I think adoption needs to be delved into into a lot more detail. Rachels Paper only briefly mentions adoption:
First, it will say nothing about adoption. Adoptive parents do not conceive their children and thus do not “have children”
in the sense relevant to my argument. (In another, perfectly normal sense, adoptive parents do of course have children.)
My wife and I are fairly well off, so over the course of our life, I would not be surprised if we could potentially give hundreds of thousands of dollars to charities. We are also going to be having our first in person, pre-adoption meeting with a adoption social worker this weekend. If we do adopt a child, we will likely spend that hundreds of thousands of dollars on the child and not on the charities.
So in terms of impact, now would be a VERY impactful time for me to hear any and all arguments for and against this being moral, immoral, or morally neutral, and I feel a bit let down the paper just sort of glosses over this.
Please don’t worry about personally offending me! I’ll even call Crocker’s rules.
Purchase fuzzies and utilons separately. Adopting is not going to be anywhere near the most efficient way to improve the world. Certainly do not do it out of a sense of obligation; that will lead to a build up of resentment that will hurt you all. Do it if you want to, but recognise that you’re doing it for your own sake.
I think the marginal difference you can make by adopting is probably surprisingly large. (If your expectations of the amount of good it’s possible to do are well-grounded to start with.)
The difference in quality of life for a child who’s adopted rather than staying in the care system is spectacularly large: it’s a long time since I looked at the data but I remember it being eye-popping. And society is likely to be better as a result—there’s a much greater chance of the child contributing positively to society rather than causing significant problems. (Of course, this is on average: some cared-for children grow up to do spectacularly positive things for society, and some adopted kids go on to a life of antisocial crime.)
There are way more children who would benefit from being adopted than there are adoptive parents. (In the UK it’s something like 10- or 20-to-1 at the moment.) With some complex social issues, it’s hard to see what the limiting factor is in improving things: not here. For looked-after children, the supply of adoptive parents is a runaway winner.
[EDIT: Woah, cultural assumptions there, sorry. From a quick glance, it looks like there is a shortage of adoptive parents in the US, but nothing like on the scale as in the UK.]
One of the big problems with organised altruism is the distance from the donor to the beneficiary: for instance, if you’re trying to help people a continent away, and in a profoundly different social context, it’s hard to be confident about what is genuinely improving things and what isn’t. But an adopted child lives right in your house and is socialised by you, so the distance—literal and figurative—is much smaller.
I wouldn’t advocate it as a life choice for people whose main goal is purely to benefit society. Parenting is bloody hard work, physically and emotionally. But some people (me included) find it hugely rewarding as well. So if you think you’re likely to find it rewarding to parent, adopting seems to me like a great thing to do.
On a personal note, good luck with the process: friends and relations who’ve been through it have had mixed experiences. But the ones who ended up adopting report being very happy they did so.
(Bias declaration: I’m a parent of young children, and so likely to irrationally overvalue actions that benefit young children.)
Sometimes adopted children were kidnapped from their families, rather than being in the care system. I don’t know how common this is compared to adoption of children who don’t have families or are being abused, but it should go into the calculation somewhere.
If we do adopt a child, we will likely spend that hundreds of thousands of dollars on the child and not on the charities.
What are you aiming to optimize for? If it’s truly altruism, then it’s unlikely a kid would generate the same utility as hundreds of thousands of dollars going toward great charities.
Realistically, the current answer to this is “My wife’s utility function.” That includes a fair amount of altruism, although not necessarily in an organized way.
After review, I think most of my approaches to altruism also seem to be disorganized. The only thread that seems to run through them is that they seem to be focused on having minimum guilt, but that means I need to have a better grasp of ‘What makes me feel guilty?’ to answer the question well or I’m just pulling a phlogiston.
My current model of my own guilt sort of feels like something which slowly increases over time which can be removed by being altruistic in a similar manner to how people get hungry over time and they minimize that by eating.
That being said, that doesn’t quite seem like it cleaves reality correctly, but I can’t think of a better metaphor right now. I’m going to want to think more about this.
