http://www.wcpo.com/content/news/fresh/story/3-…

http://www.wcpo.com/content/news/fresh/story/3-…

Just really think about your birth and your parents. Aren't you thankful? I've met all sorts of people in my short span on this rock and I've maybe met one out of thousands that isn't thankful his parents gave life to him. That goes for scientists, panhandlers, office workers, murderers, etc.

Sure, things may be tough for parents, but balance that with the utter potentiality of a new life. In some ways it is a no brainer, it's a genetic non-decision. Hope is life is breeding is future is genetics is more, more, more with a rebel yell!

I'm most curious about the dose effect, and how much the marginal child's impact varies with parity ((number of previous children). That first step really is a doozy.

Think of the N.B. at the end of your post: you don't state that you want “a kid” or even “a kid or kids.” The implicit normative standard regards an only child as anomalous, even deviant. Whatever the merits of that standard in its own right (I'm one of four, but we were spaced strangely and I was a de facto only child), it's culturally pervasive enough to show up in the data in weird and interesting ways. So I'm curious about what the results would look like if you disaggregated the one-child families.

And I agree that the right thing to do is push the button, and in virtue of this I would say that they have a right to my pushing the button (although this would be an odd way to put it). I don't mean to treat “rights” as narrowly as you seem to be reading, but rather broadly to refer to any moral claim people have on one another. The key is that moral demands arise from these claims that PERSONS have on each other and not on certain aggregative properties of states of the world as a whole.

Specifically, I think you're making a mistake by focusing on “rights.” There is more to morality than rights. Let's say I had the opportunity to press a magic button that would instantly cure everyone suffering from intensely painful, but nonlethal, medical conditions. With one push of the button, I'd eliminate a great deal of pain, at essentially no cost to myself. There's no reason to think that those sick people have a “right” to my pushing the button — I don't have any obligation TO THEM. But surely the right thing to do would be to push the button.

What was Taleb's first principle?:

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small.

If you're afraid of the child ruining the marriage, maybe the marriage isn't strong enough to be worth investing more time and energy in.

Either way, it seems like a good thing to find out early how strong the marriage is .

Suppose I have a choice between creating a person in a state such that they will suffer tremendously for the entirety of their lives and creating one such that they will live a full, happy life. If welfare considerations don't come into the picture until they exist, there can be nothing wrong with doing the former. Suppose I can ensure that a child is born with horrible disfigurement and suffers in perpetual agony for the duration of their short, miserable life. There can be nothing wrong with my doing so, because after all, there's no one for me to harm until after the act is done. Of course, once they're here, I may be obligated to reduce its suffering, but strangely I was not obligated to effectually prevent it.

I think we should accept this consequence, but I've found that's not a popular response.

This is the greatest thing I've ever read.

A similar issue arises in most personal injury and/or wrongful death lawsuits involving young or unborn children. In many, if not all cases, the societal cost damages (e.g. lost wages) awarded the plaintiff pale in comparison to those awarded to working adults. Why? Because you can't quantify (without very broad assumptions) what an young or unborn child will produce, in economic terms, in adulthood, and that means you can't enter it into a court of law. Of course the injured or killed child may have grown up to be successful entrepreneur, or a doctor, or whatever…problem is on a case-by-case basis you just don't know.

I don't think this is a reason not to account for the utility of an additional average productive human being added to the planet when it comes to child-bearing economic research. It's why many of us worry about the acceptance of widespread anti-natalism within our most educated and economically successful demographic – do we know how much utility we are depriving society when we decide not to have kids, particularly when we are more likely to have kids that are smart and productive? Maybe this allows for, at the margin, opportunities to a shifting demographic, but I am skeptical.