I'd never really considered how it is that child rape is the clear moral choice. I've learned something today.
You're just following your genetic programming .
If you obey your genes they trigger dopamine, serotonin, and whatever else makes you feel happy. If you don't obey your genes they trigger stuff that makes you anxious, angry or sad.
That's why any decision you take is a faux decision. A choice between happiness and sadness isn't really a choice.
But the instrument by which our genes control us is an exceedingly blunt instrument. That's why humans have been cheerfully having had sex for generations using condoms, and our genes have yet to adapt to create a revulsion to condom use. Which will happen. It's just a matter of time.
Genes are not selected to optimize happiness. They are selected to optimize reproduction of reproductive offspring, which has only a tenuous and unreliable relationship to the subjective happiness of any individual organism.
Countless childless people are far happier than countless reproductive parents.
Nothing about the concept of a "choice" requires that the options all make one similarly happy. Also, virtually every option can bring various consequences that are both happiness enhancing and reducing. Thus, actions do not determine happiness, but rather choice of how one thinks about the consequences determine happiness.
But the instrument by which our genes control us is an exceedingly blunt instrument. That's why humans have been cheerfully having had sex for generations using condoms, and our genes have yet to adapt to create a revulsion to condom use. Which will happen. It's just a matter of time.
No it won't. Plenty of people actually become unhappy, depressed, and even suicidal after fulfilling the evolutionary task of procreating. Societies have created cultural systems to shame and incentivize people into having kids, because plenty of people would not naturally choose the stress and other negative emotions often caused by procreating. Also, we only have one "happiness system". Any individual act only contributes a small % to overall happiness, and that contribution is itself multi-faceted because an act can have countless consequences, some of which reduce happiness and some increase it, and those effects differ in being long or short term. So, how any act impacts happiness is determined by how and what consequences a person chooses to focus upon. IOW, happiness is a choice and under a person's control, not simply an byproduct of genetically determined actions.
Since that doesn't follow from my argument, your point is moot. All that is required is that we think we'll be happier with kids. That's what is rewarded. As well as rewarding sex.
True. But it's still a faux choice. Fundamentally it's always a emotional choice.
But the instrument by which our genes control us is an exceedingly blunt instrument. That's why humans have been cheerfully having had sex for generations using condoms, and our genes have yet to adapt to create a revulsion to condom use. Which will happen. It's just a matter of time.
No it won't. Plenty of people actually become unhappy, depressed, and even suicidal after fulfilling the evolutionary task of procreating. Societies have created cultural systems to shame and incentivize people into having kids, because plenty of people would not naturally choose the stress and other negative emotions often caused by procreating. Also, we only have one "happiness system". Any individual act only contributes a small % to overall happiness, and that contribution is itself multi-faceted because an act can have countless consequences, some of which reduce happiness and some increase it, and those effects differ in being long or short term. So, how any act impacts happiness is determined by how and what consequences a person chooses to focus upon. IOW, happiness is a choice and under a person's control, not simply an byproduct of genetically determined actions.
All that's perfectly true. But the OP is about the morals of controlling births and we'd never, in a democratic society, put up with it. Because many of us see having children as the greatest achievement in life. Loads.
If some people develop a revulusion to contraceptives and it's genetic they'd over time out compete the rest of us.
One of the most common female sexual fetishes is the feeling of being ejaculated inside. Nature can be quite intricate in how it programmes us
Yes it does follow from your argument. You said that that obeying our genes makes us happy and not obeying our genes makes us sad. That presumes that our genes our selected to promote behaviors that make us happy.
Hard to get the gist of the entire conversation above without in depth reading, but the idea that the majority of humans aren't genetically inclined to want kids is untenable to me.
The simple proof is that those who don't want kids fall out of the gene pool. Only those who have (and presumably want) kids, reproduce, meaning subsequent generations will continue wanting kids. Even if we normalize for social norms, this is only going to weed out the people who didn't really want kids, leading to a population that more ubiquitously wants kids.
Hard to get the gist of the entire conversation above without in depth reading, but the idea that the majority of humans aren't genetically inclined to want kids is untenable to me.
The simple proof is that those who don't want kids fall out of the gene pool. Only those who have (and presumably want) kids, reproduce, meaning subsequent generations will continue wanting kids. Even if we normalize for social norms, this is only going to weed out the people who didn't really want kids, leading to a population that more ubiquitously wants kids.
If that were true, then wouldn't we expect the proportion of humans who do not want to have offspring to be basically nonexistent at this point? The effect you suggest is exponential, in that each generation would be another round of weeding out those without the "gene" for wanting children. Yet, we see no evidence that today's population of humans is any more pro-reproduction than any past population. If anything, the acceptance of childlessness is at an all-time high at this point in history, which would be unlikely if every generation was subjected to a process of winnowing out those who are reluctant to be parents. Your argument is actually a good reason to believe that there is actually no genetic compulsion for kids, just for things that are sometimes associated with kids (like sex), and qualities that are regarded positively in others as a proxy (like cuteness or vulnerability). It's arguable that these traits are what our genes program us to pursue, and culture fills in the rest of the sentence. Otherwise, there would be no way to explain people who enjoy cute babies but don't want one of their own, or love sex but are staunchly antinatalist; their very existence means they had a long line of ancestors, which doesn't really fit with the stringent selection pressure mechanism you are proposing.
