Do you actually think an infant or young child is just… replaceable?
Not directly, for any given child. But I think potential children are at least partially fungible. Whether it’s better to have 3 children who live for decades, or 6 children, three of which only live a few years and 3 who live for decades is a very hard question.
I don’t know how to value a short life, compared to no life at all. I do think it’s an irrelevant distraction (in this context) to compare one short life to a different individual’s long life.
Not directly, for any given child. But I think potential children are at least partially fungible. Whether it’s better to have 3 children who live for decades, or 6 children, three of which only live a few years and 3 who live for decades is a very hard question.
I don’t know how to value a short life, compared to no life at all. I do think it’s an irrelevant distraction (in this context) to compare one short life to a different individual’s long life.
Losing a child is one of the worst things that can happen to a person, in terms of long-term well-being. See, for example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827319302204, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2910450/, and https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-015-9624-x
Yes, in the modern world, where babies are seen as precious, that is true. It clearly wasn’t as big a deal when infant mortality was very high.
The fact that we now see babies as precious is not an arbitrary feature of the modern world with no moral valence. It is an accomplishment.