Heuristically, I agree with jkaufman and lmm, but I wonder if you can do something like a Fermi estimate of the impact of this decision? (Leaving your potential fuzzies out of it for now; after you estimate the impact, you can talk with people of the appropriate reference class to help you predict the level of fuzzies that you’re likely to obtain or lose. Then, if the numbers are going in opposite directions, you can estimate how much you care about impact vs fuzzies to help make your decision.) Here are some factors you might want to estimate:
Some measure of how much of your income is likely to go to charity. What fraction of the income that you have left over after maintaining quality of life for yourself, family, etc do you think you will contribute to charity? (To get an estimate of this, consider how much you are contributing.) Consider whether this fraction will remain the same if you have a child.
Some measure of the effectiveness of your chosen charity per marginal dollar. If you want to remove this from the equation, you could just compare fuzzies vs dollars, but I don’t think that would be as useful, since (money contributed to charity) is presumably not a terminal value for you.
Some measure of the costs of raising a child (may need to do this seperately for adopting vs creating a new human; I have no idea whether there is a significant cost difference).
Some measure of the opportunity cost of the time you spend raising the child. You’d need to think about how to evaluate this, since it’s not accurate for most people to bill these as working hours.
I think adopting a child will likely be superior to donation for your all your personal preferences, while donating the equivalent amount of money will likely be superior than adoption for the smaller subset of your personal preferences which you call “morality”. Both the adoption and the effective charity donation are moral, but the donation is more moral. Additionally, both will likely satisfy the sum of all your preferences, but the adoption is likely to satisfy them more.
I may be wrong about your values, of course. At the end of the day, you will in theory do what you believe maximizes all your preferences rather than maximize the subset of preferences you label “moral”. Truly maximizing morality would mean giving up a lot—what actually happens is that morality is just one weighted variable among many others that you wish to maximize.
Adoption moral pros you may not have considered:
1) When you spend, you use money to transfer resources from one place to another, where you believe they will be more efficient. When you adopt, it’s true that you are likely diverting resources to a sub-optimal place morally, but the non-financial investment you put in is also creating resources.
2) Don’t just look at “good you could do with the money you would otherwise spend on the kid” in a vacuum. An un-adopted child still diverts money from someone. Adoption frees up those resources for the adoption center / the state to do more good work. So when calculating the total moral loss inherent in this choice, it’s [good you could have done with the money you will spend on the kid] - [good the state/adoption clinic will do with the money they will save from you adopting the kid] - [good you will do by raising the kid] … which is be a fair bit less moral loss than you might initially assume.
Adoption moral cons you may not have considered
1) If you don’t adopt the child, someone else is likely to do it. But if you don’t donate to effective charity, no one is likely to take your place. (However, you can mitigate this by adopting a child that other people would for some reason be unlikely to adopt)
Considering my preferences/values are strongly connected to my wife’s preferences/values, I should probably have her read some of this thread and get her thoughts as well. Getting a list of pros and cons and thinking about all of the items does help me think through decisions, and it helps me think of things that I may want to talk to the social worker about.
As a bit of a generic update about that meeting… very little of any dramatic import happened. The first visit seemed to be primarily focused on “Thank you for filling out that first chunk of paperwork. You still need to fill out these various forms of paperwork so that we can confirm that there are records that you and all adults living with you are sane/safe/non-criminal, etc. That being said, there are still 2 more home visits after the paperwork, and classes, and books.
I get the feeling I was substantially compressing all of the drama and moral decision making of adoption into a single meeting, when in fact, that isn’t how it feels at all when you actually start going through the process. (For reference, I live in Maryland. I have no idea how other states or countries manage their adoption processes, and this may not apply to anyone else.)
The most comparable thing I can think of now is getting my driver’s license, but more so. Not that I think there is ever a specific “Adoption License.” but the relative amount of work, classes, and bureaucratic effort feels in about the same order of magnitude, if higher.
Certainly not if you’re trying to maximize your hedonic happiness. But children do not increase hedonic happiness; they increase your sense of living a meaningful life. To maximize the actual meaning of your life, you must use estimates of the impact of your decisions; whether or not this affects your perceived sense of meaning depends on how seriously you take moral arguments.
