I find it interesting nearly everyone thought of the eugenic angle since I didn’t explicitly mention the hereditary argument at all. I suspect this is because people here are familiar with the high heritability and usefulness of traits like IQ. But lets assume for the sake of argument humans are blank slates when it comes to traits that affect income.
In that case the policy isn’t weakened at all even if its only upbringing and social environments that matter. Increasing the proportion of children raised by rich people means they are more likely to end up rich due to social factors, fewer children being raised by poor people means they have a better environment per capita. This would reduce poverty, increasing equality, while increasing the absolute wealth in society. Arguably this is the implicit mainstream rationalization used when praising celebrities who adopt third world children.
Now to take it even a step further lets say that wealth or poverty have no connection at all to merit or cultural traits. The policy still makes sense since it improves the childhoods of many people while not affecting the utility of would be parents much if anything on average (since we see having children has a weak connection to lifetime happiness and a drop in happiness in the first few years). Society uses a combination of the previous and this argument already, to take away children from neglectful or abusive parents, so they are clearly acceptable justifications in theory. If anything taking children from their suboptimal parents is more heartless than to encourage suboptimal parents not to have children! Indeed in the OP I already mentioned a group where we consider forcefully taking away children generally barbaric, yet find it acceptable and praiseworthy to encourage them to not have children. Teen mothers.
Some of the people who think they dislike the policy because it is an “eugenic” policy and that either “eugenic” policies don’t work or the relevant traits aren’t heritable at all. If so they need to address the versions of the argument that work in “blank slate”or “zero meritocracy society” scenarios.
We find it justified to take children away from parents who we consider “guilty”—adults who can take on such a serious duty, but who then make decisions which fail to fulfill that duty. Neglect and abuse are considered to be the result of such decisions, while poverty is considered to be (often? always?) the result of bad luck. Teen parents aren’t considered candidates for this level of guilt for the same reason that their partners might be considered candidates for statutory rape charges—it’s presumed that teens are too young to be making mature decisions about sex.
If you really want to step into all your opponents’ shoes, you need to consider that some of their models of the world aren’t just “zero meritocracy”, they’re “moral anti-meritocracy”, i.e. “rich people got that way by being more willing to step on poor people”.
Specific policy implementation details might be seen as less offensive than the policy they’re intended to promote. E.g. a progressive who currently considers you a eugenicist monster might nevertheless already be your ally for a few practical purposes, like subsidized access to birth control, and you might be able to talk them into others, like switching the estate tax exemption level from a per-estate to a per-inheritor amount.
Neglect and abuse are considered to be the result of such decisions, while poverty is considered to be (often? always?) the result of bad luck.
The bigger difference is that neglect and abuse are carried out after children are born, while poverty is usually there before they are born. Prospecitve parents are much likelier to correctly predict they’ll be bringing up poor children, than that they’ll be bringing up neglected or abused children. And for the same reason, it’s much easier for society to predict who’ll be a poor parent, and disincentivize them, than it is to predict who’ll be a bad parent.
So if people really carried about bad decisions vs. bad luck, they would blame poor parents for deciding to have predictably poor children. Instead people seem to reason that both poor and rich people have a right to raise children, which mostly overrides the desire of those children to not have poor parents.
The anti-meritocracy scenario is a third distinct one, good catch. In that scenario one would have to weigh the evilness of rich people and its likely effects on how they treat their children vs. the positive effects of greater material wealth on the children and how the goodness of poor people factors compared to their material deprivation. Also noteworthy is that in an anti-meritocracy wealth may actually corrupt due to social networks.
Overall I should emphasise that I’m not promoting the policy, but that I found it an interesting case where it seemed my moral intuitions confliced with both utilitarianism and my virtue ethics. I was more hoping to creating moral thought experiments rather than figuring out which one best describes the real world. Maybe I should have disguised “rich” and “poor” with two other groups and made the utilitarian analysis there, but then I suspect people would just outright accept the utilitarian solution proposed in each of the scenarios. At least that is the impression I got from how the community reacted to more concrete examples of dustspecks vs. torture compared to the abstract case.
Overall I should emphasise that I’m not promoting the policy, but that I found it an interesting case where it seemed my moral intuitions confliced with both utilitarianism and my virtue ethics.
