I am a proponent of liberalism (more specifically, of the most consistent form of liberalism, which is of course libertarianism. But let’s not worry about different versions of liberalism today). Thus far, for the past few centuries that it has been ascendant, liberalism has been an enormous boon to humanity. It is largely to liberalism that we owe
I'm surprised you didn't distinguish between a political liberalism and a cultural liberalism since there are plenty of folks over at the Acton Institute and the Libertarian Christian Institute that would strongly be in favor of political liberalism but have conservative to moderate views on religion, sex, and family life.
While I take a moderate position on most of the cultural issues you discuss, I don't think culturally liberal views on religion, sex, and family life are what has given us "vast improvements in human beings’ standard of living, in our health, longevity, freedom, individual fulfillment, knowledge, access to great art, and just about everything that’s good in human life." I think it's things like free markets, toleration, and human rights that have done that. Fundamentalist beliefs, perhaps on gender roles, may hinder some progress in these areas, but I doubt they would stop any of these "vast improvements."
My guess is, the the solutions that you're offering won't work unless they are combined with an embrace of religion in some way, shape or form, since that has been what provides a community in which raising children is possible. A related question is whether the types of communities that foster fertility are possible in a politically liberal society. I certainly hope the answer is yes!
I wonder what makes religion unusually successful in promoting fertility. Perhaps, if you believe in an afterlife, you don’t have to worry about experiencing the maximum pleasure you can while you’re alive and can focus on family instead. But if you don’t believe so, you’ll be much more concerned about getting the most out of your time here. Perhaps Huemer should promote his arguments for reincarnation among the secular public 🤔
Religion is unusually successful because it’s the greatest coercion tool ever created that doesn’t require a totalitarian state. And religion is mainly trying to coerce women and high value males. Being that those two groups will have the most abundance in the mating market their nature will have to be artificially suppressed lest we return to a time of serious hypergamy. Oops! Too late. It looks like the western world is already there.
Ironically, the men who helped bring back this natural state are the atheist who never bothered to really understand our nature and now complain that women want a particular type of man in this modern global dating market. They also didn’t understand the importance of status to women. Oh well...these are the cycles of life.
I feel so lucky to be alive during this cycle. How many of us get to see the final blows to religion in the western world and see wether atheism can scale. So far, those fertility statistics are making my childhood fantasies of an atheist world look like I should’ve been careful with wanting to tear things down without knowing it’s purpose.
"free markets, toleration, and human rights" are integral to "cultural liberalism", too. It is women's human right to be treated no worse than males. And have the choices/chances man have. It is tolerance to what humans do in their bedrooms, that leads to "gays are ok". And it is free markets that gives jobs to men, women and whoever. "You can't have the one without the other" - sounded once kinda true about "love and marriage" - but one can not have an illiberal liberalism. (One can have a society that takes its picks and limits some liberties. We always do. But what would be the "liberal" way is usu. quite clear.)
Human rights are a human invention. They should promote human flourishing, not merely abstract freedoms for individuals that might be detrimental to it.
Humans flourish in a nurturing environment - a society. Left to their own devices, a human individual would be worse off than any animal baby, on top of having to rediscover all of human civilization and social knowledge from scratch, language included.
What differentiates humans from animals is the ability to co-create, inhabit, and pass on, "abstract concepts" (knowledge) and structures (society) to a much much higher degree than any animal gathering.
Try getting born into a dysfunctional society and let me know if it's an "abstract concept that doesn't flourish" and how your individual flourishing can happen just as easily on your own devices in such a society.
If by a politically liberal, yet also largely religious and family oriented society, you would include for example the bourgeois liberal european culture of the 19th century, then the answer is obviously yes, such a society is indeed possible.
For liberals of that time, what today passes of as liberalism I suspect would seem to them to be something more like democratic socialism combined with hedonistic individualism.
Yes that's what I was thinking. Cultural liberalism is a whole different beast. It is mostly a consumer ideology invented by large corporation to make profit. Has nothing to even do with politics.
