The Repugnant Conclusion | Hacker News Reader

The Repugnant Conclusion

plato.stanford.edu

24 pointsmonort12 comments

An initial idea: yet again realism raises it's head. The idea of applying a property like happiness to non-existent, hypothetical people sounds sketchy.

Yeah, that's exactly what Parfit is trying to deal with.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonidentity-problem/

I agree. I'm still reading, but apparently to arrive at the repugnant conclusion, you need to argue semantics such as in the following:

> (2) A woman suffers from an illness which means that, if she gets pregnant now, her child will suffer from a permanent handicap. If she postpones her pregnancy a few months until she has recovered, her child will be perfectly normal.

[...]

[It's problematic to recommend postponing to the mother because] if the woman postpones her pregnancy, then the child that is brought into existence will not be identical to the child she would have had, had she decided to become pregnant while she was ill (it will not be the same ovum and sperm that meet). Hence, the alternative for the child brought into existence during the mother’s illness is non-existence, and to claim that it would have been better for this child if the mother had postponed pregnancy is tantamount to claiming that non-existence would have been better for her.

... which makes me not take it very serious.

I didn't get that far. that's clearly a silly tradeoff.

As with everything in the world, there are unintended consequences. It's moral to want people to be safe, have an opportunity for education, food, a decent lifestyle. I want that for everyone. What makes me happy wouldn't make other people happy.

My friends had a situation where they had a couple of kids and the wife was pregnant in the first 3 months and the docs discovered she had breast cancer. They decided to get an abortion and get treatment. She seems to be fine now. Imagine making that choice? It would kill me to face that.

Unless you are the woman in question, I suppose, it would not be your decision at all. While facing someone in the position to make that decision is surely not easy, the breast cancer could literally kill the pregnant woman and possibly the baby, too. The decision then rests on various medical conditions that a philosopher would be hardly qualified to judge on.

Since I'm not sammy hagar, I could be a woman though ;-)

As if a person who is non-existing because sperm and ova didn't hook up is somehow suffering because of it? He seems to be suggesting that all possible people must exist. Every sperm is sacred? Good grief.

Not that. It's supposing that non-existence is bad. Doesn't prove it. Just assumes it.

This is written by someone without a good grasp on grammar.

> get pregnant

become

> her child

this is used two times in one paragraph as though referring to one and the same entity, although the succeeding paragraph claims the opposite case as essential to the whole premises.

> The Nonidentity Problem

this linked to article suffers from the same lack of (grammatical) precision.

> an act that confers on a person an existence

What is that even supposed to mean?! Granted, that touches on the essential problem central to philosophy and takes a fast and loose short cut instead of getting into semantics, but to me that's the whole point of philosophy, so why skimp on it.

The whole argument should remain egoistic instead of digressing. The non-sequitur follows from the focus on non-existence. Ex nihilo nihil, ex falso quodlibet.

China figured this out decades ago. Hence the one-child policy. Now that China's population is leveling off, they can lighten up on that.

India, though...

> Now that China's population is leveling off, they can lighten up on that.

They already have, but people are now accustomed to the new status quo and changing their behaviour is proving difficult.

In China, because of the one child policy, people had more sons cause "they were considered better" in some sense. Now they don't have enough women to match. Some of those boys will be angry about it. What problems will that cause? Increased warlike tendancy? More prostitution? Leaving the country to seek a mate? Who knows. Also the population would not grow the same as it would with men and women in normal distributions. Then will they have the 'elderly worker' problem that Japan has? Maybe not enough workers?

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