Should we care about people who need never exist?

No; it is absurd to even talk about. Run from anyone who thinks this is legitimate intellectual discourse.

Let's bite this trolling hook for a second. If you're going to count the lives of those nonexistent children, you have to also count and subtract the deaths they will cause. A few of those children might turn out to be be murderers. Others will cause accidents, maybe big ones. Others still will have consumption habits that snuff out future lives.

Imagine if Adolf Hitler's mother had died in some accident before he had been conceived and born; how would you tally the accident?

Even worse is considering the cost per healthy life year. It's very rare to find any policy maker even willing to discuss this. One that have seen is Britain's NHS, who will spend £20,000 - £30,000 to give cancer patients 1 extra "Quality adjusted life year"[1]. But this is only used to compare drug prices and never mentioned even in the context of other UK government health interventions, which might have a much higher cost (e.g. COVID measures which might have cost 100x more per Qaly) or much lower (e.g. teen mental health might cost 100x less per Qaly). And that's just discussing health care inside a single country. The cost per Qaly of foreign aid to areas experiencing famine might be 10,000x lower than other policies.

[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-28983924

How many? Nobody I know has done this with an actual spreadsheet of cost per child.

What I see instead (in my professional friend circles) is people keep putting off having kids until their mid thirties because they end up so focused on their career. Then biology just makes is statistically much less likely to have lots of kids.

So it’s not really, “we didn’t have our 3rd because I didn’t get that promotion.” Instead it’s, “we didn’t have kids until we had advanced careers because society for the past 3 decades said anything else was irresponsible.”

It can be argued that some countries are already at this point. Ie they have stagnant population numbers because they are already over-populated, and there is economic pressure to reduce population growth.

You never account for potential people because it inevitably leads to so-called repugnant conclusions that causes involuntary suffering among some number of currently existing people in order to secure some hypothetical good outcome for some set of hypothetical future people. People can voluntarily make such sacrifices, as parents do for their children, but this sort of argument should never be compulsory as with government policy.

> Even more dramatically, consider policies that have an effect on whether humanity continues to exist. If we wipe ourselves out with nukes, bioengineering, etc, that's a lot of potential future people

But more importantly, this impacts all current people and the things they value. What existing people want and value should always take precedence over hypothetical people, if only because their values may be entirely different than your own.

This objection is technically correct, but misses the point completely. It's irrelevant whether "the universe" cares – all that matters to humanity is whether humans care. And they do care about the survival of their species.

Even if this position seems obvious to you, I respectfully would suggest you consider that most people do not hold extremely nihilistic views like this, and that a lack of nihilism is not naive.

This is an interesting question, and the answer one gives is highly dependent upon their worldview and beliefs.

From a Christian perspective (on which most of the Western world was based), the earth was given to humans along with an explicit decree to have children and "subdue" it and everything on it ( https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+1%3A28&... ). Therefore in the Christian worldview, Earth is pretty explicitly defined as human-centric, and human life is considered above all else on this Earth.

I appreciate the effort to keep an open mind, but you can have too much of everything :)

A universe without a conscious observer seems kind of pointless to me.

I would care. As a human (as a living organism, really), I have children because I hope they outlive me (that's not the only reason!). In a way, they are what's left of me when I'm dead. And my grandchildren when my children are dead. So, yes, I would be sad if my children choose to not have any children themselves, and I would consider it a catastrophe if the hypothesis that a whole generation stopped having kids materialized.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism [2] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-ca...

I believe that is a tidy, principled way of resolving the conundrum of self-interest vs utilitarianism.

I'd say it's impossible to do this in any ethical way without perfect knowledge of the future. When it comes to solving this as a civil issue, this is not at all what we do. We look at the future potential value of that individual persons life and then ask a jury to decide the award.

> So for example I'd try to save a diverse mixture of kinds of people from a sinking ship

Assuming you can actually measure diversity acceptably in such conditions.

