The more fundamental problem is that many people will vote to use their share of nature for profit and not preserve it. I don’t think the problem with conservation is entirely due to the absence of popular influence.
Regarding the future people, I don’t honor the rights and don’t assign value to the well-being of potential people. How about you?
My reasoning: the only decision to do with ethics is whether to create those people. If I act to improve the well-being of children who may be born years from now, and who won’t be my children (i.e. it won’t be my decision to give them birth), then I will also cause an increase in the number of children produced by these other people, and I will never catch up.
You’re misreading me if you think I think we each have “a share” of nature. My suspicion is that the right way to look at it isn’t as a bunch of discrete nature-slices, such that everybody gets complete dominion over one; rather, I think it’s better looked at as everyone having an equal stake in an indivisible chunk of nature.
I assign value to the well-being of future people, and think that they also have rights. (For instance, while a fetus is not a person, in paradigm cases it will one day be a person. It’s fine to prevent it from ever being a person by aborting it; but assuming that’s not on the agenda, it’d be wrong to, say, drink and smoke and contract STDs while pregnant such that the future person will suffer health problems as a result.)
About dividing nature, it does look like a good ideal, but realistically we need a way to resolve disputes. Unanimous agreement is very rare.
My own idea was to assign to everyone a personal chunk of nature, which was small enough to not be commercially useful on its own, and if people were sufficiently certain of never gaining more/new chunks (e.g., we forbid sales, single ownership of many chunks, and corporate ownership). Of course realistically nothing like that’s going to happen either.
Re: future people. Your example is of a fetus, which will become an adult if we don’t interfere with it, as opposed to unconcieved “potential” people—the vast mass of “future people”. The example of drinking and smoking, again, is an act done by the mother—who chose to create the new child—and so I don’t think it should be extended to my liability towards the child (before that child exists).
My last paragraph was poorly worded, here’s a restatement. Suppose I value purely potential future people (not foetuses, for the sake of argument). These future people, almost entirely, would not be my own children.
Suppose I act now to improve their lives in case they come to exist later. This would tend to increase the amount of such new people who are actually created. The more resources I create for future people to consume, the more people will be able to live in the future on these resources. Increasing population is not a goal of mine, so I prefer to stop this early and not act in favor of “future people” at all.
Yes—which is why I privilege the status quo (that is, what the situation would be absent human action) in cases where such agreement can’t be reached. For a smaller-scale example of collective property: I have a roommate, and our apartment has one bathroom. If he decides he’d like to keep koi in the bathtub, and I don’t approve of this idea, then even though we have equal stakes in the bathtub, the status quo (a non-koi-containing state of affairs) ought to win. We would need to agree to make a change from the status quo to some other state.
The example of drinking and smoking, again, is an act done by the mother—who chose to create the new child
This is a mischaracterization of many, if not most, pregnancies.
the vast mass of “future people”
The fact that most future people haven’t been conceived yet doesn’t seem meaningful to me, assuming you’re not expecting species extinction next week. Does it matter who they are exactly, as long as they’re people? It doesn’t seem so to me.
Why do you assume that making the future a nicer place to live will also make it more crowded? Many actions that can be taken to make the future a nicer place to live also make it less crowded. In fact, making the future less crowded probably also makes it a nicer place to live quite directly.
I wholeheartedly disagree with this mentality, and I think it’s one of the major hindrances to the righting of social injustice. When people feel like they’re entitled to “the way things are”, it’s difficult for them to notice when the status quo is unfair in a way that benefits them at the expense of others.
In your example about the koi fish in the bathtub, the no-koi-containing state of affairs doesn’t win out because it’s the status quo, but because the disutility of not being able to shower (where there was a reasonable expectation prior to renting of being able to shower) outweighs the utility of having koi fish. If you had used Craigslist to rent a room abroad with a shared bathroom and you discovered upon arriving that there were koi fish in the only bathtub, I doubt you’d consider “the koi fish have always been there so let’s not intervene” to be particularly fair, especially given your expectations when you arranged for the room. The situation can be assessed without privileging the current state of affairs.
