[casercaramel144]

I mean yeah. Not existing has a utility value of 0. You can make the same argument for people who don't exist yet. Is it infinite utility to go around as a government and force people to pump out 100 babies a year? Since not existing is so bad?

TBH if I never existed by definition I would be fine with it, you know, since I don't exist and was never born. I don't think its coherent to measure things from aggregate utilitarian POV, since the optimal solution seems relentless expansionism like a virus.

[Lammy]

> I don't think its coherent to measure things from aggregate utilitarian POV

I do, because second-person collectively-singular Humanity is a living thing all its own, and the more humans there are the more alive We are. Your argument is the anthropological equivalent of “640K ought to be enough for anybody”.

[harimau777]

Having more than 640Kb of RAM isn't a good in of itself, it's only good in that applications arose which required more RAM.

Similarly higher population isn't a good in of itself. It seems to me that there's much less evidence that there's something that needs higher population.

I don't see how higher population necessarily makes humanity as a collective organism more human. That seems like saying that an individual human is more human if they weigh more.

[Lammy]

> I don't see how

Try ketamine some time with good sensory deprivation — comfy bed, silk sleep mask, ear plugs :)

[casercaramel144]

So by the tyranny of exponential growth, we should just start building massive breeding factories and forceably enslaving people randomly matching them to have children? Because this could actually be the optimal policy if we take your view of "second persons" to it's optimum.

In your world governments forceably breed humans like chickens in massive factory farms churning out people to the carrying capacity of the planet. I don't want to live there and I sure as hell don't find it moral.

[ipaddr]

Why not encourage through policy and taxation changes? Invest in culture that promotes. Restructure society to encourage having babies at an earlier age.

[casercaramel144]

Since that's nearly certainly less efficient at population expansion compared to physical violence. Conservatively, modern humans seem to settle at having 2~4 children per woman but historically it was not uncommon to have families of size exceeding 10.

The whole point is that if you accept the fact that expanding population is good a priori, this leads to stupid conclusions by the tyranny of exponential growth. Who cares if the average person is a slave when you have several hundred billion of them. Who cares if mothers die horribly after being forced to carry child after child.

Personally I think the only consistent viewpoint is some form of logarithmic population * average well being metric to measure utility. From that perspective, I have no clue how a policy maker should act today. Hopefully smarter minds than mine figure it out!

[Lammy]

> Because this could actually be the optimal policy if we take your view of "second persons" to it's optimum.

Maybe if you're evil enough to not care about any individual human's quality of life. Is there a word for the logical fallacy where you argue against the most absurd possible interpretation of a person's beliefs in order to feel no guilt for disregarding them?

[casercaramel144]

The idea is that due to exponential growth, amortized over long enough times, the utility of a person's happiness right now is 0 compared to the utility of filling the planet with lets say hundreds of billions of people with barely alive standards of living. Even if an individual persons life is 100x worse than present day, it doesn't matter since there are billions more of them.

This is the standard issue with any aggregate utilitarianism theories of morality.

https://utilitarianism.net/population-ethics/

It's a stupid idea that's been soundly rejected because it posits arbitrarily bad living conditions since "anything" is better than nothing.

[snapcaster]

You think maybe there could be a pretty large spectrum of solutions between stopping population growth and massive forced breeding factories?