
The Repugnant Conclusion - monort
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
======
mcguire
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.

~~~
xg15
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.

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NotSammyHagar
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.

~~~
posterboy
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.

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

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posterboy
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.

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Animats
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...

~~~
naasking
> 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.

~~~
NotSammyHagar
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?