As a particularly extreme historical example of status quo privileging, if you were a white man in 18th century America and you worked hard, you could have earned enough money to buy a slave. And you might have felt entitled to that slave because you played fairly according to the rules of the status quo. So if someone came along and argued that even though you followed the rules, it’s not actually fair for you to own a slave because the rules themselves were unfair, you might disagree. In fact, you might argue that it would be unfair to you if the rules were changed after you followed them so obediently.
However, a few hundred years later, it’s obvious to us that slavery was unfair, even if slaveowners disagreed. The slaveowners’ disutility should certainly be taken into account when optimizing for fairness, but it shouldn’t get some special “status quo” multiplier in society’s utility function. The status quo deserves no special privileges because it’s simply one of the many possible states of affairs.
Unfortunately, the tendency to privilege the status quo permeates our modern politics.
I expect that a few hundred years from now, it will be obvious to everyone that it’s unfair for an economic system to fail to provide adequate health care as compensation for any full-time contribution to society, even though many people currently feel entitled to the benefit of the higher after-tax purchasing power that they’re provided by the status quo at the expense of the uninsured working class.
You’re either ignoring “absent human action” or taking it to mean something wildly different from what I had in mind. Buying a slave is a human action. I used the word “status quo” because we were talking about “nature”—a thing that usually includes in its definition that humans haven’t messed with it all that much. I’d have chosen a different term (or more likely, made one up—I don’t think there is a good one already for the general case) if the topic had not been nature.
If I moved into an apartment only to discover that the only bathtub was home to koi, I think much of my irkedness would stem from having been subject to misleading advertising. Misleading advertising is certainly a human action.
You’re either ignoring “absent human action” or taking it to mean something wildly different from what I had in mind.
I took it to mean “absent further human action”, which I thought was the only coherent way to interpret your post. (If that’s not what you meant, then please forgive the rant.)
If what you really meant was “absent human action at all” (i.e. just nature), then in your original example about koi, the “natural” status quo would not have been no-koi-in-bathtub, but instead no-bathtub-at-all.
So the only way I could make sense of your example was to assume that you were assigning special status to “no further action” such that it was more relevant to the question of what to do with the bathtub than comparing the utilities of “being able to shower” and “having pet koi” in order to optimize for fairness.
I’m not saying that I think your position is that the status quo is always better. That would be a silly straw man. I’m just saying that privileging the status quo is a form of anchoring that can make people resist change even when they’d consider the new state of affairs to be “more fair” than the old state of affairs, had they not been anchored.
In my example about discovering the bathtub home to koi, “no further action” would have left the koi in place. The misleading advertising had already happened. It would take further action to find the koi a new home.
In my example about the slaveowner being confronted by abolitionists, “no further action” would have kept the slave enslaved. The slave had already been bought “fair and square” according to the rules at the time. The status quo was legal slavery. Abolition is what needed further action.
Am I completely missing your point? If so, by what interpretation of “status quo” was your original koi example relevant?
If what you really meant was “absent human action at all” (i.e. just nature), then in your original example about koi, the “natural” status quo would not have been no-koi-in-bathtub, but instead no-bathtub-at-all.
Of course. However, since I think that nature probably belongs to all humans now and in the future, I couldn’t use a nature example without begging the question and having it be giant and cumbersome. The bathtub was supposed to illustrate the collective property notion, not the status-quo notion.
You’re inserting the word “further”. I never included or meant to include the word or notion of “further”. Among other things, that would lead to the conclusion that once a factory is already set up to dump waste into a river (for instance), since it’d take further human action to undo that setup, it should be left in place unless everyone agrees to change it. But that’s not the answer I want—I think it matters that it took human action to set it up that way to begin with.
The bathtub was supposed to illustrate the collective property notion, not the status-quo notion.
Well that clears things up then. I realize you never included the word “further”, but I had to insert it in order to use your bathtub example to interpret the status quo notion in any meaningful way.
Assuming that had been your intent, the implied reductio was very much part of my point. I didn’t think you would want the factory to continue dumping waste, which is why I thought your argument about “status quo” was flawed.
But since you’ve clarified your position, I lift that particular objection.
Having reread your comments with the context of that clarification, I now understand what you meant and I sort of agree, with caveats.
If there is no clear winner among the possible states of affairs in consideration, then it makes sense to default to the state of affairs that requires no action. And I agree that future humans have rights insofar as it isn’t fair to “use up” nature in the present, leaving future generations with polluted wastelands.
