You haven't presented any logical relationship between any vaccination and any autoimmune disease. The fact that it is checked for in trials does not demonstrate a logical relationship. — Metaphysician Undercover

I just presumed that you'd have no reason to disbelieve me. I can cite a dozen trial results, but if you've already decided that I'm making stuff up I'm sure you'd just sweep them away somehow too. There's little point in continuing along those lines.

What it demonstrates is that some people are afraid that a vaccine might cause an autoimmune problem so it is checked for in trials, in order to demonstrate to these people that it does not. — Metaphysician Undercover

Absolute nonsense. Pharmaceutical trials are not public relations exercises.

I think it is actually highly unlikely that an injected molecule of any sort could cause a chronic autoimmune condition. These conditions are extremely complex with unknown causes. So, if it were the case that the injection of a molecule into the body could cause such an illness, I think it would not be the case that these conditions are extremely complex with unknown causes. — Metaphysician Undercover

How does it being complex prevent it from being triggered by some molecule. And if not triggered by some molecule, then what is it triggered by? Something from another realm?

A naturalistic fallacy is when you say "We should do this because it's natrual". For example: "People naturally want to steal therefore they should". That seems to me what you're doing.

There is no 'should'. — Isaac


Bit late for that. — khaled

Not sure what you're trying to say here. To be clear, my position is that morality is not imposed from some divine (or otherwise non-physical) external source. That means that our desire to act morally (such as it is) arises naturally. That means that 'should' is irrelevant at the level of "why 'should' we behave morally?" It's not a question which makes any sense - the idea of 'moral' behaviour is just that behaviour we find ourselves generally inclined toward with a certain category of effect (either internal or external). The inclination (ceteris paribus) is already there.

So when we say "You should give the poor", we're saying "in order to fulfil that moral inclination we, ceteris paribus, have, you should give to the poor". Proceeding to ask "why 'should' we fulfil such a moral inclination makes no sense. It's like asking "why 'should' I like whisky?" It's not a question that has a normative answer.

If by this statement you mean that we should follow this or that moral intuition because they are culturally and biologically evolved that would be a natrualistic fallacy. — khaled

No it wouldn't. Maybe to a moral absolutist it would, but I thought you and I were past that. Anyone not absolutist about morals, these ideas have arrived in our heads by some natural means, they are not given by God and they are not us getting in touch with some platonic realm of moral values... So, given we both agree that they have not arrived in our heads by divine force, then their origin is natural, hence it is not a naturalistic fallacy. There is no 'should'. We simply will or will not according to our mental states. The relevant task is only to try to describe and predict that process.

I thought the idea that vaccines actually cause autoimmune diseases was debunked a long time ago. — Metaphysician Undercover

Guillain-Barré syndrome, multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, Bell’s palsy, paraesthesia, and inflammatory bowel disease are all routinely checked during trials for new vaccines or new adjuvants. Autoimmune issues are a significant concern. What's been debunked is the idea that any existing vaccines cause such issues (in significant enough quantity to out weigh their advantages). This hasn't just magically made all future vaccines safe, what a ridiculous notion. You'd be arguing that it is impossible for any injected molecule of any sort to cause autoimmune conditions.

What's ironic is that this is coming from someone who thinks every mathematician in the world has made an error, but you can't even conceive of the idea that pharmaceutical researchers might have done. Just goes to show the quasi-religious hold these people have over the population. Fear of death...come to think of it, it's not so different from religion afterall.

Whatever the evidence is, it is not hard and fast. The line gets blurry at foxes and wolves. — khaled

Agreed.

you seem to me to be asking for hard and fast. — khaled

No, just within the ballpark.

What makes "Moral acts are for the benefit of the community" so incredibly different than the moral rule we outlined that the former works as a definition and the latter becomes "arbitrary rules followed for no reason"? — khaled

I don't see them as two examples of the same thing. One's an attempt to summarise the purpose of the rules, the other is a rule itself (and so, without purpose, is arbitrary). The equivalent for the antinatalist would be something like "Moral acts are to minimise suffering".

I can raise evolutionary, cultural, linguistic, psychological and sociological reasons why moral acts might be those which benefit the community. I'm asking what equivalent type of evidence you can bring to support your idea that moral acts are those which minimise suffering.