And it's not just not having no kids at all, it's also not having more kids. If we were 'genetically progammed' no one would use family planning, and its use is widely prevalent where it and information about it are freely available. This probably highlights the cultural and situational aspects of the issue, and we all understand how culture and attitudes can change with circumstances even when genes don't. Because, of course, nowadays it's understood that we are not progammed by our genes when it comes to this behaviour.
Hard to get the gist of the entire conversation above without in depth reading, but the idea that the majority of humans aren't genetically inclined to want kids is untenable to me.
The simple proof is that those who don't want kids fall out of the gene pool.
Hard to get the gist of the entire conversation above without in depth reading, but the idea that the majority of humans aren't genetically inclined to want kids is untenable to me.
The simple proof is that those who don't want kids fall out of the gene pool.
This is a circular argument. You are saying that the proof that people are genetically driven to have kids is that that those whose genes lead them to not want kids would be driven out of the gene pool, which only makes sense if you start with the assumption that variability in wanting or not wanting kids is genetically determined.
The fundamental problem of population control is that the incentives and disincentives which guide people's choices, have no effect on the people who create the population problem, who of course are people have yet to be conceived and be born.
It's usually a petulant adolescent complaint, "I didn't ask to be born!", but true, none the less. If we want to decrease the rate of population increase, legal suicide(boy, is that a dumb idea) and euthanasia won't put a dent in the statistics. After all, what's the point of killing someone who's time to consume resources is near the end, anyway. How much could you save?
The only practical way to control population growth, without cutting back on vaccines or turning off the tsunami warning systems, is to make life for the currently alive, conducive to having a minimal number of children and for many people, no children at all. The best way to do this may sound counter intuitive, but reducing infant mortality is a good start. The second step is to raise the standard of living, especially for people who now subsist off the land, which for millennia have depended upon large families, simply to have a ready labor supply. Reduce the need for labor and reduce the population.
The subtlety that's missing in some of the posts above is that there would most certainly not be a 'gene' for wanting or not wanting kids, but rather an entire genome of genes that are all oriented toward the end of producing kids. The end-goal of a living thing is to produce more living things, and so literally every gene in our body contributes to that outcome. Reproduction is the reason for every single one of our gene's existence.
And so it's not 'you have this gene you want kids' or 'you don't have this gene you don't want kids', it's way more complicated than that. It's 'you have a huge mess of interconnected genes that all interact to ensure you are interested in finding a partner to mate with'. This may or may not mean you 'want' kids, but the whole system will literally always be oriented toward the outcome of you 'having' kids, whether that's through a normalized social structure, or in fact, you actually wanting kids, or you just not realizing being childless is an option for you.
I'll grant that the current genetic system may be more oriented toward ensuring we have sex, and that reproductive technologies may have an impact. But even then, the people who still continue to reproduce are the ones who pass on their genes. Make sense?
The idea of literally any species ever not being oriented toward reproduction is absurd, because that's literally what life is. A group of living things evolving out of existence is a physical impossibility.
The subtlety that's missing in some of the posts above is that there would most certainly not be a 'gene' for wanting or not wanting kids, but rather an entire genome of genes that are all oriented toward the end of producing kids. The end-goal of a living thing is to produce more living things, and so literally every gene in our body contributes to that outcome. Reproduction is the reason for every single one of our gene's existence.
And so it's not 'you have this gene you want kids' or 'you don't have this gene you don't want kids', it's way more complicated than that. It's 'you have a huge mess of interconnected genes that all interact to ensure you are interested in finding a partner to mate with'. This may or may not mean you 'want' kids, but the whole system will literally always be oriented toward the outcome of you 'having' kids, whether that's through a normalized social structure, or in fact, you actually wanting kids, or you just not realizing being childless is an option for you.
I'll grant that the current genetic system may be more oriented toward ensuring we have sex, and that reproductive technologies may have an impact. But even then, the people who still continue to reproduce are the ones who pass on their genes. Make sense?
The idea of literally any species ever not being oriented toward reproduction is absurd, because that's literally what life is. A group of living things evolving out of existence is a physical impossibility.
Human beings are absurd. We don't live in our environment; We modify environments so we can live practically anywhere. We have recently decoupled fucking from childbearing - and are the only species to have ever done so. All the assumptions and the history of life prior to this development are void. All bets are off.
Most species go extinct - and the reasons for their extinction are many and varied; But humans could quite possibly go extinct because we decide not to have children. It's quite reasonable (and certainly physically possible) for a species to 'evolve out of existence' (for given meanings of that phrase). Extinction is a driver of evolution.
Humans are not genetically oriented towards reproduction - like most mammals, we are oriented towards having sex, and sex and reproduction were so closely linked for all of history that that was sufficient. Evolution tends towards sufficient solutions for everything. It doesn't do perfection.
Sex and reproduction are no longer linked for humans. Wanting sex no longer implies having kids, and wanting kids is not a genetically driven imperative (unlike wanting sex, which appears to be).