The ethics of having children in a Post-peak world

[UndercoverElephant]

To answer the question directly, and not take the easy route of taking the piss???

Well.... in a post peak world, IMHO .. it makes sense to have as many kids as the thing you have sharing your bed can pop out. In as short a period as possible. 14 or 15 would be ideal.

If 2/3rds of them died, before 16, of currently preventable illnesses, you'd still have about 4 that could help provide for you in your old age* (old age being a lot less than what you expect now)

While they're growing up.. and before they actually die of an illness currently preventable.. you can get them doing useful stuff, like weeding, firewood gathering.. and other tasks that free you up to do more useful stuff to provide.

So, in short, yeah. Breed. It's the social security of the future. Just get lots of little boxes ready to bury your mumps or measles ridden offspring in...

This thread is supposed to be about ethics. The question is not "What makes the best sense for my own future security?" The question is "What is the morally right thing to do?"

[Ludwig]

To answer the question directly, and not take the easy route of taking the piss???

Well.... in a post peak world, IMHO .. it makes sense to have as many kids as the thing you have sharing your bed can pop out. In as short a period as possible. 14 or 15 would be ideal.

If 2/3rds of them died, before 16, of currently preventable illnesses, you'd still have about 4 that could help provide for you in your old age* (old age being a lot less than what you expect now)

While they're growing up.. and before they actually die of an illness currently preventable.. you can get them doing useful stuff, like weeding, firewood gathering.. and other tasks that free you up to do more useful stuff to provide.

So, in short, yeah. Breed. It's the social security of the future. Just get lots of little boxes ready to bury your mumps or measles ridden offspring in...

You are making the rather rash assumption that there would be enough for both you and them to eat.

[RGR]

[quote="Lord Beria3"]

[ziggy12345]

To answer the question directly, and not take the easy route of taking the piss???

Well.... in a post peak world, IMHO .. it makes sense to have as many kids as the thing you have sharing your bed can pop out. In as short a period as possible. 14 or 15 would be ideal.

If 2/3rds of them died, before 16, of currently preventable illnesses, you'd still have about 4 that could help provide for you in your old age* (old age being a lot less than what you expect now)

While they're growing up.. and before they actually die of an illness currently preventable.. you can get them doing useful stuff, like weeding, firewood gathering.. and other tasks that free you up to do more useful stuff to provide.

So, in short, yeah. Breed. It's the social security of the future. Just get lots of little boxes ready to bury your mumps or measles ridden offspring in...

Thios sounds exactly like the countries I have been sent to over the last 30 years to rape them of their resources in the name of capitalism.

Just thought I would mention it as you are talking about morals

[2 As and a B]

Deleted

[biffvernon]

This thread is supposed to be about ethics.

We're all agreed that things would be better if the population stopped growing but there is an ethical question as to how to get there. I take the view that the problem needs to be tackled at the population, rather the individual, level. Thus we should not tell an individual 'You are a bad person if you have more than 1 or 2 babies', but we should create the societal conditions in which people on average choose voluntarily to only have one or two babies.

I think it is unethical for an individual to be told by others how many babies to have.

I think it is ethical that society acts to promote the conditions for demographic transition.

[DominicJ]

This thread is supposed to be about ethics. The question is not "What makes the best sense for my own future security?" The question is "What is the morally right thing to do?"

Only the living get a say on what morality is.....

[Ludwig]

This thread is supposed to be about ethics. The question is not "What makes the best sense for my own future security?" The question is "What is the morally right thing to do?"

Only the living get a say on what morality is.....

+1.

Morality is the social aspect of Darwinism. Every group has its rules. If the rules help it prosper (or at least survive), they become enshrined as its ethics.

Morality can differ a lot from group to group, but a common dimension to it is that it considered wrong to kill members of your own community. depending on the group, other communities may or may not be fair game - usually they are.

Our society has been propped up so much by fossil fuels and the impersonal net of the welfare state that we have been able to pretty much abandon morality. Nobody has been encouraged to care anout anyone outside their own family, and no one has needed to. Once hunger sets in, British people will start killing each other with postive relish - at last, a chance to do for real what so far they've only done on the X-Box.

One advantage of having children is that it justifies you joining in the general bloodbath. Without children, you can't pretend you're killing (and possibly eating) other people for anybody other than yourself.