'Moral' is a word in our shared language. — Isaac


Well considering how many debates we have about it, maybe its meaning isn't as "shared" as, say, "dog". It has some flexibility. — khaled

Yeah, I think that's right. So what kind of evidence would one bring to bear if one were to make an argument about the parameters? Say if we were talking about 'dog', you might argue some new creature was a type of dog by pointing to similarities with other dogs (physiology, genetics etc). You might argue that my toaster isn't a 'dog' by the opposite method.

You're missing the point. 'Moral' is a word in our shared language. It has to have a public meaning in order to be able to carry out this function. It can't be a term which you apply to describe absolutely anything, otherwise it has no meaning, I'm none the wiser if you say "X is immoral", than if you just say "X is". The word has no function whatsoever.

In order for words to function in a language they have to have some shared meaning, we can't just go around saying any old thing counts as 'moral'.

As to where those shared meanings come from in the first place, I'm generally in favour of some biological origin with a significant history of cultural modifications. Which means that the deep driver of morality is not arbitrary at all, it's not something you even get to choose.

Problem is all you can say about these axioms is that they’re weird. That’s not really important, it’s like saying you don’t like vanilla ice cream. But this thread is an attempt to say they’re wrong. — khaled

Not 'wrong', just not moral. 'Moral' has a meaning, and wiping out the human race isn't it. If your axiom happened to be 'kill everyone who annoys me' we'd be in exactly the same situation, but I don't think anyone would object to countering an argument that such an axiom was a 'moral' one.

I remember hearing that Kant was asked: If there were 2 people male and female, left alive on earth but one of them was a criminal, should she be executed or should the couple try to rebuild the human race and he answered: Executed for her crimes. I don’t know if this actually happened, I only heard it from a friend. But that was Kant’s philosophy. It doesn’t matter what the impact is on the community, it only matters whether or not the act is right — khaled

That may well be, I'm no expert on Kant. If true then it just confirms my suspicion that Kant was a sociopath, but as far as I can tell such a view would contradict the CI. I suppose, if not, then I'd have to agree that some uses of the term 'moral' are so far removed from others that one could reasonably define it as 'an arbitrary set of rules one sticks to for no reason at all', but such a definition would be next to useless as no-one would know what you were talking about when you used the term.

I was under the impression that the basic technology has been around for 50 years. Is that still new in pharmacy? Sounds ancient. — Benkei

As I said, my knowledge of this only comes from articles in the BMJ mostly (it's been fairly Covid-dominated lately, obviously), but basically the idea of using external mRNA in cells to synthesise proteins is pretty old, but the mechanism by which they are got into the cell and then released, functioning, is what's caused so much trouble. It's that mechanism that's new and it's also that mechanism (or failures in it) that has caused the nasty side effects which kept the technology from being useful in the past. It's a common issue with vaccines. The idea of exposing the immune system to the virus (or preferably just one or more of it's proteins) is the simple bit. Getting that into the body is what the pharmaceutical concoction does, and it's here most problems are going to arise.

Oh, that and the fact that the lizard-men have put nanomachines into it to control the population (we're not sure why yet). People react like a bugger to nanomachines - it's the main reason they haven't done it earlier.

It's just an axiom, no unnecessary harms and challenges are taking place versus they are taking place. — schopenhauer1

Finally. This time it only took you sixteen pages to admit the same point we get to every time...

"I have some weird axioms, look what weird consequences arise from following them"

Summarises all these threads in one sentence.

It was the refusing to apply it bit I was confused about — Isaac


In my comment I told you how I apply it to get the conclusion “You shouldn’t have kids”. What do you think of that application? — khaled

That's mainly what I was trying to address in my later comments, but perhaps I didn't relate them clearly enough. It comes down, I think, to the nature of the decision that no amount of benefits constitute an A that you have any moral obligation to consider - hence all the discussion about where moral obligations arise from. I think if you're of the opinion that moral obligations just spring out of nowhere and then must be followed for their own sake, then we are too far from one another to gain anything from a conversation such as this. I don't think that's even close to a definition of what moral obligations are.

I said Kant didn’t care about consequences. If you had the option to lie to save some innocent’s life from a killer, he would say don’t lie. Period.

Same for me. I don’t care about the consequences. — khaled

Isn't the harm future people will suffer a consequence that you care about?

These rules just seem right to me, that’s why I follow them. I don’t see how “embedding” them in deeper, yet still arbitrary rules helps. Though everybody seems to like that for some reason. — khaled

It's not that the 'deeper' rules are arbitrary, it's that they're definitional. Obligations which count as 'moral' ones (as opposed to just any obligation) have to be defined, in order to be in that class. The class makes no sense in language unless it has a public definition - even if only a vague one. How do you think we come to learn how to use the word 'moral' unless there's some definitional parameters to it's use we can identify publicly?