> or I'd try to select for people from say indigenous tribal cultures that were under-represented in outcomes

Without asking why they're under represented? Is a tribe of cannibals or a classroom of children more valuable?

> Selecting for diversity rather than quality of life feels like it avoids some of the tyranny of the masses kind of thinking and the worst of human-centric thinking.

You've only described racial diversity. What about diversity of lived experience? Diversity of thought? Diversity of religion? Where do these rank against race?

The US has a population density 1/15th India's. It's high time for a billion Indians to move to the US.

Like; it an 'emotional' argument but doesn't actually propose solutions. I'd like to hear more about solutions or actual push back rather than simply push the emotion button over a conspiracy fear.

True it is The Economist, which can be suspect in that it tends to reflect something of an agenda of a minority population with a lot of power. I am in fact willing to believe that there is a small group of people who would prefer there to be less people period. But it still doesn't feel unreasonable to examine our morals. I'd prefer to build coherent arguments to oppose the concepts if these are bad concepts. Not just push the emotion button a lot.

If a single family has to make decisions about having more babies or not based on budget, then why can't a planet full of people decide how many people should exist period? Why is that "bad" to even think about?

And why not 'scan' an unborn child for diseases and terminate in some cases? I don't think it implicitly is 'defacto bad' as the sentence implies. This second comment attempts to tie larger issues of population to more narrow fear based issues around abortion. It's creating a gordian knot. It's not a great argument.

Is there a way to make an argument that isn't mashing the emotion button over and over? And that isn't trying to conflate far and near issues together into an unresolvable emotional morass?

I do favor a pro-choice stance, but I want to avoid strictly falling down into a pro-choice versus pro-life stance since that is hugely loaded politically with people on the left hugely inflamed at the restriction in women's freedoms, and people on the right ostensibly outraged that every single life is not seen as sacred. As a left leaning person I do think the people on the right are not charitable, and I do think they don't actually care about lives, but rather they are using babies as emotional tools to try manipulate emotions and hold onto power. So I tend to think pro-lifers are manipulative - basically I see them as trying to manipulate me with their rhetoric. But I am willing to acknowledge that it is worth trying to think about this more; a charitable read has to include room for some pro-life arguments that human life is indeed sacred. The problem with the scanning statement however is that it leads us only to an emotional argument - and those are not solvable today. It might be nice to propose an idea or solution, not just (again) hit the emotion button.

If we have a mental model of a potential child as having the best possible outcomes, having the most joyous life, contributing the most - then of course it is an utter tragedy to deprive that child of a possible life. But I think our mental model of life should be more like what we actually see in nature; a garden that is riotous and constantly and eagerly grows, and we weed and prune that garden constantly. I'd argue that we are 'helpess gardeners' - we cannot avoid gardening, we cannot avoid stepping in the garden, we can only choose where to step. The solution space I see here that bridges left and right values is to decide who the decision maker is around if a child lives or dies. I'd argue the best decision maker is the person most closely involved and most entangled with that life - basically the mother. I'd pour dollars funding and energy into the people with utereses - rather than into judges and police. Any structural imperialism that deprives the mother of agency and turns them into a baby factory feels cruel to me but also is clearly not valuing the mommas life itself. If people on the left or the right want to fund that mother, educate that mother, argue with that mother - then they should empower the uterus owner as much as they wish - pay for schooling, education, rhetoric - whatever they want to expose them to - but delegate the power of the decision to the uterus owner. People on the right then get a chance to bombard that poor uterus owner with their campaign - but so be it - at least the energy, money and attention are placed in the right spot. This is more diverse, close to the ground, grass roots and reflects more the nature of the world - that decisions should be distributed and local - more ecological. In any world where uterus owners were male this would instantly be the case - we only consider denying women agency because we come from a patriarchy.

Probably in fact - if we want to solve far field issues like planetary population concerns, then education is probably the best way in general. The system as a whole can load balance births with locally available resources if it is allowed to do so I believe.