However, I don’t think that uncertainty about the preferences of future humans should leave us unable to make changes to the current state of nature.
messing with nature is going to be stealing it from somebody who was entitled to its being left alone.
This may be true, but if we collectively think in the present that some change is a generally good idea overall, we shouldn’t maintain the status quo just because we’re worried that people in the future might disagree and want nature left alone. We should guess at what their preferences will be and take that into account so that we can move forward.
Otherwise, we’d never be able to change anything about nature that we don’t like.
This may be true, but if we collectively think in the present that some change is a generally good idea overall, we shouldn’t maintain the status quo just because we’re worried that people in the future might disagree and want nature left alone. We should guess at what their preferences will be and take that into account so that we can move forward.
But what if a majority of people agrees on a change? How can we decide how large it must be to have its way? It’s a troubling question for me because in political systems such decisions are usually pretty much arbitrary: why require a 70% supermajority vote and not 60% or 80%?
Unless the required supermajority is very near 100% (and has good reason to be so), I’m too afraid of the tyranny of the majority and would prefer a system where each voter actually controlled the proportion of nature that he or she is voting “for”.
This is a mischaracterization of many, if not most, pregnancies.
I acknowledge this problem, but it doesn’t change my conclusion.
The fact that most future people haven’t been conceived yet doesn’t seem meaningful to me, assuming you’re not expecting species extinction next week. Does it matter who they are exactly, as long as they’re people? It doesn’t seem so to me.
But they’re not people. They’re possibilities. They do not exist.
I accept the following reasoning: the future world will contain many new people no matter what I do. I prefer a future world that’s nice for them. That makes perfect sense.
The problem for me comes when people imply that ownership of parts of nature (e.g., tracts of land) should be forbidden. For instance you said,
messing with nature is going to be stealing it from somebody who was entitled to its being left alone.
I don’t accept that people who don’t yet even exist are entitled to a piece of nature I’m using today (if I don’t own it). I don’t intend to die before these future people are born, so I’ll have to share with them. The more new people are born, the smaller my remaining share—even if it’s a time-share or some such instead of a literal piece of the property. I’m willing to share—after all I didn’t create this land, so it shouldn’t be mine exclusively—but only up to some limit.
If the world population is X, and the small country of Breedia invents a molecular manufacturing technology that lets them convert all their mountains into 10X small children, I hope they won’t become entitled to nine-tenths of the world’s resources. I’ll feel sorry for the children and I’ll do everything I can to find them a place to live that’s not too much at the expense of existing people, including myself. I’ll also vote for anyone proposing a singleton that would prevent the neighboring country of Multiplia from doing the same thing next year.
Why do you assume that making the future a nicer place to live will also make it more crowded?
It’s the nature of population that it grows until it encounters a limit—either of resources, or cultural. I hope that future humans will breed more in the presence of more resources, and less in the presence of less resources, but I don’t fully trust this will happen.
Suppose the number and timing of children were limited only by the delay of nine months’ pregnancy, and the costs of raising children were negligible. I expect the world population to rise rapidly and without limit in this scenario.
It’s the nature of population that it grows until it encounters a limit—either of resources, or cultural. I hope that future humans will breed more in the presence of more resources, and less in the presence of less resources, but I don’t fully trust this will happen.
“Either resources, or cultural” makes this claim true but meaninglessly broad, since you can say that any population that fails to expand, but has sufficient resources to do so, is stopping for “cultural” reasons. Thus, populations will keep growing until they run out of resources to expand, or else they won’t. Not terribly helpful.
Much more importantly, you argue abstract resources, not “nature”—the two are quite different. Even if we grant you your assumption that future populations will use any existing resources to increase population, “nature preservation” generally deals with preventing people from converting non-population sustaining resources—squirrels, waterfalls, purple mountain’s majesty—into population sustaining resources—hot-dogs, hydroelectric plants, and coal mines.
Thus, preserving nature should limit population growth while making life more pleasant for existing populations. Within your own framework, this sounds like a win-win.
Nature preservation isn’t once and for all. We can’t really influence future generations not to use the nature we preserved as non-renewable resources, except culturally.
With time, many kinds of resources dwindle, while technology improvements increase the potential value of unused resources. Future generations may want those resources more than we do today.