For me, I'd say 'moral' obligations we those obligations which related to creating a more harmonious community (we live together with less conflict and suffering if we follow them). That seems to encompass what most people are trying to get at - even Kant.

But the existence of a definition for the class {moral activities} means that not everything can fit in that class. Causing the extinction of the human race, for example, doesn't fit in that class - it doesn't create a more harmonious community - it creates no community at all.

We seem to have come back to the conclusion of our last conversation on anti-natalism. What you have is a plan (eliminate suffering). It's not moral - by definition. It's just a plan.

You'll have to point me back to where you think I did this. — Isaac


Here: — khaled

It was the refusing to apply it bit I was confused about. Not sure what I've said outside of a principle of weighing harms, benefits and duties.

The objective of moral behavior is moral behavior. I don't know how many ways I have to restate this. And this isn't some fringe belief either, Kant thought that way. — khaled

I'm no Kant scholar but the SEP has...

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argued that the supreme principle of morality is a standard of rationality that he dubbed the “Categorical Imperative” (CI).

And...

a rational will must be regarded as autonomous, or free, in the sense of being the author of the law that binds it. The fundamental principle of morality — the CI — is none other than the law of an autonomous will.

None of that sounds anything like an arbitrary set of rules which are simply followed for their own sake.

What prevents 'maximise my personal wealth' becoming a moral imperative?

Yeah. It all depends on the progress they've supposedly made. Here's Stat on mRNA approaches just a few years ago

mRNA is a tricky technology. Several major pharmaceutical companies have tried and abandoned the idea, struggling to get mRNA into cells without triggering nasty side effects.

Moderna actually pinned almost its entire investment strategy on better mRNA delivery methods. Supposedly it now has them, but the failure to test in the immunocompromised wouldn't guarantee that (especially as heightened immune response seems to have been one of the issues and is coincidentally one of the factors in the severity of covid infection).

The difficulty as I understand it is both in delivering the mRNA, and in the body's potential reaction to the protein thus generated. Both have been implicated in autoimmune disease development. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26728772/

But I'm not an expert in this field, and those that are are heavily invested in the technology. I think the best indication os likely adverse reactions comes from the MHRA (the UK's FDA). In November they ditched their old adverse reaction reporting system because they said it would be unfit to cope with the number of reports that would likely result from the roll out of a vaccine (for balance, here's the Full Fact assessment of that news). Personally, I think the MHRA response is a bit weak, but others may be satisfied with it.

Both Astra-Zeneca and Pfizer have negotiated immunity from prosecution for liability under the Adverse Reaction Compensation Scheme, and the Government have closed off their own compensation routes for Covid vaccines...https://www.reuters.com/article/us-astrazeneca-results-vaccine-liability-idUSKCN24V2EN

Make of that what you will. The explanation given for both is the very large expected take-up. But in terms of impact - both on health sevices and community health robustness - that's no reassurance. We're not judging the vaccine, but the likely global reaction to its rollout.

The main point I want to emphasise though before this gets lost in the weeds of potential adverse reactions is that we are not comparing vaccines vs doing nothing. There are a lot of well-proven methods of reducing both transmission and severity of infection which could be vastly improved on given the same money.

Behaving morally is done for its own sake. — khaled

Not quite sure how to take this. Are you implying that moral behaviour has no objective. It's just series of arbitrary rules we follow just because...?

You laid out the common ground. You summed it up very well. Then refused to actually apply it. — khaled

You'll have to point me back to where you think I did this.

I am characterizing the position that other people need to live life so they can find solutions as a smug argument yes. The word I really mean here is paternalistic. Smug is sort of self-righteous condescension. That would be more like the tone of responses from certain posters here looking to start fights. — schopenhauer1

'Arguments' and 'responses' are not smug. People are. It's an ad hominen which just goes the heart of the issue. You're pissed off about your life and looking for someone to blame. This isn't philosophy, it's bad therapy.

It seems exceedingly one sided that your values, your perspective, and what you want, is somehow of more value than what those who disagree with you want. — Book273

Where did I say anything even remotely like that?

