[whack]

> every person has a purpose, nobody is superfluous or redundant.

> That’s a tragedy not just for Nicky, but for the rest of us, too. There’s a hole in the ecosystem where Nicky should be: there’s a hospital she should be running, or seventh-graders she should be teaching, or pizzas she should be delivering underwater. Wherever that hole is, everything else will be a little off-balance until Nicky fills it.

Some interesting implications of this:

1. Any children you have, would be fulfilling a purpose in the world

2. If you decide not to have that child, you are depriving the world and everyone else of a person who would otherwise fulfill that purpose

3. Recall that no one is superfluous or redundant. So by depriving the world of a person who can fulfill that purpose, you are guaranteeing that the purpose will never be adequately fulfilled

4. The above applies no matter how many children you've already had. Already had 10 children and decided not to have a 11th? Man, you just created a Nicky-sized hole in the ecosystem. Now the whole world will be off-balance because of your tragic decision

5. So yeah, if you don't want the world to be off-balance, you better get out there and have as many kids as humanly possible

[seabass-labrax]

It's interesting indeed, but is missing an important factor. Every niche requires resources for someone to fill it: time, at a minimum, but also raw materials (engineering, art), land (agriculture, wildlife preservation), power (pretty much everything) and so on. These are all finite, although some are now used more efficiently than they could have been in the past.

By having more children, you contribute to more people fulfilling their purposes in the future, but this is true only to the point where resources would become too scarce when divided between the niches.

I would guess that in the future, the Earth could sustain maybe double its current population, due to much more efficient resource utilisation and extraction, relieving the demand on these resources, and the large number of people who would prefer to live in cities, reducing the demand on land. But the Earth could not sustain such a growth of its population immediately; we need time to let society and technology improve and adapt.

[pdonis]

> Some interesting implications of this

Not really. The article only says persons who exist have a purpose. It does not say that persons who do not yet exist must be created because there is a purpose waiting for them.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

Doesn't that put a strange significance on making new people?

There's some boundary where you can't abort or your child is born and then they definitely have a purpose, even though 5 minutes before reaching that boundary, they didn't

[pdonis]

> There's some boundary

But there's nothing that says that boundary has to be birth. It would depend on when you think a person exists. Some people would say that happens at conception. Others would say it doesn't happen until well after birth (indeed some philosophers have said it doesn't fully happen until adulthood).

[immibis]

Is evolving into something with purpose also a purpose? Then unfertilized eggs have a purpose - to become fertilized - and if you aren't making that happen nonstop it's as bad as killing someone.

[pdonis]

The article says every person has a purpose. As I said before, people's opinions might differ on exactly when a person exists during the human developmental process, but as far as I know nobody has ever argued that unfertilized eggs are persons.

(Note that unfertilized eggs do not "evolve into" humans--only fertilized eggs do. So even on its own terms your argument is not valid.)

[immibis]

Unfertilized eggs have the purpose of turning into fertilized eggs, which either are people or have the purpose of turning into people.

I think if fertilized eggs are people, so are unfertilized eggs. There's really not much difference between them.

[nuancebydefault]

I think you are taking the author's reasoning a little bit too literal. The gist is, Nicky is doing a job that she does not like, simply because she does not even know of the existence of a job that suits her better. The filling of that position would be a win-win situation. The current 'off-balance' ness is just a metaphor.

[cardanome]

Every person also has needs meaning they add demands for niches to be filled. So it balances itself out.

If someone doesn't fulfill their niche they tend to take more than they give creating imbalance.

So your implications don't really follow strictly from the stated axioms. Though yeah, generally, yes, more people are a good thing as it means more people that can help drive humanity forward. (Obviously there are factors why having as many children as humanly possible is not always a good idea though.) Also some religions strongly encourage people to have as many children as possible so it is not a super uncommon view.

[mulmen]

> If someone doesn't fulfill their niche they tend to take more than they give creating imbalance.

This seems like harmful thinking. Should I feel guilty about being depressed? What about victims of circumstance? Do they owe society an apology for their trauma?

[cardanome]

The mistake you are making is thinking the sentence is meant to assign individual responsibility for finding your niche.

Not at all. The article and I agree on that point is pretty clear that it is a societal responsibility. People not being able to flex their individual talents is a failure of society not the individual. And yes there are niches for depressed, traumatized people, there is a place for everyone.

[mtVessel]

The post doesn't explain how the niches themselves come into being, so an equally logical assumption could be that creating a person also creates a new niche, and their task is simply to find the right one. No new person, no niche.

A less rigorous explanation, but probably more to the author's point, is that people who end up filling the wrong niche add more negativity to the world than those who find their place. This is a worse state of affairs than leaving some niches unfilled.

[autoexec]

What if your purpose in the world is to not have any children?

[klntsky]

5 is correct but for the reasons not related to niches or purposes