 at 3:17 pm
STJ –
1. Read what JQ wrote @71 (unpaid labour is still a cost)
2. What proportion of oldies require intensive care and for how long?
3. In the case of China what proportion of the big demographic bulge are heavy smokers and will have a reduced lifespan as a result?
reason 01.23.23 at 3:18 pm
I suspect a large proportion of those who claim that oldies cost more than children have never had children.
bekabot 01.23.23 at 3:41 pm
“Existing governments don’t, in fact, claim to promote a particular comprehensive moral theory. The assumption that one’s own government does, carries with it an automatic assumption that one’s own morals are encoded in law, and that people one doesn’t like are criminals”
It goes farther than that — it assumes that all citizens of all other polities are criminals, at least potentially, and that all stateless people are criminals too. In fact it’s so well suited to that purpose that a suspicious person who isn’t a philosopher might end up thinking that that’s exactly what it’s for.
Alex SL 01.23.23 at 8:40 pm
MisterMr @59 and engels @61:
I was referring to the following statement as cited last year in a piece in the New Yorker:
Nick Beckstead, the philosopher at the helm of the Future Fund, remarked in his 2013 dissertation, “Richer countries have substantially more innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive. By ordinary standards–at least by ordinary enlightened humanitarian standards–saving and improving lives in rich countries is about equally as important as saving and improving lives in poor countries, provided lives are improved by roughly comparable amounts. But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country.”
On the question of what happens to the economy if there are fewer people, it seems obvious that it will have to shrink. But that whole discourse is rather like complaining that we are too slow now after our bus driver hit the brakes so that we don’t all drive over the cliff edge. Kind of missing the point.
MisterMr 01.23.23 at 11:39 pm
Alex Sl @80
Yes I agree that the argument about the shrinking economy is sorta missing the point.
Bekabot @79 and J, not that one @9
Government don’t usually claim to represent a comprehensive moral theory, however there is the assumption that governments are at least morally decent. Otherwise, do you believe that your government jails people for long periods of time without any moral justification, at least most times? If you believe this why are you not starting a revolution?
It seems to me that governments do usually claim to be at least morally decent and that when people don’t believe this anymore then that is the time revolutions start.
John Q 01.24.23 at 5:40 am
One more point on young vs old, from personal experience. My wife and I, both retirement age, are taking care of our young grandson. That’s not usual in our age group, but it’s also not rare. So, that’s an entry that can go on whichever side of the ledger you like.
J-D 01.24.23 at 7:25 am
I am uncertain how much moral justification my government has for jailing people, but I have no idea what I could do to start a revolution no matter what I thought about the government.
TM 01.24.23 at 8:58 am
engels 75: “people choose to have children, so there’s presumably some kind of pay off for them. Perhaps it should be assigned a monetary value” Those who choose to have children are free to have them but let’s not get into trying to measure the emotional benefit they derive. (Interesting suggestion coming from a Marxist though…)
Again quantifying the economic cost of children vs retirees is beside the point. But nevertheless let’s point out that the vast majoritiy of retirees live autonomously, only a minority require intensive care, and many retirees also contribute to the common good by volunteering, taking care of their grandchildren and so on. On the other hand, honestly it sucks that so much political power is concentrated in the age group that has most of their lives behind them and won’t be much affected by the political decisions they help made. That just really sucks. But it’s an unavoidable temporary effect of the demographic transition in combination with high life expectancy. The alternatives – lower life expectancy or higher fertility rates – are not desirable.
What is really at issue in this debate is whether people should be enticed or even corced via pro-natalist measures into having more children. Various authoritarian governments are already going in that direction (so far without success) and I’m afraid the assault on reproductive rights will only intensify in the near future. And while liberals and leftists oppose that assault, many are to some extent on board with the idea that raising birth rates is a desirable policy goal, which I think is concerning enough.
MisterMr 01.24.23 at 12:09 pm
@J-D 83
There are plenty of violent acts that people can do against governments. We generally believe said acts are immoral. The reason we believe it is that we accept that governments have a certain minimum level of moral justificfation.
E.G: some dudes on Jan.6 2020 tried a violent attck against the USA congress. Most people disapprove of this. If people believed that the USA congress/presidency had no moral justification, people would approve of the jan.6 attempted coup, or would try to support it.
I mean, coups, revolutions, terrorism etc. happen in the world; luckily most people on this blog do not live in countries where this kind of things happen (or feel that this should happen), but those things are a normal part of history on the long run.
It seems to me that the idea that governments have exactly 0 zero zilch claims of moral justification is a sort of abstraction that sounds plausible only because we are so used to live in the same societies that we don’t perceive the, lt’s call it, “base level” of cultural and moral assumptions on which said societies are predicated.
engels 01.24.23 at 3:06 pm
Another contrast to keep in mind is financial structure: oldies are highly capitalised, kids are often debt-financed (eg by a mortgage on a larger home), spelling trouble for their competitiveness in a world of rising interest rates.
Enjoying the “bear vs shark” energy of this thread.
bekabot 01.24.23 at 4:02 pm
“Otherwise, do you believe that your government jails people for long periods of time without any moral justification…? If you believe this why are you not starting a revolution?”
Question: Do I believe that my government jails people for long periods of time without any moral justification? Answer: I don’t believe it, I know it.