So I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, as long as I check with you first, and you say it's ok — Book273

Didn't mention that either

everyone not you is somehow less than you — Book273

Nor that

I have literally no idea what you're replying to but it doesn't seem to be my actual post - try again.

more smug... Smug, smug, smug, smug... — schopenhauer1

Yep yep yep. smug smug smug.. I get it. You can reinforce it with more smug responses and I'll entertain it. — schopenhauer1

Good to hear you avoiding all those ad hominen arguments you dislike so much...

What's the point of behaving morally, for you? — Isaac


Behaving morally. — khaled

That's not really an answer to the question. You've made a clear distinction between desires and moral behaviour so moral behaviour can't simply be one of the things you desire otherwise the distinction breaks down. We only act motivated by desires. You're advocating restraining ourselves in some desire (saying it's immoral to have children). Are you suggesting that what classes as 'moral' is random, arbitrary?

Having kids is like buying the suit with your money when I don't have a responsibility to keep you suited. Just with way higher stakes. There is no factor here that I’ve outlined as important that I’m not considering as far as I see. The fact that you tried to sneak in the “extinction bad” thing again without outright saying it (because you know I don’t see it as a worthy goal, but something that has to come out of the morality naturally) suggests that you know this too. — khaled

This conversation is just getting too weird for me so I think I'll just leave it there. You're basically just saying that you desire noting above the reduction of suffering to zero and there's no reason at all why. Well, fair enough, but there's no point in continuing a conversation with someone so manifestly odd, I don't think we have any common ground on which to base an argument.

No. It had no notification attached to it, quite deliberately. — Isaac


Weird, I got one. I've been getting notified by quotes sometimes. — khaled

Notifications on this site are a bit peculiar.

Idk what their duty would have to do with their opinion of life. Don't see what you're trying to say with 3a — khaled

Nothing. I worded it all wrong. I meant to say that we could take that into account when weighing their opinion (ie, we don't just take into account how much they like it, but whether they're fulfilling a duty).

I'm not after "good worlds" whatever those are. — khaled

So if your morality isn't aimed at making the world a better place, then what is it aimed at? What's the point of behaving morally, for you?

It is a fact of the matter that having children produces more suffering than not. — khaled

Agreed.

So why would you want to reduce suffering...above all else...seemingly to the complete exclusion of all other considerations?

We've seen that you don't (in practice) fail to consider other factors when making decisions, so why, with the decision over children, do you keep coming back to this naive oversimplification of moral judgement where the only thing we have to consider is suffering?

Same question here. Why bother? Why reduce suffering?

I mean.... it was written in response to me. Kind of confusing. — khaled

No. It had no notification attached to it, quite deliberately.

It is, but I'm just saying that nothing in it implied that I have the responsibility of keeping you suited. But yes there are cases where that could be true. — khaled

Right. So it doesn't work as a counter-argument then does it. If there are situations in which the reductio wouldn't work because the factors are different then it becomes about whether the situation in question has those factors.

don't tell me "harm you alleviate from others" because I could also easily argue that your child will cause a fair share of harm. — khaled

So? You could well make that argument. But then we'd only be exactly where I've been claiming we should be since the start.

1. There are benefits to having children (enjoyed both by the future child and the community into which they're born) and there are harms (suffered both by the child and the community they're born into).

2. Despite the incoherence of the framing given sometimes, we can theoretically consider how the future child might respond to these benefits and harms, we can even imagine how they might feel about the logical impossibility of not having had the opportunity to choose. What we can't do is ask them what their actual view in either case is - we can only guess what it might, in future, be.

3. Since, out of the 7 billion people on the planet at the moment (and the tens of billions who've been born) the proportion who complain that they'd rather not have been born (even if such a claim is incoherent) is absolutely tiny, it's not an unreasonable assumption, then, that this future child will feel equally comfortable with this situation.

3a. We can also add to this that in some moral frameworks, it's not unreasonable to assign a duty to members of a community, and as such we would assume this duty of our imaginary child when predicting their opinion.

4. A world with no-one in it is not a good world because 'good' is an assessment made by people - without them nothing is good. Moral goals make no sense in the absence of people to enjoy the benefits of them.

5. Since it is a perfectly reasonable moral tool to evaluate the failure to meet a duty no less than the causing of a harm, it is incumbent that we weigh the loss of benefits (some of which it might be our duty to provide) against the potential to cause harm to an imagined future child and their community.

6. Since (3) would indicate the chances of severe harm are pretty slim, and (4) would indicate that avoiding those harms via extinction would be self-defeating, the benefits would have to be pretty small indeed to not weigh quite heavily against them. Most people see the benefits of life as weighing quite heavily - we do a lot to preserve it - so the argument seems clear.