There is variance in happiness, yes, but studies have shown that having children does not on average result in higher hedonic happiness, although it does increase a sense of living a meaningful life. If you doubt this, I can dig up the reference; I think it was actually referred to in the Rachaels paper. I said “certainly not”, but that wasn’t meant to be taken literally; of course it’s not certain that you’ll be equally or less happy with children.
I think I didn’t word the second sentence correctly. I was trying to make the point that having a sense of meaning is not the same as doing reasonably well at improving the world in the ways you care about.
If you wanted to maximize your sense of meaning, you wouldn’t object to being wireheaded in a blissful and maximally meaningful cyber-world. I think it’s reasonable to say that most people object to such wireheading because they care about their actual impact on the world. At least, they want to appear as if they do.
studies have shown that having children does not on average result in higher hedonic happiness
I am not average person, you don’t look to be one either.
having a sense of meaning is not the same as doing reasonably well at improving the world in the ways you care about.
Well, again, it depends. For some people “meaningful life” has nothing to do with improving the world. And if your idea of meaningful life is improving the world, I don’t see how you can have a sense of meaning and at the same time be aware that you’re not “doing reasonably well”.
I am not average person, you don’t look to be one either.
Fair enough, but I still don’t think I am very good at predicting whether I’ll be happier with children. I also doubt that other people who do think they will be happier are very accurate. Humans are notoriously bad at determining what will make them happy/unhappy. I’m thinking in particular about the study about lottery winners vs. amputee victim from Dan Gilbert’s TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html.
if your idea of meaningful life is improving the world, I don’t see how you can have a sense of meaning and at the same time be aware that you’re not “doing reasonably well”.
Society as a whole regards having children as profoundly selfless, rather than selfish, so I think I am fair in concluding that some of the sense of meaning that people get from having children is related to improving the world for future generations. That particular self-satisfaction might not be disturbed by Rachaels’ argument if one does not take moral arguments seriously.
I think adoption needs to be delved into into a lot more detail. Rachels Paper only briefly mentions adoption:
My wife and I are fairly well off, so over the course of our life, I would not be surprised if we could potentially give hundreds of thousands of dollars to charities. We are also going to be having our first in person, pre-adoption meeting with a adoption social worker this weekend. If we do adopt a child, we will likely spend that hundreds of thousands of dollars on the child and not on the charities.
So in terms of impact, now would be a VERY impactful time for me to hear any and all arguments for and against this being moral, immoral, or morally neutral, and I feel a bit let down the paper just sort of glosses over this.
Please don’t worry about personally offending me! I’ll even call Crocker’s rules.
Purchase fuzzies and utilons separately. Adopting is not going to be anywhere near the most efficient way to improve the world. Certainly do not do it out of a sense of obligation; that will lead to a build up of resentment that will hurt you all. Do it if you want to, but recognise that you’re doing it for your own sake.
Roughly: adopt if you would prefer a life with the child, not because you think it’s making the world better.
Up voted for calling Crocker’s Rules when things actually mattered.
I think the marginal difference you can make by adopting is probably surprisingly large. (If your expectations of the amount of good it’s possible to do are well-grounded to start with.)
The difference in quality of life for a child who’s adopted rather than staying in the care system is spectacularly large: it’s a long time since I looked at the data but I remember it being eye-popping. And society is likely to be better as a result—there’s a much greater chance of the child contributing positively to society rather than causing significant problems. (Of course, this is on average: some cared-for children grow up to do spectacularly positive things for society, and some adopted kids go on to a life of antisocial crime.)
There are way more children who would benefit from being adopted than there are adoptive parents. (In the UK it’s something like 10- or 20-to-1 at the moment.) With some complex social issues, it’s hard to see what the limiting factor is in improving things: not here. For looked-after children, the supply of adoptive parents is a runaway winner.
[EDIT: Woah, cultural assumptions there, sorry. From a quick glance, it looks like there is a shortage of adoptive parents in the US, but nothing like on the scale as in the UK.]
