What is the philosophy behind bringing a child to this world?
Hi, Is there a motivation to bring a child to this world? (from a philosophical perspective of course) I lack such a motivation. So, I'm not a parent (at least for now).
I'd very much like to hear from the people who have children about their philosophy on this.
I'd very much like to hear from the people who have children about their philosophy on this.
Comments (40)
I have a wife with five children so far and would be classified as a radical pro-natalist. Check out my profile to get the gist of my character and lifestyle.
I have three main grounds that I will list, not in order of importance.
I. I hold to the position that contraception is the same as murder, on the basis of a logical connection between potential and actual life that occurs during the moment of potential actualization. I call this the Pronatalist Master Argument and I can present it if you ask.
II. I subscribe to Divine Command Theory and believe that Holy Writ prohibits the prevention of pregnancy in marriage.
III. I affirm a version of a will-to-power anthropology that is confirmed through a historiographic analysis; wherein, I believe that man's nature and obligation is to conquer and dominate and that when he fails to perpetuate his being and culture through a religiously justified patriarchal & monogamous fecundity, that society loses its collective will and begins to grow decadent and then apathetic and eventually will collapse.
Negatively, I have found anti-natalist arguments quite wanting, especially Benatar's argument from the asymmetry between pleasure and pain experiences, which is both simplistic and assumes an ethical framework guilty of the naturalistic fallacy.
Thank you for posting some actual information about yourself in your profile. You have a busy life, what with smoking, drinking, screwing, hunting, killing, interior designing, history of philosophizing, attending divine worship, and whatever else it is that you do. You and Agustino should have a good time together.
Too many of the wrong kind of people are having children. Wrong kind? People who can not support their children, do not really know how to rear children successfully (for this time and place), or are very screwed up and will likely pass their screwed upedness on to their unfortunate children. Some people are just plain having too many children. God to the contrary, there just isn't room and resources for everybody.
"Getting frequent blowjobs" is a form of contraception, and hence murder, according to your own principles.
Only if blowjobs would occur during a time which contraception is ordinarily possible, I do not practice oral sex during a time when my wife would ordinarily be able to conceive, for as I argued in an initial post, a potential life is connected to actual life during the time of potential actualization. I do not believe that sperm (for example) are in themselves actual life (vitae actualis).
Given that you have not seen my Pronatalist Master Argument, I do not see how you could make such presumptions....the fact that you have not given me the benefit of the doubt makes me wonder whether or not you are already engaging in an attempted confirmation bias regarding me.
Ah, some very deep moral sentiments you have there, I suppose you have some sort of logical grounds for your moral edicts regarding child raising, or ought i suppose these to be merely your arbitary opinion and conjecture?
As for resource allocation and "room," that is a malthusian absurdity to the third degree. there is enough room in Texas for the entire world's population for each family of four to have a 2,000 sq ft home and decent yard. there is enough farmable land in the Guinea Plateau alone to feed the entire world's population beyond our current hectaacre output which is also more than sufficient to feed the world's population. The problem is resource allocation and land management, not population and production (actual or potential). To say otherwise is an incredibly uninformed sentiment. The problem is not population-based, or agricultural...the problem is political and I can defend all of these points with source material if you are interested.
Not that its any of your business or that it has anything to do with my arguments as presented (red herring?)......but here is my response as to whether I should plan as a cancer patient:
Nah, I don't smoke THAT much, and I am somewhat suspicious of some of the research on tobacco anyway....My life insurance plan guarantees $500,000.00 to my wife, my eldest son will take over the farm, and the rest will split the whats left....the top three oldest living humans in the last fifty years were all chain smokers and regular consumers of alcohol and my time is fixed as far as i'm concerned, so I really don't care...I will eat bacon, drink beer, and smoke and kick ass while doing it....with a name like "bitter crank" I would of expected you to sympathize itstead of being such a pussy.