You will live your life by your tenets, as you should. Wear your mask if you like. Get the vaccine if you like. However, do not impose your values on to others. We are not you, nor do we want to be. We wish to live life on our terms, not yours, or anyone else's. — Book273

I don't understand this position. If you're of the view that people should be left to do as they please (even if that causes problems for other people - in terms of exposing them to a risk they'd rather not take), then how is grouping together, electing a government, and making laws not 'a thing' that people should be allowed to do if they want to, even if it causes problems for other people (you, in this case). You seem to be arguing that you should be allowed to do as you please even if it risks some harm to others, but other people cannot do as they please (in forming governments and laws) because that risks some harm to you (in terms of restricting your freedoms).

I just don't get the idea that we want to make other people deal with any kind of thing. — schopenhauer1

It's not rocket science, it just takes the tiniest bit of theory of mind (something most three years olds can muster), but I'll teach you it here and now so that you can get on with your life.

--Not everyone has the same opinion about stuff as you do--

Edit - (in case that wasn't abundantly clear) the fact that you personally find these things difficult to cope with does not in any way mean anyone else finds them difficult to cope with.

What you said wasn't disagreement, you were refuting a misunderstanding of the argument. I am not arguing that there is a person who is benefited by antinatalism, or that there is someone who is harmed by birth (although suffering does result from it). And yet everyone here just keeps refuting the same 2 arguments, even though I'm not (and no one is really) making them. — khaled

The analogy wasn't necessarily aimed at you.

In what world? If I was your parent and you had some important interview or something maybe :rofl: But other than that, I don't see why I would have a responsibility to keep a stranger suited. Didn't cross my mind. — khaled

For fuck's sake, it was an analogy and hopefully you knew perfectly well it was an analogy when you wrote it, otherwise it was mindnumbingly stupid thing to write. To make the analogy correct, we'd have to add that there are situations where it is your responsibility to buy me a suit.

If you're really finding the concept of an analogy difficult to cope with then we can put it in absolute terms. There is some benefit A which carries a risk B to person C. If I'm under no duty to provide benefit A then it might not be appropriate to take risk B if I cannot get the consent of person C to do so. IF, however, I'm under some responsibility to provide benefit A and still can't get the consent of person C, I might well take risk B because failing to provide A would be no less of a risk - be an equally morally relevant outcome.

And NOT driving is also very bad because then I can't work. So my job is to get good enough at driving that the harm done to me due to not being able to work starts to be comparable (hopefully less) than the "expected value" of harm I can cause. — khaled

Great. So it seems we agree then. The risk that a person might end up displeased with their life is worth taking because not taking it also causes harms. We weigh the two and come to a conclusion about whether to take the risk or not. It seems we're on the same page after all.

The difference is, in the case of a future person, the amount of "harm" I alleviate from myself by having a child is insignificant to the amount I cause by having one. — khaled

Why are you suddenly only taking into account the harm you alleviate from yourself as the only positive in the balance?

all is what I would require as a standard before I'd even consider inflicting human embodiment upon another person. — Inyenzi

You can't inflict human embodiment on a person. If the thing you're imagining is not already embodied, it's not a person.

the pronatalist/antinatalist position starts and ends with a question of what kind of man/woman one aspires to be. — Inyenzi

Agreed.

Do I inflict a burden where it need not exist, or don't I? — Inyenzi

How do you determine if a burden 'needs' to exist?

Do I have the self-discipline to deny my biological programming, or don't I? — Inyenzi

Do your desires go around with little labels attached? How are you identifying the ones resulting from 'biological programming'?

Do I aspire to do what is moral, or to simply indulge my base instincts to breed like every other mammal? — Inyenzi

Why assume it's one or the other?

I imagine the vast majority of antinatalist/pronatalist debates on this forum are in reality debates between those with children and those without. — Inyenzi

That seems likely, given the topic. So?

The antinatalist simply requires a higher standard for the creation of life that another human body must deal with — Inyenzi

No. The antinatalist requires a different standard. It is not 'higher'. The argument is that it's incoherent, not that it's excessively high.