One of the big problems with organised altruism is the distance from the donor to the beneficiary: for instance, if you’re trying to help people a continent away, and in a profoundly different social context, it’s hard to be confident about what is genuinely improving things and what isn’t. But an adopted child lives right in your house and is socialised by you, so the distance—literal and figurative—is much smaller.
I wouldn’t advocate it as a life choice for people whose main goal is purely to benefit society. Parenting is bloody hard work, physically and emotionally. But some people (me included) find it hugely rewarding as well. So if you think you’re likely to find it rewarding to parent, adopting seems to me like a great thing to do.
On a personal note, good luck with the process: friends and relations who’ve been through it have had mixed experiences. But the ones who ended up adopting report being very happy they did so.
(Bias declaration: I’m a parent of young children, and so likely to irrationally overvalue actions that benefit young children.)
Sometimes adopted children were kidnapped from their families, rather than being in the care system. I don’t know how common this is compared to adoption of children who don’t have families or are being abused, but it should go into the calculation somewhere.
Yes—I wasn’t thinking of inter-country adoption in this context, because it’s barely-on-the-radar where I live (UK) for people who want to adopt.
What are you aiming to optimize for? If it’s truly altruism, then it’s unlikely a kid would generate the same utility as hundreds of thousands of dollars going toward great charities.
Realistically, the current answer to this is “My wife’s utility function.” That includes a fair amount of altruism, although not necessarily in an organized way.
After review, I think most of my approaches to altruism also seem to be disorganized. The only thread that seems to run through them is that they seem to be focused on having minimum guilt, but that means I need to have a better grasp of ‘What makes me feel guilty?’ to answer the question well or I’m just pulling a phlogiston.
My current model of my own guilt sort of feels like something which slowly increases over time which can be removed by being altruistic in a similar manner to how people get hungry over time and they minimize that by eating.
That being said, that doesn’t quite seem like it cleaves reality correctly, but I can’t think of a better metaphor right now. I’m going to want to think more about this.
Second comment on this page: www.givinggladly.com/2013/06/cheerfully.html.
link
Heuristically, I agree with jkaufman and lmm, but I wonder if you can do something like a Fermi estimate of the impact of this decision? (Leaving your potential fuzzies out of it for now; after you estimate the impact, you can talk with people of the appropriate reference class to help you predict the level of fuzzies that you’re likely to obtain or lose. Then, if the numbers are going in opposite directions, you can estimate how much you care about impact vs fuzzies to help make your decision.) Here are some factors you might want to estimate:
Some measure of how much of your income is likely to go to charity. What fraction of the income that you have left over after maintaining quality of life for yourself, family, etc do you think you will contribute to charity? (To get an estimate of this, consider how much you are contributing.) Consider whether this fraction will remain the same if you have a child.
Some measure of the effectiveness of your chosen charity per marginal dollar. If you want to remove this from the equation, you could just compare fuzzies vs dollars, but I don’t think that would be as useful, since (money contributed to charity) is presumably not a terminal value for you.
Some measure of the costs of raising a child (may need to do this seperately for adopting vs creating a new human; I have no idea whether there is a significant cost difference).
Some measure of the opportunity cost of the time you spend raising the child. You’d need to think about how to evaluate this, since it’s not accurate for most people to bill these as working hours.
I think adopting a child will likely be superior to donation for your all your personal preferences, while donating the equivalent amount of money will likely be superior than adoption for the smaller subset of your personal preferences which you call “morality”. Both the adoption and the effective charity donation are moral, but the donation is more moral. Additionally, both will likely satisfy the sum of all your preferences, but the adoption is likely to satisfy them more.
I may be wrong about your values, of course. At the end of the day, you will in theory do what you believe maximizes all your preferences rather than maximize the subset of preferences you label “moral”. Truly maximizing morality would mean giving up a lot—what actually happens is that morality is just one weighted variable among many others that you wish to maximize.
