I don’t understand the positive duty to procreate which seems to be an accepted premise here?
Morality is an adverb not an adjective.
Is a room of 100 people 100x more “moral” than a room with 1 person. What’s wrong with calling that a morally neutral state? (I’m not totalling up happiness or net pleasure or any of that weird stuff).
Only when forced into a trolley problem when we have actual decisions do our decisions, e.g. kill 1 person or 100 people, does the number of people have significance.
I don’t think there’s a “duty to procreate”. I wrote that “There’s always some reason to positively benefit possible future people by bringing them into a positive existence, even though it doesn’t wrong anyone to remain childless by choice.” In other words: it’s a good thing to do, not a duty. Some things are important, and worth doing, even though morally optional.
Is a world containing happy lives better than a barren rock? As a staunch anti-nihilist, I think that good lives have value, and so the answer is ‘yes’.
Note that I wouldn’t necessarily say that this world is “more moral”, since “moral” is more naturally read as a narrow assessment of actions, rather than outcomes. But we should care about more than just actions. The point of acting, as I see it, is to bring about desirable outcomes. And I think we should prefer worlds filled with vibrant, happy lives over barren worlds. That’s not something I’m arguing for here; just a basic premise that I think is partly constitutive of having good values.
I don’t understand the positive duty to procreate which seems to be an accepted premise here?
Morality is an adverb not an adjective.
Is a room of 100 people 100x more “moral” than a room with 1 person. What’s wrong with calling that a morally neutral state? (I’m not totalling up happiness or net pleasure or any of that weird stuff).
Only when forced into a trolley problem when we have actual decisions do our decisions, e.g. kill 1 person or 100 people, does the number of people have significance.
I don’t think there’s a “duty to procreate”. I wrote that “There’s always some reason to positively benefit possible future people by bringing them into a positive existence, even though it doesn’t wrong anyone to remain childless by choice.” In other words: it’s a good thing to do, not a duty. Some things are important, and worth doing, even though morally optional.
Is a world containing happy lives better than a barren rock? As a staunch anti-nihilist, I think that good lives have value, and so the answer is ‘yes’.
Note that I wouldn’t necessarily say that this world is “more moral”, since “moral” is more naturally read as a narrow assessment of actions, rather than outcomes. But we should care about more than just actions. The point of acting, as I see it, is to bring about desirable outcomes. And I think we should prefer worlds filled with vibrant, happy lives over barren worlds. That’s not something I’m arguing for here; just a basic premise that I think is partly constitutive of having good values.
I think I understand and that makes sense to me.