We can’t really influence future generations not to use the nature we preserved as non-renewable resources, except culturally.
This isn’t really, um, true. We can pass laws, and laws help create and maintain a very powerful status quo. Cultural methods also matter, and cannot be arbitrarily excepted.
But this is all irrelevant to my actual point. Preserving nature means fewer baby-producing resources and more pleasure-producing resources for however long that preservation lasts. If we preserve now, then, ceteris paribus, we expect slower population growth and more happiness vs. if we commercialized that nature now. The fact that preservation is not forever is wholly irrelevant; however long it lasts, it generates a better world than had it not lasted that long, within your own concept of “better.”
You’re presenting the wrong alternatives. It’s not preserving nature vs. letting others harvest resources they will use in part to make babies. Rather, it’s preserving nature vs. harvesting it for myself and using those resources for whatever I want (which does not include babies).
The argument of the OP (and others) which I originally answered, was that nature should be a sort of trust, and should not be exploited by this generation. That morally, we should leave it no worse than we found it for future generations. Hence my argument that I can’t trust future generations.
Preservation is great if we can enjoy the preserved nature as parks, etc.(*) But preservation purely for the sake of preservation isn’t so great, and that was my point originally.
(*) On the market the value of nature as “resources” is clearly higher, in large part because the incentives and responsibilities are all set up wrong. It follows that we can economically harvest all the resources we want and use the profits to set up parks, preserves, etc. which would be tailored to human enjoyment and so much more pleasant for most people than really wild nature.
Suppose the number and timing of children were limited only by the delay of nine months’ pregnancy, and the costs of raising children were negligible. I expect the world population to rise rapidly and without limit in this scenario.
I would need to know much more about what you consider to be the “costs” of raising children (as they are presently) to address this scenario. For instance, if they still take nine months from conception to birth, do they also still take the same number of years from birth to adulthood? Parental attention per childhood is a cost, and one that you don’t get to scale up for greater numbers of children indefinitely without fiddling with time.
I meant all the costs which come down to money. Parents would also be free to choose to pay for babysitters (or TVs, or nanny AIs) to reduce parenting time if they wish.
It’s not at all obvious to me that, even if monetary cost per child approached zero, people would have all the children it was biologically feasible to have, specifically because of the bottleneck on parental attention (but also because many people don’t want children, or want a smaller number for some non-money-related reason). I don’t think a majority of choices about family size have much to do with money at all.
people would have all the children it was biologically feasible to have
I didn’t say that. I merely think that the (world average) birthrates would be well above sustainment level. Three children per family on average would be more than enough for a population explosion.
many people don’t want children, or want a smaller number for some non-money-related reason
Unfortunately, if we have a future of many generations of biological humanity without significant resource constraints, memetic selection will make sure most people do want many children. This must happen as long as some people want many children and can teach most of their children to want the same.
The more fundamental problem is that many people will vote to use their share of nature for profit and not preserve it. I don’t think the problem with conservation is entirely due to the absence of popular influence.
Regarding the future people, I don’t honor the rights and don’t assign value to the well-being of potential people. How about you?
My reasoning: the only decision to do with ethics is whether to create those people. If I act to improve the well-being of children who may be born years from now, and who won’t be my children (i.e. it won’t be my decision to give them birth), then I will also cause an increase in the number of children produced by these other people, and I will never catch up.
You’re misreading me if you think I think we each have “a share” of nature. My suspicion is that the right way to look at it isn’t as a bunch of discrete nature-slices, such that everybody gets complete dominion over one; rather, I think it’s better looked at as everyone having an equal stake in an indivisible chunk of nature.
I assign value to the well-being of future people, and think that they also have rights. (For instance, while a fetus is not a person, in paradigm cases it will one day be a person. It’s fine to prevent it from ever being a person by aborting it; but assuming that’s not on the agenda, it’d be wrong to, say, drink and smoke and contract STDs while pregnant such that the future person will suffer health problems as a result.)
I can’t parse your last paragraph at all.
About dividing nature, it does look like a good ideal, but realistically we need a way to resolve disputes. Unanimous agreement is very rare.
My own idea was to assign to everyone a personal chunk of nature, which was small enough to not be commercially useful on its own, and if people were sufficiently certain of never gaining more/new chunks (e.g., we forbid sales, single ownership of many chunks, and corporate ownership). Of course realistically nothing like that’s going to happen either.