If you look within developed countries, more socially liberal places do not do worse than more socially conservative places in terms of fertility - Nordic countries do better than Anglo do better than Southern European do better than East Asian; South Korea doesn’t just have some of the lowest fertility but also some of the least feminist attitudes. Of course there are other cultural and institutional differences that could produce this, but it leans against an easy equation between the degree of cultural liberalism (within the plausible constraints of a developed context) and fertility.
Yes, and the Nordic countries also demonstrate that when people are provided with a substantial social safety net, women tend to work less and pursue more internally fulfilling and family-friendly jobs.
"Men and women are pretty much the same, and there’s no reason why women should not be just as career-oriented as men."
I'm not so sure that we ought to describe either rejection of psychological dimorphism or disfavor of reproduction as liberal. Liberalism is historically associated with an epistemology of "following the evidence where it leads", as well as an ethics that tends toward consequentialism. If some of the changes attributable to feminism decrease women's average well-being, then continuing to cleave to them in the name of some a priori ideological commitment strikes me as markedly illiberal.
Should probably add robotic caretakers to the list of potential liberal solutions here. If they were affordable and good enough that it was socially acceptable to just leave your kids in their care for 2 weeks to go on a vacation, it would go a long way toward convincing hedonists like me to try raising a family.
Although it may not necessarily be immoral to have sex outside of marriage it may not be *pragmatic*. At least if you have tons of partners and do it frequently.
There are diseases, unexpected pregnancies, side effects from birth control, psychological and possibly moral implications of abortion, psychological issues with how you view sex that could impact future serious relationships and probably more things as well.
As far as fulfillment I think that there's a trade off between family and a career. Is having a good career and being able to buy more things more fulfilling than the bond you have with your spouse and children? How many people have a career that allows them to answer "yes" to that question? I also question whether men or women get the better deal in the hardcore conservative family structure. Is going to work 40 hours a week at a 9-5 actually better than staying home with kids? Prior to baby formula and the sale of breast milk babies would be physically dependent on their mother. Are there biological or evolutionary psychological factors that may make them prefer this role more than men?
How does government intervention impact these decisions? Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance and other social safety nets offload the risks and socialize the costs of risky behavior as well as crowd out private institutions like family, organized religion and charity to some extent. So would the conservative view be even more pragmatic without them?
Stretching our thinking a little further afield, perhaps it is the fact that the basic structure of our families and households have not sufficiently adapted to the material and social changes that have taken place over the last 200 years. Reading about the traditional family arrangements of the Mosuo people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosuo) I wonder if something like that may be more suited to our modern mode of civilization. Matrilineal families where the male siblings and cousins are expected to support their female relatives in childrearing and provide the male role models for children would remove the need for a stable romantic relationship to start having children, and greater use of extended families to meet the needs of childrearing would enable adults to balance work and family life without sacrificing the latter.
Cringe matriarchial take. Imagine supporting children as a male in a society that has no proscriptions against miscegenation - fundamental misunderstanding of Hamilton's rule and group selection. Sure, I'll take care of white women's half black, Indian, Arab, etc off spring. Liberals cannot stop taking L's in 2023.
Even if you gave everyone ample leisure time, it would be foolish to think that the patrilinear nuclear family model would continue to operate as it used to in a world where people are wealthy, women are emancipated and birth control is cheap and easily available. One must work within the constraints of the environment one has been given, so if raising birthrates is the goal, the key is to lighten the social and time burdens placed on would-be mothers.
Excellent article! I appreciate that you acknowledge the tradeoff between fertility and prosperity with liberal values, but try to seek solutions that preserve both. When I see conservatives raise this issue, I usually feel like they are trying to use this problem as a vehicle to promote their (false) values, ignoring other solutions.
By the way, another option you missed is increased immigration. While, since immigrants assimilate to liberal values, it would only be a temporary measure, it would certainly buy us a few extra decades. Alas, it would be really unpopular, in the US at least.
Looking at that graph, it's pretty clear that the decline in fertility happens right after the invention of the pill. Implying that all the extra babies born before then were accidents.