[Lord Beria3]

Biff - I don't think a two child rule (for those with or below two children currently) is unethical, once you factor in the likely trajectory of population as we go down the PO cliff.

Postie - when civilisation stabilises around 1-2 billion people that approach may make sense (assuming that child mortality rates go back to the Middle Ages) but until the world population crashes and stabilises that approach is likely to be doomed.

Why? Because as Ludwig says, if Europe experiences a die-off, the chances of your children surviving are relatively limited.

My personal opinion is not to have more than one child, at least for this generation.

[biffvernon]

I don't know why folk find it hard to distinguish between individual and average.

We want to reduce the birth rate of the whole population. That's all about averages. How an individual behaves doesn't matter, so long as most individuals don't behave in the same way.

If we create a society whose average birth rate is below replacement level, then it's job done.

If we have to resort the to telling individuals how they must act then it's authoritarian coercion. That's unethical and if it has to be done (as, arguably, it was in China) then that marks a failure of society.

I remain optimistic that the demographic transition will happen without coercing the individual.

[Ludwig]

I don't know why folk find it hard to distinguish between individual and average.

We want to reduce the birth rate of the whole population. That's all about averages. How an individual behaves doesn't matter, so long as most individuals don't behave in the same way.

And how do you stop them behaving in the same same way, given that...

If we have to resort the to telling individuals how they must act then it's authoritarian coercion.

?

You seem to envision a society in which you get everything you want, and other people are magicked into wanting different things so that you don't have to make any compromises. Sometimes you sound more Thatcherite than Beria.

That's unethical and if it has to be done (as, arguably, it was in China) then that marks a failure of society.

What marks a society as a failure is whether it collapses. Our society is close to being revealed as a failure an order of magnitude greater than China's.

I remain optimistic that the demographic transition will happen without coercing the individual.

Oh, it probably will, if it's government coercion you're talking abouit. The coercion will all be done by nature.

[Prokopton]

There seem to be some people educated in ethics here, but on the whole there isn't really any discussion of the ethical question.

The question is not "What makes the best sense for my own future security?" The question is "What is the morally right thing to do?"

But some people think that security itself is a moral value.

Apparently the major thought is the avoidance of the suffering of the child, that's certainly a major consideration, especially if you believe that a good life is about the avoidance of suffering -- but again, not everyone does, and when societies decline + starvation and violence become more endemic, the value of suffering sometimes surfaces in the ethics that become popular.

Just trying to see what the actual thinking is behind the 'obviously definitely not, no discussion' attitude.

Personally on the 'enough to eat' thing I think much depends on circumstances that are still unfolding. It may not be possible on a practical level to see which choice would in the end seem more regrettable.

[vtsnowedin]

If you are peakoil aware then it is unethical to not have children.
Being smarter then the average individual ,to remove yourself from the gene pool leaves it to people less intelligent then yourself to carry on the human line.
To give stupid people this advantage is idiocy.
Have your children, raise and educate them well so they can defeat those less capable of dealing with a energy limited world.
That way the best of humanity will survive.

[Ludwig]

Ethics are a red herring. Unless you're religious, how can there be ethics? Love and compassion are real emotions, but that's all they are: emotions, that have have helped to hold human beings together and helped them to prosper. In fact they are almost certainly necessary counterweights to the opposing impulses of aggression and selfishness.

To take an example: I like animals, but there is nothing ethical about my liking of them, I just happen to find them cute in a way that is no doubt fundamentally infantile and traceable to the child's craving for physical affection. It is also no doubt linked to the parental nurturing instinct.

I used to subscribe to the Christian ethic of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." However, in the dog-eat-dog society we now inhabit, I tend to think, "Why should I help you? You wouldn't do the same for me, in fact given the chance, you'd probably hang me out to dry." I'd feel like a fool and a doormat.

My point is that a personal code of ethics is pointless if it isn't shared by society at large.

[UndercoverElephant]

It is also what animals do. In morality terms it is amoral.

I don't agree. It's only amoral if the human making the decision is amoral.

How does that stack up against ethical/unethical? Is there such a stance as aethical?

No.

Maybe it just goes under the guise of "acting naturally".

All sorts of things that come naturally are immoral and illegal. Rape, for example.