Re: future people. Your example is of a fetus, which will become an adult if we don’t interfere with it, as opposed to unconcieved “potential” people—the vast mass of “future people”. The example of drinking and smoking, again, is an act done by the mother—who chose to create the new child—and so I don’t think it should be extended to my liability towards the child (before that child exists).
My last paragraph was poorly worded, here’s a restatement. Suppose I value purely potential future people (not foetuses, for the sake of argument). These future people, almost entirely, would not be my own children.
Suppose I act now to improve their lives in case they come to exist later. This would tend to increase the amount of such new people who are actually created. The more resources I create for future people to consume, the more people will be able to live in the future on these resources. Increasing population is not a goal of mine, so I prefer to stop this early and not act in favor of “future people” at all.
Yes—which is why I privilege the status quo (that is, what the situation would be absent human action) in cases where such agreement can’t be reached. For a smaller-scale example of collective property: I have a roommate, and our apartment has one bathroom. If he decides he’d like to keep koi in the bathtub, and I don’t approve of this idea, then even though we have equal stakes in the bathtub, the status quo (a non-koi-containing state of affairs) ought to win. We would need to agree to make a change from the status quo to some other state.
This is a mischaracterization of many, if not most, pregnancies.
The fact that most future people haven’t been conceived yet doesn’t seem meaningful to me, assuming you’re not expecting species extinction next week. Does it matter who they are exactly, as long as they’re people? It doesn’t seem so to me.
Why do you assume that making the future a nicer place to live will also make it more crowded? Many actions that can be taken to make the future a nicer place to live also make it less crowded. In fact, making the future less crowded probably also makes it a nicer place to live quite directly.
I wholeheartedly disagree with this mentality, and I think it’s one of the major hindrances to the righting of social injustice. When people feel like they’re entitled to “the way things are”, it’s difficult for them to notice when the status quo is unfair in a way that benefits them at the expense of others.
In your example about the koi fish in the bathtub, the no-koi-containing state of affairs doesn’t win out because it’s the status quo, but because the disutility of not being able to shower (where there was a reasonable expectation prior to renting of being able to shower) outweighs the utility of having koi fish. If you had used Craigslist to rent a room abroad with a shared bathroom and you discovered upon arriving that there were koi fish in the only bathtub, I doubt you’d consider “the koi fish have always been there so let’s not intervene” to be particularly fair, especially given your expectations when you arranged for the room. The situation can be assessed without privileging the current state of affairs.
As a particularly extreme historical example of status quo privileging, if you were a white man in 18th century America and you worked hard, you could have earned enough money to buy a slave. And you might have felt entitled to that slave because you played fairly according to the rules of the status quo. So if someone came along and argued that even though you followed the rules, it’s not actually fair for you to own a slave because the rules themselves were unfair, you might disagree. In fact, you might argue that it would be unfair to you if the rules were changed after you followed them so obediently.
However, a few hundred years later, it’s obvious to us that slavery was unfair, even if slaveowners disagreed. The slaveowners’ disutility should certainly be taken into account when optimizing for fairness, but it shouldn’t get some special “status quo” multiplier in society’s utility function. The status quo deserves no special privileges because it’s simply one of the many possible states of affairs.
Unfortunately, the tendency to privilege the status quo permeates our modern politics.
I expect that a few hundred years from now, it will be obvious to everyone that it’s unfair for an economic system to fail to provide adequate health care as compensation for any full-time contribution to society, even though many people currently feel entitled to the benefit of the higher after-tax purchasing power that they’re provided by the status quo at the expense of the uninsured working class.
You’re either ignoring “absent human action” or taking it to mean something wildly different from what I had in mind. Buying a slave is a human action. I used the word “status quo” because we were talking about “nature”—a thing that usually includes in its definition that humans haven’t messed with it all that much. I’d have chosen a different term (or more likely, made one up—I don’t think there is a good one already for the general case) if the topic had not been nature.
If I moved into an apartment only to discover that the only bathtub was home to koi, I think much of my irkedness would stem from having been subject to misleading advertising. Misleading advertising is certainly a human action.
I took it to mean “absent further human action”, which I thought was the only coherent way to interpret your post. (If that’s not what you meant, then please forgive the rant.)
