You keep saying that sort of thing, over and over. I think at this point your readers all realize you think the end justifies the means.
It does from a practical standpoint, which is what we've been discussing: the actual UTILITY of such actions in the context of their goals.
And looking back, we find that the choice was often made for the purpose of perpetuating the family and extending the shared legacies of parents onto their offspring, regardless of prevailing social/economic conditions. The choice they made, in essence, was to raise families and pursue whatever happiness and success might have been available, rather than wait for someone or some thing to come along and offer them a better deal.
Families that did this succeeded in their goal of continuing to exist. Families that did not came to an end.
Could be you're more interested in the individual case-by-case context in which those decisions were made; that isn't even POSSIBLE in this discussion since we don't actually know the individual case-by-case circumstances of every one of those choices. But as I just finished explaining to Angra, moral judgement is a matter of evaluating intentions, not probabilities.
To the extent that procreation can be considered morally acceptable AT ALL, then maximizing the odds of successful offspring can be accomplished either by heaping benefits on the individuals or by simply producing enough offspring to beat the odds.
Either one will accomplish that same goal... so now it's just a question of whether or not that goal makes any sense in the first place.
How does that follow? What's your reasoning? How do you get from the premise that "procreation can be considered morally acceptable AT ALL" to the conclusion that it makes no moral difference whether you do it by being an r-strategist or a K-strategist?
I didn't. I said:
To the extent that procreation can be considered morally acceptable, then either strategy may very well accomplish that goal.
So it therefore depends on to what extent procreation is morally acceptable in the first place. If it isn't, then neither strategy is valid. But if the deliberate perpetuation of one's own family, community and species is a goal to be praised, then a strategy that accomplishes this is also a goal to be praised.
That still doesn't eliminate the need to evaluate individual actions within the context of that strategy. Attempting to get people to exercise more frequently is a morally beneficent strategy for public health; breaking into people's houses with a chainsaw and chasing them halfway across town is a questionable application of that strategy.
I, for one, am happy to have been born, so from my point of view the decisions of my ancestors was a net benefit to me. If they had not made those decisions I would not have been born, which is an outcome I would not have preferred. Your mileage may vary.
If your great
24 grandfather hadn't made the decision to rape your great
24 grandmother you would not have been born
Irrelevant; in that case his goal was to commit a rape, not to perpetuate his family. One does not evaluate the moral implications of
accidents. But I note that you are again implying that the decision to have a child is somehow morally equivalent to some other serious crime because Reasons.
And again, we're speaking of the choice to create children and raise families under circumstances that are not ideal for either. People have ALWAYS done this in the past, and those families have usually survived -- and sometimes thrived -- despite the conditions. There are all kinds of reasons why rape can be considered immoral; as I explained to Angra, "the probability of harm coming to the victim" is not one of them, which is the same reason why "the probability of benefit coming to the victim" would not make that action justifiable.
Pretty much every bit of happiness in my life has happened because my wife and I met each other and hit it off. As I trace the chain of cause and effect, it seems a near certainty to me that we would never have met each other if Klaus Fuchs hadn't stolen the plans for the atomic bomb and given them to Stalin...
Did Klaus Fuchs think that doing so would give his family a better chance of happiness in the future? Did he specifically act with the intention of creating a better life for himself and for his future descendants? If so, then he acted directly for your benefit, and he accomplished that goal. His actions could be considered morally virtuous in the context of that goal... again, to the extent that perpetuating the existence of your family is virtuous at all.
I would assume that he knew that giving Stalin the atomic bomb was going to trigger a war that would eventually kill millions of people (he would have been wrong, but that's what everybody "knew" back then). If he knew this and did so anyway, then his actions CANNOT be considered morally virtuous even if he accomplished that goal.
Is there anything about procreation that you consider to be inherently immoral? If not, why do you keep comparing reproduction to
crimes as if they are the same thing? Not once have I seen you compare having a baby to, say, opening a restaurant or teaching slaves how to read.
So does that mean you think choosing to drive while you're drunk is moral provided you don't intend to crash into anyone, and you have a good reason to want to be at the place you're trying to drive to?
It's a very reckless action, but not necessarily an immoral one (that again depends on the circumstances and depends on what the drunk driver knows).
Why would that make it neutral? As you say, moral responsibility is about choices. Why would choosing to give someone no pleasure and no suffering not be a more moral choice than choosing to give him both when you know it's probably going to be a lot more suffering than pleasure?
Because the "probably" in that statement cannot and does not factor into the decision: you can't evaluate a moral judgement based on "probably."
You can be morally responsible only for your own choices and not for the choices of others. To use your previous example, a drunk driver is, statistically speaking, NOT particularly likely to cause an accident that one time, only at heightened risk of doing so. So the moral judgement is how he chooses to deal with the risk and weigh them against the potential benefit he hopes to pursue. If he's driving drunk to talk his nephew out of committing suicide, this is probably more strongly encouraged than driving drunk to catch the next episode of Game of Thrones.
Do you assume the parents of poor children do not CARE what happens to their children? Do you assume they will not take any action to maximize their happiness and just say "You're the statisticians' problem now." You don't evaluate morality on statistics because statistics are not choices.
tl;dr: having a child who has a high probability of being unhappy is not immoral.
Causing the child to be unhappy is immoral.
So is it your contention that a Huntington's couple who choose to have eight children, knowing that most likely six of them are going to have short miserable lives and horrible deaths, are doing the right thing by making two healthy kids to maintain the family, as long as they're nice to their six sick children while they all wait for nature to take its course?
Depends on what they know and what they believe, but quite possibly, yes.
