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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

Is this some performance piece about entitlement based on the source article?

I remember being a teenager not all that long ago (I'm 32 now). The girls that got pregnant all knew better - I remember sitting through the same lectures in class that they did - but they made their choices.

And obviously you were in the same situations they were, and had the same upbringing, so the comparison is valid? It's nice that you can rationalize your current situation as stemming entirely from all the correct choices you've made, but have you considered that you are far from an unbiased source in such a rationalization?

The truth is that people are not rational actors. Adolescents are even less so. To state that all the girls in your age group knew better when they got pregnant does not immediately point towards them having the wrong goals (or ideas, as you term them), but towards a failure in your reasoning (or at least a failure of imagination).

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>The truth is that people are not rational actors. Adolescents are even less so.

And yet, any remotely intelligent person living in a remotely modern country is completely capable of not getting pregnant or getting someone else pregnant, should they choose not to. Let's not completely absolve people of blame just because they're poor/young/whatever. Everyone is capable of autonomy.

This isn't actually completely true. If you're having trouble eating well, access to condoms and birth control isn't always an easy thing.

One would say that if you're having trouble eating well, you might as well want to prioritize something apart from having sex.

Can we take this to mean impoverished people are less entitled to some of the enjoyable aspects of life?

What's your solution, free sterilization?

All I'm saying is, your mouth can't get pregnant.

But it can catch diseases. Acting as if pregnancy is the only possible ill effect of promiscuity is narrowing the argument as to be useless, when it was already so narrow it was useless.

Fuck poor people am I right? They should be forced to live in anguish because of their poor decision of not being born into a well off family.

I seem to recall there was another pregnancy avoidance technique that didn't cost anything, but it's been many years since I last took health class.

I made no case for absolving people of all their responsibility, just for accepting that conditions differ for different people, and the responsibility may not entirely lay with them. By refuting the absolute put forth, I'm not proposing the opposite absolute.

It's trivially provable that some vanishingly small percentage of people have no choice in life (e.g. die/incarcerated until death while young through no fault of their own). Accepting that, I think it's logical to conclude that some circumstances will negatively impact you more than others, and affect your chances at success. That does not resolve people of responsibility, but in my mind it does make a case for compassionate handling of poor circumstances.

"Everyone is capable of autonomy."

Thank you for so concisely and cogently resolving what may well have been philosophy's longest-standing and most ontologically profound line of inquiry. I'm confident that one day I will look back and consider myself blessed for having had the opportunity to effectively witness such an historic event first hand.

I don't usually endorse snark, but I think a large set of the new HN don't have any appreciation for the history of thought about a lot of hard problems. It's part of the new "I've got an opinion so it must be one that has value (because I have value)." It's true, you do have value, but that does not make your opinion informed.

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