DISQUS

This is crazy talk. When you reach the point where you're saying that there's no moral reason for you, given the choice, to choose a world where everyone born from now on is basically happy and lives fulfilling lives, versus a world where everyone born from now on is miserable, and in immense, constant pain -- well, I consider that a reductio ad absurdum of whatever premises are leading you to that conclusion.

Specifically, I think you're making a mistake by focusing on "rights." There is more to morality than rights. Let's say I had the opportunity to press a magic button that would instantly cure everyone suffering from intensely painful, but nonlethal, medical conditions. With one push of the button, I'd eliminate a great deal of pain, at essentially no cost to myself. There's no reason to think that those sick people have a "right" to my pushing the button -- I don't have any obligation TO THEM. But surely the right thing to do would be to push the button.

I find the issue somewhat perplexing and hard to get a grip on, but I didn't find your dismissal of the argument convincing. In that item you say, basically, that it's silly to attribute preferences or utility to people who don't exist. And so it is -- that's a silly way to use language and it probably leads to some silly results if you take that language seriously.

But I don't see how that even remotely answers the question, would it be good if an additional person existed? Clearly "that person" has no preference on the matter, because they don't exist (indeed, the phrase "that person" has no concrete referent at all, not even a hypothetical one).

But who cares? I'm not asking for their nonexistent opinion. I'm the one making the decision, and I'm deciding between two future states of the world, one with n people and one with n+1 people. There are all sorts of reasons why I might prefer one of those worlds to the other. Many of them have to do with my own welfare (with which I'm naturally especially concerned). This is all the stuff you've been talking about -- happiness or unhappiness, having someone to take care of you when you're old, and so on.

What I'm saying is that those self-regarding reasons aren't the ONLY reasons that could (should) move me to prefer the (n people) state to the (n+1 people) state or vice-versa. I don't see any reason why I can't reasonably view it as a good thing, a better state of the world, for there to be this extra person -- given, of course, that I can expect the person's life to be good, overall.

Now, of course the basic intuition here is just that, say, a world with ten billion happy people is better than a world with three happy people. I do see that some problems lurk behind this intuition -- but I'm far from convinced that it's necessary to abandon it.

The interesting thing is that both you and the people you're arguing with are almost always focused on parents' welfare. Missing from the debate seems to be the fact that, by having kids, you're creating a new, additional person, whose life you can often expect to be good (with a substantial variance on that expectation, of course).

You can reduce that good to welfare or utility, if you want to cast this point in homo economicus terms; or you can just appreciate it as the package of net goods, satisfactions, and fulfillments that are part of the experience of living a human life. Either way, it seems extremely likely that having a kid is going to be a net good, IF you think you'd be a decent parent, you don't have larger-than-usual opportunity costs (whether internal or external -- if you can cure cancer without the distraction of a child, do it), and you care to some degree about other people's goods and fulfillment as well as your own.

Will, I'm a big admirer of your work, but I just don't see what you're getting at here. I mean, do you honestly disagree that investment in science and medical research can lead to "new discoveries" and "breakthroughs" -- meaning, as Merriam-Webster's helpfully tells us, "a sudden advance especially in knowledge or technique"? If you do disagree with this, do you know anything about the science funding systems in place in this country, and how and when they've succeeded or failed?

This post is really quite bizarre. You're skewering a straw man here, and not the rather unremarkable, more-or-less obviously true line from Obama's speech.

Those interested should also take a look at Jason Malloy's analysis here.

Malloy's argument, from the data, is that "People with average and below average IQs are getting just as much of a financial return out of their 4-year degree as those above the 85th percentile." This leaves open, of course, the question whether there might be alternatives to college that could do equally well for people.

Couldn't one reasonably say that taking more money is more coercive because it prevents you from doing more things with your money? I have $20 and I plan to buy a $10 book and see a $10 movie. Someone steals $10; they have coercively prevented me from seeing the movie (say I'd prefer the book if forced to choose). If they steal all $20 they've coercively prevented me from doing either one.

Will's argument that having kids causes a lot of bad stuff to happen is certainly true, but not enough stress has been laid on the point (which Will himself has repeatedly made) that all this just proves that people value things besides happiness. The younger you have children, the more of their lives you'll get to see and experience; the older they'll be when you die; and the more opportunity they'll have to know their grandparents at ages when child is not too young nor grandparent too old for the interaction to be meaningful. These kinds of things and others are very important to people. I doubt they influence measured "happiness" much, but I imagine they might well influence something like "contentment," the sense that one's life has been a full and satisfying arc from start to finish. I'd give up some lifetime earnings for that kind of contentment, even at some cost to day-to-day happiness.