If what you really meant was “absent human action at all” (i.e. just nature), then in your original example about koi, the “natural” status quo would not have been no-koi-in-bathtub, but instead no-bathtub-at-all.
So the only way I could make sense of your example was to assume that you were assigning special status to “no further action” such that it was more relevant to the question of what to do with the bathtub than comparing the utilities of “being able to shower” and “having pet koi” in order to optimize for fairness.
I’m not saying that I think your position is that the status quo is always better. That would be a silly straw man. I’m just saying that privileging the status quo is a form of anchoring that can make people resist change even when they’d consider the new state of affairs to be “more fair” than the old state of affairs, had they not been anchored.
In my example about discovering the bathtub home to koi, “no further action” would have left the koi in place. The misleading advertising had already happened. It would take further action to find the koi a new home.
In my example about the slaveowner being confronted by abolitionists, “no further action” would have kept the slave enslaved. The slave had already been bought “fair and square” according to the rules at the time. The status quo was legal slavery. Abolition is what needed further action.
Am I completely missing your point? If so, by what interpretation of “status quo” was your original koi example relevant?
Of course. However, since I think that nature probably belongs to all humans now and in the future, I couldn’t use a nature example without begging the question and having it be giant and cumbersome. The bathtub was supposed to illustrate the collective property notion, not the status-quo notion.
You’re inserting the word “further”. I never included or meant to include the word or notion of “further”. Among other things, that would lead to the conclusion that once a factory is already set up to dump waste into a river (for instance), since it’d take further human action to undo that setup, it should be left in place unless everyone agrees to change it. But that’s not the answer I want—I think it matters that it took human action to set it up that way to begin with.
Well that clears things up then. I realize you never included the word “further”, but I had to insert it in order to use your bathtub example to interpret the status quo notion in any meaningful way.
Assuming that had been your intent, the implied reductio was very much part of my point. I didn’t think you would want the factory to continue dumping waste, which is why I thought your argument about “status quo” was flawed.
But since you’ve clarified your position, I lift that particular objection.
Having reread your comments with the context of that clarification, I now understand what you meant and I sort of agree, with caveats.
If there is no clear winner among the possible states of affairs in consideration, then it makes sense to default to the state of affairs that requires no action. And I agree that future humans have rights insofar as it isn’t fair to “use up” nature in the present, leaving future generations with polluted wastelands.
However, I don’t think that uncertainty about the preferences of future humans should leave us unable to make changes to the current state of nature.
This may be true, but if we collectively think in the present that some change is a generally good idea overall, we shouldn’t maintain the status quo just because we’re worried that people in the future might disagree and want nature left alone. We should guess at what their preferences will be and take that into account so that we can move forward.
Otherwise, we’d never be able to change anything about nature that we don’t like.
For all practical purposes, I agree completely.
Get rid of the roommate. Shower with the koi.
‘A wizard has turned your bathtub into a koi pond. Is this awesome Y/N?’
(I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
‘An evil sorcerer has turned your home into a human’s bathtub. Is this a horrible eco-disaster Y/N?’
(In keeping with the theme of preservation of nature. Although koi aren’t very natural.)
But what if a majority of people agrees on a change? How can we decide how large it must be to have its way? It’s a troubling question for me because in political systems such decisions are usually pretty much arbitrary: why require a 70% supermajority vote and not 60% or 80%?
Unless the required supermajority is very near 100% (and has good reason to be so), I’m too afraid of the tyranny of the majority and would prefer a system where each voter actually controlled the proportion of nature that he or she is voting “for”.
I acknowledge this problem, but it doesn’t change my conclusion.
But they’re not people. They’re possibilities. They do not exist.
I accept the following reasoning: the future world will contain many new people no matter what I do. I prefer a future world that’s nice for them. That makes perfect sense.
The problem for me comes when people imply that ownership of parts of nature (e.g., tracts of land) should be forbidden. For instance you said,
I don’t accept that people who don’t yet even exist are entitled to a piece of nature I’m using today (if I don’t own it). I don’t intend to die before these future people are born, so I’ll have to share with them. The more new people are born, the smaller my remaining share—even if it’s a time-share or some such instead of a literal piece of the property. I’m willing to share—after all I didn’t create this land, so it shouldn’t be mine exclusively—but only up to some limit.