I know from my own experience of human embodiment that there are significant burdens involved. — Inyenzi

So?

why create another human body with perpetual needs that must endlessly be strove against, and only for this person to die in the end regardless? — Inyenzi

Because life is good, the striving is fun sometimes, there are a lot of great things to enjoy in life. Most people seem to agree, even in today's difficult times. If we make the massive improvements to society which are certainly possible we'd have an even better time.

the joys of eating are predicated upon having a stomach — Inyenzi

So? What difference does it make what the joys are predicated on?

the source of this food is rooted in harm (eg, someone must labour to produce the food, bring it to market, in many cases horrific animal harm and cruelty being involved). — Inyenzi

None of which are necessary.

To justify creating a body with a stomach, by pointing out how good it is to feed it, strikes me as absurd. — Inyenzi

Why? Justifying things by how good they are seems pretty standard to me.

Better to just not create the deficiency in the first place, to not create a body with a need for food. — Inyenzi

Why would that be better? You'd miss out on the pleasure of eating that way. By what measure does missing out on pleasure come out as 'better', than having that pleasure?

We can have a very good idea what it might be, humans are not radically different from one another in fundamental preferences. — Isaac


Disagreed. — Tzeentch

Odd, because when talking about the suffering intrinsic to life you reach for rather a familiar list - disease, work, war, poverty, disability... You never seem to list friends, love, comfort, peace...

This seems to be based on a severely cherry-picked version of history. There are many things humanity has been doing for much of history, where some have suffered and others and have profited, which we now consider inhuman. — Tzeentch

Of course. All of which have been vigorously complained about by the aggrieved parties. Until Benetar almost no one complained about being born and even now it's restricted to whiny teenagers and niche philosophers. So where's the evidence of widespread regret having been caused (in the opinion of those to whom it has supposedly been caused)?

it seems silly to reduce one's choice to have children to generalizations — Tzeentch

Weren't you only recently citing exactly such generalisations in our ability to predict harms?

where forcing individuals into existence is a "necessary evil" — Tzeentch

We've just established the very low rate at which people consider life a necessary evil.

Then the argument for inaction seems obvious; by your own words you claim to have no idea what you're getting that person into. — Tzeentch

That doesn't follow at all. Not having access to their judgement is not the same as having no idea what it might be. We can have a very good idea what it might be, humans are not radically different from one another in fundamental preferences.

Why would one feel entitled to make that decision for someone else in the first place, especially considering the fact that the decision is irreversible and can result in a life-time of misery.

You really think it so strange to choose to err on the side of caution here? — Tzeentch

Yes, absolutely. Making decisions for others (making decisions that will affect future others - I still don't agree with your incoherent wording), is something that humanity has been doing in this context for several million years and overall happiness ratings for the people who have later been affected by these decisions have been consistently quite high. I'd even argue that they were even higher for much of our past. There seems to be a very low chance of resulting in a lifetime of misery. The alternative seems utterly pointless (a world without suffering which no one exists to enjoy).

So yes, it seems utterly stupid to wipe out humanity to avoid a risk which we've been taking by the billions without any noticeable issue.

Only because you don't understand the argument. — khaled

Why is it everyone couches disagreement as the other side not 'understanding'? Have you considered the possibility that it's you who don't understand the counter-arguments?

Whenever I use harm I mean it in the sense that I strictly made the situation worse...
...And I find this is a much more common use — khaled

Stanford has quite a good article on the philosophical use of 'harm' if you want to read up about it. So what would you call some negative outcome of your failure to act?

But you said earlier that you'd also include failing to meet a responsibility as a harm (or at least equally morally relevant, we can quibble over terms). When pressed you said that some moral intuition guides you as to what these responsibilities are (you're not persuaded simply by its status as law).

So definitions aside, I don't see what difference there is. It might well be your responsibility to ensure I'm suited, in which case, absent of any ability to ask my consent, you would have no less behaved immorally by failing to act as you have by acting.

It all turns on what you consider your moral responsibility to your community, rather than any more fundamental argument about default choices when acting without consent.

By being a good driver. Not being drunk. Etc. — khaled

Is absolutely evidently insufficient. Driving is a risky undertaking. You risk harming others in doing so, that much is unarguable. Again, this seems to alk turn on the figures rather than anything more fundamental. And as @Benkei has pointed out, the odds of causing net harm to a future person are pretty low.

I've changed the details here, but I had a client once who could not read books because he'd convinced himself that tiny invisible people were living on its pages and he would harm them by closing the book.

He would say "but how do you know there aren't, why take the risk? It's not worth it". It seems a similar delusion is happening here, imagining the souls of yet-to-be children looking down on the world thinking "please don't put me there, I prefer it here".

