Raising a productive, kind, and compassionate human being is very hard, and very much an achievement. You reduce it uncharitably by claiming it's simply 'birthing.'
> You reduce it uncharitably by claiming it's simply 'birthing.'
Isn't that exactly what it has become? Right now we are struggling with a massive environmental catastrophe, which is largely caused by overconsumption.
One of the best ways to fight that is to simply have fewer consumers [0], yet somehow that's something barely anybody even dares to talk about because we can't take from people the "freedom" to keep birthing more off-spring for no other reason than self-gratification.
It's not like we are a species on the brink of extinction like we direly need those additional bodies. Right now it looks like we are having way too many bodies to actually keep busy with meaningful work, a problem that will only become that much worse as automation makes even more manual jobs redundant.
In that context, I consider this urge to have biological off-spring the epitome of egoism. There's plenty of orphans out there who would be glad to be living in a family that cares. Why not give them a chance instead of adding yet another body to the problem because it has some minor DNA similarities?
Yes, adopting in most countries is a difficult process, I know that, I still think it's the much more responsible choice than insisting on biological offspring.
It might be controversial to mention, but isn't there an underlying feeling of "us versus them"?
Consider the movie Idiocracy, where the high-IQ couple decided to put off children until they were unable to conceive - contrasted with a trashy man who had dozens of children with many different women.
Do you want the world you live in 20 years from now to be one with people like you or unlike you? Regardless it reduces to people being selfish, but I dont think it's inherently wrong to want to raise children into upstanding citizens.
What are you talking about? Birthrates in developed countries are below replacement rates. If anything, in developed countries, more people should be having more kids.
If you want to decrease the number of consumers, here's what you do: Go to every developing country in the world and speed up its movement aping the western development arc so that it gets more money, suburbia, feminism, etc. Until everyone's miserable, alone, and nobody's having kids, like in Europe, Korea, or Japan.
> What are you talking about? Birthrates in developed countries are below replacement rates. If anything, in developed countries, more people should be having more kids.
I believe that you have to look at that from a global perspective as the climate change also doesn't stop at borders and globally birth rates are still way too high. The proper solution would be to stop trying to keep "foreigners" out of the rich, western countries, so that people from countries with high population growth can migrate to countries with shrinking population. That'd be a win-win situation for everybody.
Isn't that exactly what it has become? Right now we are struggling with a massive environmental catastrophe, which is largely caused by overconsumption.
One of the best ways to fight that is to simply have fewer consumers [0], yet somehow that's something barely anybody even dares to talk about because we can't take from people the "freedom" to keep birthing more off-spring for no other reason than self-gratification.
It's not like we are a species on the brink of extinction like we direly need those additional bodies. Right now it looks like we are having way too many bodies to actually keep busy with meaningful work, a problem that will only become that much worse as automation makes even more manual jobs redundant.
In that context, I consider this urge to have biological off-spring the epitome of egoism. There's plenty of orphans out there who would be glad to be living in a family that cares. Why not give them a chance instead of adding yet another body to the problem because it has some minor DNA similarities?
Yes, adopting in most countries is a difficult process, I know that, I still think it's the much more responsible choice than insisting on biological offspring.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-...