That implies women do anything on purpose instead of just stumbling through life on their confused intuition. Women do things because of astrology and vagina tingles, not rational thought.
Just to clarify, by stating that "the liberal views on nearly all of the above points are clearly the correct, rational views" apart from abortion, you are affirming that:
- The main purpose of sex is recreation, not procreation
- Men and women are pretty much the same
- Traditional religion (whatever you mean by that) is demonstrably false
- Homosexuality and transgenderism are obviously fine
- are you suggesting that the conservative position is that sex is only for procreation? I don't think many actual conservatives belief that; and if they do it's probably for religious reasons so it's a doctrine they have inherited rather than a brief they've arrived at from first principles. Personally I think that this is a false dichotomy anyway, for me the main purpose of sex is to express love for the other person. Where does that viewpoint fit on a left-right spectrum?
- this is empirically nonsense and too many liberals buy into the idea; but I'm not sure how relevant it is to the birth rates question.
- Occam's razor implies that God doesn't exist; but surely a liberal also believes in freedom of religion, that the faith of others I'd ultimately none of the liberal's business. A liberal society must be a secular society with church and state kept well apart, but that doesn't mean such a society has no room for the church at all. (Indeed, the most famous society that tried to ban religion, the Soviet Union, was about as far from liberal as it's possible to be.)
- I mean, they are. This one just is obvious to me. And even if they aren't fine, well those people exist and those characteristics are largely immutable, so society has to deal with it regardless.
- I don't really think in terms of conservative/progressive that much. Like I get the framework and it's helpful sometimes, but I don't subscribe to a view because "I'm a conservative"
- I don't dismiss things because they're based on doctrine, rather than 'first principles'.
Quick responses in turn:
- No, I didn't say "only for procreation"; just that it's not clearly correct that the main purpose is recreation. I agree with you that expressing love is massive – that's probably one of the two main purposes of sex in my view, along with recreation.
- I think we agree on this point?
- Interesting thoughts on liberalism and religion. I don't particularly have concrete views on that, but what you're saying seems to make sense to me. But I'm fascinated by your assertion that Occam's razor implies that God doesn't exist. I know that's not the point of Michael's post, but I'd love to hear more of your reasoning about that? I'm really interested in the topic.
- I mean this in a genuinely non-confrontational way, but I don't think you've left much scope for conversation about this. "They are", "it's just obvious" and "largely immutable" are all just assertions, right? Totally happy to agree to disagree about it, because it seems like we have pretty different presuppositions (one example being about doctrine vs first principles). And just in case it's helpful, I wasn't necessarily arguing with Michael's conclusions about the implications for liberalism; I was just taking issue with his assertion that this list of things is "clearly the correct, rational views".
Thanks for the thoughts and the healthy disagreement
Thanks for disagreeing politely and in good faith. That's rare enough with internet strangers.
To follow up on a couple of queries:
- the way I understand Occam's Razor is essentially "don't make more assumptions than you have to". (I know it's often quoted as "the simplest solution is probably the correct one" but I don't think this is really what Occam was getting at; although it's also quite a useful razor in its own right.) Since there isn't really any additional explanatory power gained by assuming the existence of God, we should probably not assume His existence. (But in any case, I don't think whether God exists or not has any ethical implications, what a good life looks like is pretty much the same either way, and Christian virtues can be a valid moral system independent of the metaphysics.)
- on whether non-heteronormativity is "fine": maybe I was indeed being a bit blunt. I think what I was really getting at was that sexuality is not like a political belief. It is reasonable to ask whether it is okay to be a conservative or a liberal, because people can be persuaded into and out of those positions. But to ask whether it is fine to be gay? You might as well debate the merits and demerits of being tall.
Okay gotcha. Thanks again for your thoughts. I have a couple in response:
- I think the crux of our disagreement then is about whether God's existence adds any explanatory power, because I think it would help explain the existence of the physical universe, objective morality, meaning and purpose, some historical events, etc. If you're interested, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the first two:
How do you think the universe came to exist? Do you subscribe to a multi-verse theory?