"How do you know there aren't, why take the risk? It's not worth it"

Any type of information that is lacking only affirms the lack of a basis for our decision. — Tzeentch

Then we have no basis on which to make any decisions at all, since all lack millions upon millions of theoretical data points which are impossible to know.

what if your judgement on what constitutes benefit may drastically differ from that of the individual one is making decisions for? — Tzeentch

That doesn't change things. Presuming I cannot possibly access that person's judgement I have nothing else to go on. As I said to khaled, no one has yet offered an argument beyond naive neo-liberalism as to why inaction suddenly trumps action. I don't even see.much if an argument in the case where consent cannot be acquired. I certainly see no coherent argument in the case where consent isn't even logically possible.

it's like buying a suit with someone else's money, while not having the slightest idea of what type of suit they may like. — Tzeentch

No it isn't, because asking that other person whether they'd like a suit is almost always possible and never logically incoherent. Our intuition in it is affected by the context, which is different from deciding whether to have children.

"Does no harm". Last I checked "the human race" was not a person. On the other hand, a generation of resentful malcontents comprises of many people. — khaled

Conservatism does not restrict itself to individual harms. As I said, if you want to use a term in a particularly unusual manner you'll need to explain it first, or preferably pick a term that more commonly covers you use.

If I was right, and I didn't buy a suit, you would just be where you started. — khaled

Right. Which is a harm if what I wanted was a suit.

The question is what happens if I do buy the suit. I could be wrong: In which case I make the situation worse (you have a useless suit and less money) or I could be right and make it better: In whichcase you got a brand new suit you like. Given these chances, I think we can both agree that buying the suit is wrong, without asking first. — khaled

No. We don't both agree at all. You've still not given anything close to an explanation of why you think non-action has some moral strength over action when faced with uncertainty about outcomes and the impossibility of consent. Either could equally bring about a negative consequence, or lack virtue, or defy a duty... whichever moral framework you subscribe to, inaction does not just magically trump action.

If I cannot reasonably expect not to hurt others while driving, I shouldn't be driving, you're right. But since I can, I can drive. — khaled

How can you reasonably expect not to hurt others while driving? Are you a uniquely brilliant driver. Since road deaths are one of the highest causes of death who's causing all these accidents if everyone can reasonably expect not to hurt others while driving?

I don't use law and responsibility interchangeably. It is just often the case that if the law think I have a responsibility to do something, I do. — khaled

So how do you work out when it does and when it does not?

You have acknowledged that birthing a child is taking a risk in regards to its future, implying we do not have all the information. Whether that information is unknown or unknowable is irrelevant, because the basis (or lack thereof) for our decision remains the same. — Tzeentch

That is not the information I'm referring to. I really don't want to have to walk you through what has already been written. Just read it again more carefully. The data point in question is not about the rusk of harm in general (which is the only rusk I've spoken about considering). It about the rusk of consent violation or displeasure over the matter of existence.

Because one is taking a risk on someone else's behalf, obviously. What necessity is there to make such a decision? — Tzeentch

The benefit. Same as any other risk. I've just answered that question, why are you asking it again?

I have not made claims about the rate of change of laws. So I don't need to look at how they change. I have set out a moral framework where socially placed responsibilities play a role. — khaled

If your moral framework includes a feature which you cannot even predict changes in, it would seem little better than just throwing your hands up and saying "I'll just do whatever everyone else is doing". If the law said you must murder Jews would you do so? No, obviously not. So something judges laws, they are not simply accepted at face value.

Not having complete data always makes us pick the conservative option, unless we have consent to do otherwise. — khaled

Maybe. What's the most conservative option? Having children could lead to an entire generation of resentful malcontents (but it hasn't done so yet, so seems unlikely). Not having children leads to the extinction of the human race. What on earth kind of heterodox definition of 'conservative' are you using which allows the extinction of the human race to fall under it?

If I don't know that you're going to like a certain suit, I won't buy it for you with your money. Because if I turn out to be wrong, I will have caused harm. — khaled

You will have caused harm if it turns out you're right too. I'll have no suit. I don't see how the consequences of being wrong have any bearing here.

I cannot think of many cases where we take risks with others' wellbeing without permission. — khaled

Every time you drive anywhere, for example.

One only needs to conclude there is no way of knowing, and make decisions based on that. — Tzeentch

No. It's not that there's no way of knowing. It's not a data point which exists but is not 'knowable'. The data point doesn't even exist. To ask if one prefers A or B is to ask whether A or B produce greater positive feelings. A non-existent entity does not have feelings, so cannot 'prefer' anything. Where A or B are 'non-existence'. The question is meaningless, and, more importantly, has no answer.