Adoption moral pros you may not have considered:
1) When you spend, you use money to transfer resources from one place to another, where you believe they will be more efficient. When you adopt, it’s true that you are likely diverting resources to a sub-optimal place morally, but the non-financial investment you put in is also creating resources.
2) Don’t just look at “good you could do with the money you would otherwise spend on the kid” in a vacuum. An un-adopted child still diverts money from someone. Adoption frees up those resources for the adoption center / the state to do more good work. So when calculating the total moral loss inherent in this choice, it’s [good you could have done with the money you will spend on the kid] - [good the state/adoption clinic will do with the money they will save from you adopting the kid] - [good you will do by raising the kid] … which is be a fair bit less moral loss than you might initially assume.
Adoption moral cons you may not have considered
1) If you don’t adopt the child, someone else is likely to do it. But if you don’t donate to effective charity, no one is likely to take your place. (However, you can mitigate this by adopting a child that other people would for some reason be unlikely to adopt)
Considering my preferences/values are strongly connected to my wife’s preferences/values, I should probably have her read some of this thread and get her thoughts as well. Getting a list of pros and cons and thinking about all of the items does help me think through decisions, and it helps me think of things that I may want to talk to the social worker about.
As a bit of a generic update about that meeting… very little of any dramatic import happened. The first visit seemed to be primarily focused on “Thank you for filling out that first chunk of paperwork. You still need to fill out these various forms of paperwork so that we can confirm that there are records that you and all adults living with you are sane/safe/non-criminal, etc. That being said, there are still 2 more home visits after the paperwork, and classes, and books.
I get the feeling I was substantially compressing all of the drama and moral decision making of adoption into a single meeting, when in fact, that isn’t how it feels at all when you actually start going through the process. (For reference, I live in Maryland. I have no idea how other states or countries manage their adoption processes, and this may not apply to anyone else.)
The most comparable thing I can think of now is getting my driver’s license, but more so. Not that I think there is ever a specific “Adoption License.” but the relative amount of work, classes, and bureaucratic effort feels in about the same order of magnitude, if higher.
I do not think that you should decide to have or not have children based on you estimates of the impact on the world.
Certainly not if you’re trying to maximize your hedonic happiness. But children do not increase hedonic happiness; they increase your sense of living a meaningful life. To maximize the actual meaning of your life, you must use estimates of the impact of your decisions; whether or not this affects your perceived sense of meaning depends on how seriously you take moral arguments.
I think both of your statements are true for some people and not true for others. They are not general rules.
What is the actual meaning of my life?
There is variance in happiness, yes, but studies have shown that having children does not on average result in higher hedonic happiness, although it does increase a sense of living a meaningful life. If you doubt this, I can dig up the reference; I think it was actually referred to in the Rachaels paper. I said “certainly not”, but that wasn’t meant to be taken literally; of course it’s not certain that you’ll be equally or less happy with children.
I think I didn’t word the second sentence correctly. I was trying to make the point that having a sense of meaning is not the same as doing reasonably well at improving the world in the ways you care about.
If you wanted to maximize your sense of meaning, you wouldn’t object to being wireheaded in a blissful and maximally meaningful cyber-world. I think it’s reasonable to say that most people object to such wireheading because they care about their actual impact on the world. At least, they want to appear as if they do.
I am not average person, you don’t look to be one either.
Well, again, it depends. For some people “meaningful life” has nothing to do with improving the world. And if your idea of meaningful life is improving the world, I don’t see how you can have a sense of meaning and at the same time be aware that you’re not “doing reasonably well”.
Fair enough, but I still don’t think I am very good at predicting whether I’ll be happier with children. I also doubt that other people who do think they will be happier are very accurate. Humans are notoriously bad at determining what will make them happy/unhappy. I’m thinking in particular about the study about lottery winners vs. amputee victim from Dan Gilbert’s TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html.
Society as a whole regards having children as profoundly selfless, rather than selfish, so I think I am fair in concluding that some of the sense of meaning that people get from having children is related to improving the world for future generations. That particular self-satisfaction might not be disturbed by Rachaels’ argument if one does not take moral arguments seriously.