And do you think morality should be based on objective moral standards? If so, on what if not God's character?
Only if you're happy to discuss it. Totally cool if not.
- Yeah I can definitely see why you think that. Again, I'm not sure I agree that being gay is analogous to being tall. I think being same-sex attracted is analogous to being tall, but having an intrinsic desire obviously doesn't necessarily make it right to act on that desire - that would be a separate question. Hopes that makes sense.
Disclaimer - I do have a physics degree, but big bang cosmology was not my specialism so I'm not really qualified to answer that question! But I would note that "God made the universe" creates as many new problems as the questions it answers, unless you can find a way round the infinite regression of "what made God?", "what made the thing that made God?", "what made the thing that made the thing that made God?" etc.
With regard to morality, I mean this is fairly easily explained by acknowledging that God and morality are both things that humans made up. Perhaps we invented the former as a way of justifying the latter - I'm a strong believer in the notion that "if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him"; that is, while I am personally an atheist I still believe that religion is a net benefit to humanity. (God may not exist but He has inspired millions of people to live good lives!)
One more thing to add: it's fascinating that you talk about reaching "higher" but "falling short". Wouldn't language of reaching higher imply the existence of objective moral values to aspire to?
Hey Alex. Not sure I agree about God being so ineffable that there's not much point talking about it - I think it's relatively easy to describe the classical conception of God for the purposes of a conversation like this. But I'm happy to drop it if you'd prefer that.
Your comparison between morality and money is an interesting one. I agree that money is only valuable because of our subjective assignment of value to it, and I also agree that the assignment of value makes it objectively valuable (as long as we all continue to assign it subjective value), so that we are rightly more upset about losing real money than monopoly money.
I'm not sure that's analogous to morality though. On your view, the same way we *assign* financial value to (for example) a gold coin, we also *assign* moral value to (for example) generosity. But then surely it follows that, in the same way as we might all one day decide that gold coins aren't actually financially valuable, so also one day we might all decide that generosity isn't actually morally good.
So, in that sense, generosity isn't *objectively* morally good. It's only *subjectively* morally good. And what you have been calling "morality", if it is invented, is a real thing in some sense, but it is a sociological thing, not what we have all traditionally meant by "morality" (meaning an objectively binding set of values and duties).
Hey Alex, sorry for the delay – things have been crazy lately.
That's cool you studied physics. My brain definitely doesn't work that way haha. But to me the question of the origin of the universe seems like it's probably more of a philosophical question than a scientific one? Because the question isn't "how does some stuff become the universe"; it's "how did the universe come to exist in the first place".
I don't think the proposition that God made the universe creates the problem you described, because it's part of the classical definition of God (and always has been) that he is uncreated and eternally existent. So if an entity like that exists, you don't need to explain what caused it because it's uncaused. Whereas the universe doesn't seem like the sort of thing that could be uncaused, especially given big bang cosmology.
On morality, would that mean you don't think that morality is objective – as in we say that things are wrong, but we really just mean that we don't like them? I'm assuming probably not, because you talk about "a net benefit to humanity" and about living "good lives". But then can a life be objectively "good" if "good" is just a made-up concept?
Again sorry for the delay. It's totally fine if the moment has passed. I just find these questions fascinating.
libertarians aren't always pro-abortion in fact there are two theories against abortion created by them:evictionism and departurism, and yes we must ban abortion
I've heard some people claim that it's not prosperity, but education, that's causing fertility to decrease. A rich low education family will have more children than a low paid but highly educated family. That seems worth looking into more closely.
Regarding the problem with incentives that you mentioned, Robin Hanson got a solution for that. There's no reason to think that the government owning the right to the money people pay in taxes is the optimal allocation of that fincancial asset. So the the right to collect taxes should be auctioned out to the highest bidder (potentially career agents that can make the tax payer earn more). With a system like that we get a perfect policy lever for incentivising fertility. Give parents the right to collect a part of their childrens taxes. And also the abillity to sell that right to whoever they want. That asset will be worth more money for a high productivity child than for a low productivity child, which solves the incentive problem in your post.
