[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?