If the world population is X, and the small country of Breedia invents a molecular manufacturing technology that lets them convert all their mountains into 10X small children, I hope they won’t become entitled to nine-tenths of the world’s resources. I’ll feel sorry for the children and I’ll do everything I can to find them a place to live that’s not too much at the expense of existing people, including myself. I’ll also vote for anyone proposing a singleton that would prevent the neighboring country of Multiplia from doing the same thing next year.
It’s the nature of population that it grows until it encounters a limit—either of resources, or cultural. I hope that future humans will breed more in the presence of more resources, and less in the presence of less resources, but I don’t fully trust this will happen.
Suppose the number and timing of children were limited only by the delay of nine months’ pregnancy, and the costs of raising children were negligible. I expect the world population to rise rapidly and without limit in this scenario.
“Either resources, or cultural” makes this claim true but meaninglessly broad, since you can say that any population that fails to expand, but has sufficient resources to do so, is stopping for “cultural” reasons. Thus, populations will keep growing until they run out of resources to expand, or else they won’t. Not terribly helpful.
Much more importantly, you argue abstract resources, not “nature”—the two are quite different. Even if we grant you your assumption that future populations will use any existing resources to increase population, “nature preservation” generally deals with preventing people from converting non-population sustaining resources—squirrels, waterfalls, purple mountain’s majesty—into population sustaining resources—hot-dogs, hydroelectric plants, and coal mines.
Thus, preserving nature should limit population growth while making life more pleasant for existing populations. Within your own framework, this sounds like a win-win.
Nature preservation isn’t once and for all. We can’t really influence future generations not to use the nature we preserved as non-renewable resources, except culturally.
With time, many kinds of resources dwindle, while technology improvements increase the potential value of unused resources. Future generations may want those resources more than we do today.
This isn’t really, um, true. We can pass laws, and laws help create and maintain a very powerful status quo. Cultural methods also matter, and cannot be arbitrarily excepted.
But this is all irrelevant to my actual point. Preserving nature means fewer baby-producing resources and more pleasure-producing resources for however long that preservation lasts. If we preserve now, then, ceteris paribus, we expect slower population growth and more happiness vs. if we commercialized that nature now. The fact that preservation is not forever is wholly irrelevant; however long it lasts, it generates a better world than had it not lasted that long, within your own concept of “better.”
You’re presenting the wrong alternatives. It’s not preserving nature vs. letting others harvest resources they will use in part to make babies. Rather, it’s preserving nature vs. harvesting it for myself and using those resources for whatever I want (which does not include babies).
The argument of the OP (and others) which I originally answered, was that nature should be a sort of trust, and should not be exploited by this generation. That morally, we should leave it no worse than we found it for future generations. Hence my argument that I can’t trust future generations.
Preservation is great if we can enjoy the preserved nature as parks, etc.(*) But preservation purely for the sake of preservation isn’t so great, and that was my point originally.
(*) On the market the value of nature as “resources” is clearly higher, in large part because the incentives and responsibilities are all set up wrong. It follows that we can economically harvest all the resources we want and use the profits to set up parks, preserves, etc. which would be tailored to human enjoyment and so much more pleasant for most people than really wild nature.
I would need to know much more about what you consider to be the “costs” of raising children (as they are presently) to address this scenario. For instance, if they still take nine months from conception to birth, do they also still take the same number of years from birth to adulthood? Parental attention per childhood is a cost, and one that you don’t get to scale up for greater numbers of children indefinitely without fiddling with time.
I meant all the costs which come down to money. Parents would also be free to choose to pay for babysitters (or TVs, or nanny AIs) to reduce parenting time if they wish.
It’s not at all obvious to me that, even if monetary cost per child approached zero, people would have all the children it was biologically feasible to have, specifically because of the bottleneck on parental attention (but also because many people don’t want children, or want a smaller number for some non-money-related reason). I don’t think a majority of choices about family size have much to do with money at all.
I didn’t say that. I merely think that the (world average) birthrates would be well above sustainment level. Three children per family on average would be more than enough for a population explosion.
Unfortunately, if we have a future of many generations of biological humanity without significant resource constraints, memetic selection will make sure most people do want many children. This must happen as long as some people want many children and can teach most of their children to want the same.