Since you are living in "The Cold and Snowy Part of The Heroin Addicted Rural Rust Belt" I'm sure you've seen the tragic consequences of people who aren't really able to take care of their children. Children born of addicted mothers are born addicted, and fairly often damaged as well. Same for fetal alcohol syndrome.
Logical ground: Children who are nurtured and protected from harm and guided by their parents as they grow up tend to be more successful and happier adults than people who were not nurtured and protected from harm. It isn't rocket science: We know what healthy children look like and sadly, we know what unhealthy neglected children look like.
So no, it's not just my arbitrary judgement.
Quoting Victoribus Spolia
Well, Victoribus, I didn't pry into your drinking and smoking habits -- you acknowledged that you smoke and drink. Fine by me -- I spent quite a few years smoking and drinking as well, and I liked it. It's something of a knee jerk -- I've spent quite a few years doing public health education. Sure, some people who smoked a lot lived to be very old. My father lived to be 102, and he smoked. However, he suffered from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease which made the last 15 years of his life more difficult than they otherwise would have been.
Quoting Victoribus Spolia
I like to eat bacon, drink beer, gin, and whiskey. I quit smoking because it was becoming noticeably counter-productive for me. Bitter cranks come in many varieties, including pussies. I don't think I am a pussy, and I'm actually not bitter either. It's a handle, not a personality summary.
As for being a crank... Well, that's possible, but I'm a fairly happy crank. And my profile picture is the philosopher Isaiah (not Irving) Berlin. I don't know much about Berlin, but I liked this portrait of Berlin by Richard Avedon. He was a liberal Jew, so I'd probably like him just fine.
I also think it should be advertised that vegan deits use several times less land, water and resources than traditional western style diets. That the entire world could be fed if each world power reduced their livestock production by ~10-20% and realocated the resulting surplus in grain to people.
This is why cultural change is so important, their is nothing so special about anyones DNA thats going to create the worlds savior. If you have a child of your own and feed them a non-vegan diet, more kids are going to starve on the other side of the world.
Just recently, I was watching a TV documentary, on rag-pickers in slums, in the Philippines and India. Rag-pickers pick over rubbish dumps, competing for bits of plastic and cloth and metal and other paltry items which they can sell for a couple of cents. It is of course the most miserable mode of worldly existence imaginable, surrounded by steaming piles of rubbish, constantly exposed to putrid rubbish and disease, labouring while ever light is available to discern some microscopic speck of redeemable material amongst the waste and muck. Truly a hellish existence.
But - these people had children. Even despite the extraordinary privation of their circumstances, they still procreated. As soon as the children are old enough - and that's not very old - they too become rag pickers.
Their plight is of course painful in the extreme, and I don't wish to make fun of them; God knows, in some future existence, any of us might be amongst them. But the point is, even given their circumstances, they will have children. And why? Because that is the very Darwinian power that drives the existence of born beings. It is, as the philosopher Schopenhauer well knew, a relentless power, an unstoppable force, which everywhere and in all things, seeks only to be; it is 'the will to exist'.
The whole point of philosophy is to be able to question that. To even be aware of the force that drives procreation, its power and relentlessness, and ask yourself 'should I be part of this?', is already to ask a philosophical question, a question that most humans, in their relentless drive to continue to exist, will never stop to ask.
Oh, and I have children; just one week hence, witnessed the birth of a first grand-child.
If we were able to know exactly when conception is possible then there would be no need of contraceptive devices at all.
Apparently you would consider abstinence during what you believed to be your wife's fertile period a form of contraception, and hence prohibited? This is not most religious people's idea of contraception. The rule for people who believe contraception is wrong seems to be to believe that sex (including blowjobs) for any purpose other than conception is also wrong. Abstinence would never be seen as a form of contraception, but rather as an expression of a sensible attitude towards how many children one could adequately care for.
I am going to respond in two posts, the first (below) will educate you on the religious debate (i don't mean this in a condescending way, but I was in those circles a long time). The second post will address your objection/evaluation of my position.