Which virtues are you using for your virtue ethics?
I find it interesting nearly everyone thought of the eugenic angle since I didn’t explicitly mention the hereditary argument at all. I suspect this is because people here are familiar with the high heritability and usefulness of traits like IQ. But lets assume for the sake of argument humans are blank slates when it comes to traits that affect income.
In that case the policy isn’t weakened at all even if its only upbringing and social environments that matter. Increasing the proportion of children raised by rich people means they are more likely to end up rich due to social factors, fewer children being raised by poor people means they have a better environment per capita. This would reduce poverty, increasing equality, while increasing the absolute wealth in society. Arguably this is the implicit mainstream rationalization used when praising celebrities who adopt third world children.
Now to take it even a step further lets say that wealth or poverty have no connection at all to merit or cultural traits. The policy still makes sense since it improves the childhoods of many people while not affecting the utility of would be parents much if anything on average (since we see having children has a weak connection to lifetime happiness and a drop in happiness in the first few years). Society uses a combination of the previous and this argument already, to take away children from neglectful or abusive parents, so they are clearly acceptable justifications in theory. If anything taking children from their suboptimal parents is more heartless than to encourage suboptimal parents not to have children! Indeed in the OP I already mentioned a group where we consider forcefully taking away children generally barbaric, yet find it acceptable and praiseworthy to encourage them to not have children. Teen mothers.
Some of the people who think they dislike the policy because it is an “eugenic” policy and that either “eugenic” policies don’t work or the relevant traits aren’t heritable at all. If so they need to address the versions of the argument that work in “blank slate”or “zero meritocracy society” scenarios.
An explanation, then a couple thoughts:
We find it justified to take children away from parents who we consider “guilty”—adults who can take on such a serious duty, but who then make decisions which fail to fulfill that duty. Neglect and abuse are considered to be the result of such decisions, while poverty is considered to be (often? always?) the result of bad luck. Teen parents aren’t considered candidates for this level of guilt for the same reason that their partners might be considered candidates for statutory rape charges—it’s presumed that teens are too young to be making mature decisions about sex.
If you really want to step into all your opponents’ shoes, you need to consider that some of their models of the world aren’t just “zero meritocracy”, they’re “moral anti-meritocracy”, i.e. “rich people got that way by being more willing to step on poor people”.
Specific policy implementation details might be seen as less offensive than the policy they’re intended to promote. E.g. a progressive who currently considers you a eugenicist monster might nevertheless already be your ally for a few practical purposes, like subsidized access to birth control, and you might be able to talk them into others, like switching the estate tax exemption level from a per-estate to a per-inheritor amount.
The bigger difference is that neglect and abuse are carried out after children are born, while poverty is usually there before they are born. Prospecitve parents are much likelier to correctly predict they’ll be bringing up poor children, than that they’ll be bringing up neglected or abused children. And for the same reason, it’s much easier for society to predict who’ll be a poor parent, and disincentivize them, than it is to predict who’ll be a bad parent.
So if people really carried about bad decisions vs. bad luck, they would blame poor parents for deciding to have predictably poor children. Instead people seem to reason that both poor and rich people have a right to raise children, which mostly overrides the desire of those children to not have poor parents.
The anti-meritocracy scenario is a third distinct one, good catch. In that scenario one would have to weigh the evilness of rich people and its likely effects on how they treat their children vs. the positive effects of greater material wealth on the children and how the goodness of poor people factors compared to their material deprivation. Also noteworthy is that in an anti-meritocracy wealth may actually corrupt due to social networks.
Overall I should emphasise that I’m not promoting the policy, but that I found it an interesting case where it seemed my moral intuitions confliced with both utilitarianism and my virtue ethics. I was more hoping to creating moral thought experiments rather than figuring out which one best describes the real world. Maybe I should have disguised “rich” and “poor” with two other groups and made the utilitarian analysis there, but then I suspect people would just outright accept the utilitarian solution proposed in each of the scenarios. At least that is the impression I got from how the community reacted to more concrete examples of dustspecks vs. torture compared to the abstract case.
Which virtues are you using for your virtue ethics?
I like the eugenic aspects of the policy, I just think they’re why it wouldn’t be allowed.
Presumably a thinko.
Fixed.