Question: Then why am I not occupied in starting a revolution? Answer: Because I believe there are other answers to problems than starting a revolution. Starting a revolution is kind of extreme, and it’s hard to step back from. If I live in a house and know there are problems with the house, I’d be a fool to tear the whole house down when all I need to do is knock out a wall or two. Then too, I worry that starting a revolution might carry with it consequences which are worse than the problems I now live with. It would be too bad if I ended up without a house to live in in the long run just because the stairs need fixing in the here and now. Thirdly, if I started a revolution, the revolution would be on — but the stairs might still never get fixed. (There’s no guarantee that a revolution would fix the stairs; fixing the stairs isn’t the revolution’s job.) Finally, ‘starting a revolution’ is more easily said than done, thank God.
TM 01.24.23 at 4:50 pm
“Existing governments don’t, in fact, claim to promote a particular comprehensive moral theory. The assumption that one’s own government does, carries with it an automatic assumption that one’s own morals are encoded in law, and that people one doesn’t like are criminals”
Governments don’t necessarily espouse moral theories but they do generally claim to act in accordance with moral or ethical values – usually the term is justice -, and derive part of their legitimacy from the perceived justness of their actions. When they imprison or execute a person, they almost always claim to act in accordance with moral principles (although it is true that some US courts have ruled there’s nothing wrong with executing an innocent person as along as there was a trial complying with certain formalities). Observe how governments even when they commit wars of aggression are adamant to at least attempt to justify these acts (and btw you can trace this throughout history). Governments rarely openly say “we do X because we have the power to do so regardless of whether anybody considers X ethically justified”. They usually at least claim to do what is good and right and just, however that is justified. All of this seems obvious. I’m not sure what is being disputed.
“The assumption that one’s own government does, carries with it an automatic assumption that one’s own morals are encoded in law” That is or has been the case in certain polities, especially theocratic ones. Now the liberal, secular, pluralistic kind of state that most of us are probably used to doesn’t necessarily claim to encode morals in law – it considers personal morals an individual choice as long as the laws of the state are not violated. But certainly, even secular liberal states claim that the law is an expression of the community’s moral principles, and violations of the law constitute violations of the moral principles of the community, and of course criminals are bad people. Nobody says “this person’s being a criminal has no relevance for how we judge their moral character”, or do they?
reason 01.24.23 at 5:15 pm
“On the question of what happens to the economy if there are fewer people, it seems obvious that it will have to shrink.”
Yes – but the economy is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Seems to be often forgotten.
bekabot 01.24.23 at 8:37 pm
“Nobody says ‘this person’s being a criminal has no relevance for how we judge their moral character’, or do they?”
The question deserves a longer and more careful answer; in other words, it deserves a response from someone who isn’t me. But I’d like to note (for now) that between polities the deciding factor is usually admitted to be might and not right, and has been ever since the days of Hobbes, if not before. Within polities the same rule applies when it comes to young people who are being educated to accept one of their society’s upper berths; in that case, they’re introduced to the same idea in college — if not before. And this, mind you, is the state of affairs which prevails in societies which do not pretend that their internal decrees are mystically in tune with the rules which descend from on high (and/or are observable in nature) and that therefore all persons who aren’t covered by such rules (or who don’t acknowledge them) are destitute of grace and fair game for re-education and plunder, if not worse fates.
Things are rough all over, it seems.
J, not that one 01.24.23 at 8:51 pm
I took “comprehensive moral theory” to be more . . . comprehensive . . . than “people shouldn’t murder and those who do should be punished” — to encompass things like what personal virtues ought to be cultivated, what type of family life ought to be encouraged, and what kind of education is best suited for holding office.
engels 01.24.23 at 11:12 pm
On the question of what happens to the economy if there are fewer people, it seems obvious that it will have to shrink.
That’s not obvious at all.
J-D 01.25.23 at 5:35 am
I don’t know what you mean by ‘we’. If what you mean by ‘we’ is ‘some people’, that’s accurate, but so what?
The way I figure it, asking whether a government has moral justification is like asking whether a rope has moral justification. Ropes can be used to do many different things, some good and some bad; so can governments.
TM 01.25.23 at 8:36 am
90: “between polities the deciding factor is usually admitted to be might and not right”
The deciding factor is indeed “might” but states still make a point of trying to justifiy their actions as “right”.
engels 01.25.23 at 12:49 pm
asking whether a government has moral justification is like asking whether a rope has moral justification. Ropes can be used to do many different things, some good and some bad; so can governments
https://lmgtfy.wtf/go.html?q=Legitimacy
J, not that one 01.25.23 at 4:11 pm
@90
In my experience, for what it’s worth, “the deciding factor is might not right” is an attitude usually found among the working class, and the new rich who bypassed college, where “there’s a system that can and should be worked to help people” is the attitude of the college-educated. This makes sense since the former groups don’t have enough power to change things outside the system, and the latter might.
bekabot 01.25.23 at 11:51 pm
No, I also believe that there’s a system and that it ought to be worked to help people, if only because I believe there’s a system and that if it isn’t worked to help people it will certainly be worked to the opposite effect. But I also believe that the system has to retain enough juice to keep itself running if it’s going to be worked at all.
J-D 01.26.23 at 2:20 am
Does Harriet Tubman’s having been a criminal affect how you judge her moral character?
TM 01.26.23 at 8:38 am
J-D: You are missing the point. I pointed out that states typically claim “that the law is an expression of the community’s moral principles, and violations of the law constitute violations of the moral principles of the community”. People don’t always accept these claims, not all people accept them, later generations may not accept them at all, but they are made, and often accepted.
bekabot 01.26.23 at 10:33 am
“Does Harriet Tubman’s having been a criminal affect how you judge her moral character?”
You bet it affects it! The question is in which direction.
TM 01.26.23 at 5:01 pm
Btw I shouldn’t have used the word “nobody” at 88. That was a poor word choice.
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