It simply makes me wonder what the justificiation is to take such a risk. — Tzeentch

The benefit. Same as the justification for any risk. Why would you think this one any different?

There is no someone. — Isaac


This keeps being repeated, and it seems to be the last wall to hide behind, but you build your walls flimsy indeed.

Tell me then, for who is it we seek to preserve the planet? — Tzeentch

The future someone. The children who will exist.

But we are not forcing anything on these children. They exist already (in our possible world we're investigating). We can imagine what type of world they'd like, but only after assuming they already exist to hold an opinion on it. What we cannot coherently do is wonder if they'd prefer to exist or not because nothing which has that choice is capable of forming an opinion on the matter.

So it is a moral premise of yours that whatever is the law or social norm is morally relevant? How, in your world, do laws and social norms get changed? — Isaac


The premise is that you have an obligation to uphold social contracts you are a part of. So if you work as a doctor for instance, you cannot refuse to treat a patient (unless you can't), because treating patients is what you "signed up for". Society has you "sign up for" a lot of things, depending on the society (Just today I discovered you can actually get sued in the Netherlands if you don't help someone as best you can to survive an accident Benkei)

How do social contracts change? I don't know, I'm not a political theorist or sociologist. — khaled

Well don't you think that looking into it might be relevant, if you're going to make claims about it?

No. Some might be making that point, but it's not mine. I'm quite comfortable with imagining a future child and acting in what I imagine to be it's best interests. — Isaac

Something that doesn't exist doesn't have future interests in existing. — khaled

Correct.

you cannot claim to have a child "for the child's sake". There is no child who has a sake, whereas in the first case there was. — khaled

That's not the claim. The claim is merely that there will be a child whose existence might well be quite enjoyable. That in itself is a perfectly reasonable thing to aspire to.

since you can't check in advance whether or not the child will actually think life is good, it would be unethical to have them. — khaled

Why? The vast majority of people broadly agree about stuff that's good, so it can't be a case of making a poor prediction. It's not reasonable to deny action in cases where we cannot obtain all potentially relevant data (we'd literally do nothing if that were the case). So I'm lost as to why you think this particular inaccessible bit of data prohibits action.

Usually you say something like "Oh sure, risking harming the child is bad, but it is offset by the survival of the human race" but here you seem to be switching to "Sure, there is a risk the child hates life, but that doesn't matter". And I don't see a convincing reason why it shouldn't matter. — khaled

I didn't say it doesn't matter. It simply can't be ascertained. You then make the move to say we can't act, in the basis of that lack. We act in the absence of complete data all the time, I don't see why this is an exception.

They are unable. They may believe life is worth living, but there's no way of knowing whether their child will. — Tzeentch

Exactly. We can't have a moral obligation to consider data which it is impossible to gather. That would make no sense at all.

we can't possibly check in advance whether they want these things, — Isaac


Indeed. Sounds like a fantastic reason not to force those things upon someone. — Tzeentch

There is no someone.

That's my intuition too. I believe snow is white, language competence (piggybacking off object recognition/segmentation/categorisation) does the chunking things into related bits with labels on them for me - what counts as snow, what counts as white, what it means to describe a thing as white and how that's wrapped into the "is" - but what I've got the intentional state toward is snow. — fdrake

Yeah. This is perhaps more difficult to see in "the snow is white" than in "the pub is at the end of the road". If I walk to the end of the road when wanting to go to the pub, I clearly have a belief that the pub is at then end of the road, but it is necessarily (in its execution) tied to beliefs about roads and pubs and 'ends' and walking and the consistency of the world in general, the continuity of physical laws... None of which is captured in the proposition "the pub is at the end of the road", which it is claimed constitutes the same thing as my belief that it is, as evidenced by my tendency to act as if it were.

@Banno
The translation of my belief (tendency to act as if) into a proposition does a lot of simplification. If they were one and the same thing, then what would it be simplifying?

what justification is there to make this decision despite being unable to foresee the consequences and being unable to verify in advance whether the child actually wants to experience life? — Tzeentch

You've just answered your own question.

The justification is... being able to foresee the consequences (life is really good - love, sunsets, adventure etc) and we can't possibly check in advance whether they want these things, so there's obviously no moral obligation to do so (to have a moral obligation to do something impossible is stupid).