1. I never justified my position on contraception as murder as "what most religious people believe...." So that is quite irrelevant (and would be a fallacy, argumentum ad populum); nonetheless, this was the position of the reformers and early church fathers, for they permitted sexual conduct between spouses post-menopause, but argued that pregnancy prevention was murder. Calvin's commentary on Genesis 38 is quite informative on this strain. Likewise, Bryan C. Hodge's book the "The Christian Case Against Contraception" makes this very case and is a pretty recent work (it is available on Amazon and is a scholarly work in theology and exegesis).
Like positions in philosophy, such as idealism for instance, positions in theology have diverse sub-groups with their own proponents. The anti-contraception camp is no different and is split into two main groups with each subdivided into two further groups. Group A argues that contraception is generally immoral because it is contrary to God's design/desire for mankind. Group B argues that contraception is murder.
Group A includes conservative Roman Catholics and the Full-Quiver Evangelical types (e.g. the Duggars). The Roman Catholics of this group would argue that the primary purpose of sex is to reproduce, but permit family planning, just as long as no artificial contraception or other types of sexual conduct occur. The Evangelicals in this group argue that children are a blessing from God and that it is impious and lacks faith to practice contraception, but are ambiguous on other types of sexual conduct, but are generally pretty prudish to practice anything but vaginal intercourse in one of two positions....
Group B includes conservative members of the magisterial Reformation, a few hardcore Catholics, some conservative eastern orthodox, etc. all Group B members believe that contraception is murder, but this group is divided by the quesiton of "how" birth control is murder. B1 believes that human sperm is vitae actualis (actual life) and therefore affirm any non-procreative use of the seed as murder. B2 holds that sperm is only ever vitae potentialis (potential life) and is only vitae potentialis during the time of transition into vitae actualis which only occurs during a time when procreation is ordinarily possible; therefore, to intentionally prevent the transition from vitae potentialis to vitae actualis would be murder, and then only. A proponent of B1 is Charles Provan in his work "The Bible and Birth Control." and the Hodge book I mentioned is B2. I hold to B2.
Instead of 68 pounds a year, Americans on average eat an average 270 pounds of meat per year, or 12 oz. of meat per day. All that greatly exceeds what anyone needs.
Yes, intentional and not incidental abstinence during my wife's fertile period would be a form of contraception under my position.
When it comes to health, "muscles are muscles" matters not if they come from fish, chicken, cow or pig, the human body is not made to eat them.
Concerning dairy, well, you are better off with small anounts of meat than with any amount of dairy. No animal, wether omnivore, herbivore or carnivore drinks the milk of its prey in nature. The reason dairy is addicitive is becuase it contains enough opiates to keep a calf focused on coming back to the utter.
Nathan Pritikin told us everything we needed to know over 40 years ago.
https://www.drmcdougall.com/health/education/podcast/nathan-pritikin/
So that our economies will require these starving third world folks to immigrate in order to stimulate our labor sector and thereby bring their fecundity and incompetence regarding resource allocation here? Wouldn't that just make the whole world to starve instead of just the third world as it currently stands?
Quoting XanderTheGrey
I already addressed this absurd argument in a different fashion earlier, the problem we have is neither population or food supply, but land management and resource allocation. We currently waste almost 50% of the produced food and the U.S. has more farmable hectares than the whole world is currently using, we increased the amount of food on fewer hectares significantly since the 1970s, and there is enough farmable land in the Guinea Plateau to more than double our current output. The reason orphans are staving has everything to do with their government and their own use of land and knowledge of agriculture. There is enough room in Texas for everyone in the world to live comfortably and the rest of the world could be used for agriculture. That is just simple math. The problem is political and logistical. don't throw out the baby with the bathwater (pun intended).
I have posted a thread in Ethics, Called the Pronatalist Master Argument.....check it out.
Especially you:
Edit: I changed the title to something catchier: "Is Contraception Murder."
Clearly I need to learn more about this subject. However I think we nearly agree, we both see that the world holds more than enough resources to give everyone a higher quality of life than anyone currently has now, yes?
My personal stance is that its not useful to be concerned with who fault anything is, world powers have the greatest or perhaps only capability to reshape the world.
Fair enough. Perhaps we can have future interaction on this topic on a thread more specific to the question of how to ethically solve the problem of people & food, etc. As a personal advocate and practitioner of Permacultural technique, I think that would be an excellent area of discussion...From a philosophical perspective of course...
I'm off to plant a few potatoes.
Well, feel free to cleanse me of my ways.
Did Ganymede know how much risk he was putting Zeus to when he brought him the god-sized flagon of gin?
There is no philosophy. It's built into us. It is something we do and were meant to do. What is your philosophy of eating and drinking? Which isn't to say that you can't decide not to have children. I know plenty of people who have. It seems to me that your lack of motivation represents something missing from you. Maybe you need a philosophy for that.
When I googled Ganymede to check out what he was pouring, the first return was "Bizarre Bulge Found on Ganymede" -- I thought they were referring to a statue or a mosaic. Oh, intriguing! But no, just some moon.
What a striking idea. I gather there are 695,662 km² in Texas and a world population of 7 billion. That's 10,000 people per square kilometre. How will Texans (as we all will be) feel about that? I hear people can be a little rough down there.
I've been meaning to talk to VS about this - It was my understanding that this is a non-smoking forum.
I've said this before and I'll say it again - you should be careful what you say or people will think you are bitter and a crank.
I can't bring myself round to the idea of bringing up innocence in such a corrupt environment. Humanity in it's current state is poison. All the lies, hate toward one another is no place I want to be. You'd be better of living in the wild, if you had the luxury to chose that of course.
Assuming this is actually true, it's only part of the equation. You still need additional land for farming, mining, water, factories, business, parks/recreation and energy production. And then there's roads. So it's a bit misleading to only mention being able to cram 7.xx billion people into Texas.
Granted, we could be much more efficient if the entire population lived in the continental US, leaving the rest of the world to nature. But that's not how things are, and adding another 2-3 billion people over the next few decades is only going to strain resources and the climate that much more.
Given our incredible inefficiencies and wastefulness across the globe, it would have been better if the human population had levelled out at 2 billion or so. But we didn't so we have to make do with a polluted, overfished, warming planet of 10 billion by mid century.
But maybe the robots will save us.
Quoting Marchesk
I acknowledge that, but we waste almost 50% of our produced food as it currently stands and we produce more food on less land than ever in human history. Per eating requirements of humans we produce more than enough food for everyone and the Guinea Plateau ALONE could surpass all of our current outputs worldwide. The Texas example is just an example meant to illustrate that the population is manageable as far as space is concerned, and the guinea plateau point illustrates that we do not need much fertile land to sustain that population which can be contained in such a space.
lets say we expanded that population to JUST the continental U.S., to make room for some of the things you mentioned, each family would have a luxurious land allotment and we would still have massive available land for farming throughout the uninhabited world.
The point above is not meant to be a "realistic" scenario of how we should distribute people and resources, it just demonstrates that the the issue IS in fact distribution and resources. The point is not to suggest what can be done, but to properly identify the problem, because if we do not understand the problem, we cannot propose and good solution.
The fact is, the issue is NOT food production and population. the issue is land management and logistics of resource allocation given localized geo-politics. This helps rule out certain solutions, like attempting to explode crop production by creating mutant corn that can grow in Blizzards or sending condoms with our foreign aid packages to the Sudan. Such thinking will result in futility and we will likewise keep having thinkers propose our own infertility in the west as somehow a good idea to help poverty elsewhere, which is mathematically and historically unjustifiable.
The nature part, I can kinda see. The obligation part I have a real problem with. I think mankind has done enough conquering and dominating. I think it's time he pulled his head in and started looking about at the absolute carnage over creation he has caused.