* Instead of tax breaks directly to families, give them to businesses with high-earners who provide daycare.
* Make schools outside high-income neighborhoods better (by any of the obvious-but-unpopular methods).
* Promote daycare, including (especially? wealthier families would utilize it more) live-in daycare, as lucrative and respectable careers.
* Reform educational systems (teacher demographics, teacher protections, scholarships, outreach, etc.) to get more men into high-earning careers. (Again, we want more children from wealthy families, but more high-earning men will also result in more marriages.)
Not only do prosperous nations have a lower birthrate, but within prosperous countries such as the U.S., birthrate decreases with increased income. https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ I wonder if this has been true historically as well. For example, did European nobility historically have fewer children than the lower classes?
Given this correlation, I'm not sure how much economic incentives such as tax breaks will do to combat declining fertility rates. A shift in cultural values might help to some extent. For example, in fundamentalist circles, having children is considered extremely praiseworthy while couples that have fewer children or women that have full-time careers are criticized or shamed. This is not a good way to promote having children, but there are probably healthier versions of pro-natalist cultures.
I think the most significant factor is the opportunity cost of children. The more disposable income you have, the more opportunities are available to you such that having children imposes a greater opportunity cost. The nominal cost of having children also increases with income as well, given that richer couples will spend more income on any children they have.
I'm surprised you didn't distinguish between a political liberalism and a cultural liberalism since there are plenty of folks over at the Acton Institute and the Libertarian Christian Institute that would strongly be in favor of political liberalism but have conservative to moderate views on religion, sex, and family life.
While I take a moderate position on most of the cultural issues you discuss, I don't think culturally liberal views on religion, sex, and family life are what has given us "vast improvements in human beings’ standard of living, in our health, longevity, freedom, individual fulfillment, knowledge, access to great art, and just about everything that’s good in human life." I think it's things like free markets, toleration, and human rights that have done that. Fundamentalist beliefs, perhaps on gender roles, may hinder some progress in these areas, but I doubt they would stop any of these "vast improvements."
My guess is, the the solutions that you're offering won't work unless they are combined with an embrace of religion in some way, shape or form, since that has been what provides a community in which raising children is possible. A related question is whether the types of communities that foster fertility are possible in a politically liberal society. I certainly hope the answer is yes!
I wonder what makes religion unusually successful in promoting fertility. Perhaps, if you believe in an afterlife, you don’t have to worry about experiencing the maximum pleasure you can while you’re alive and can focus on family instead. But if you don’t believe so, you’ll be much more concerned about getting the most out of your time here. Perhaps Huemer should promote his arguments for reincarnation among the secular public 🤔
Religion is unusually successful because it’s the greatest coercion tool ever created that doesn’t require a totalitarian state. And religion is mainly trying to coerce women and high value males. Being that those two groups will have the most abundance in the mating market their nature will have to be artificially suppressed lest we return to a time of serious hypergamy. Oops! Too late. It looks like the western world is already there.
Ironically, the men who helped bring back this natural state are the atheist who never bothered to really understand our nature and now complain that women want a particular type of man in this modern global dating market. They also didn’t understand the importance of status to women. Oh well...these are the cycles of life.
I feel so lucky to be alive during this cycle. How many of us get to see the final blows to religion in the western world and see wether atheism can scale. So far, those fertility statistics are making my childhood fantasies of an atheist world look like I should’ve been careful with wanting to tear things down without knowing it’s purpose.
Hedonism is just leftism, aka Satanism. Anti Christ in full effect. Non Christians can't stop losing in 2024.
"free markets, toleration, and human rights" are integral to "cultural liberalism", too. It is women's human right to be treated no worse than males. And have the choices/chances man have. It is tolerance to what humans do in their bedrooms, that leads to "gays are ok". And it is free markets that gives jobs to men, women and whoever. "You can't have the one without the other" - sounded once kinda true about "love and marriage" - but one can not have an illiberal liberalism. (One can have a society that takes its picks and limits some liberties. We always do. But what would be the "liberal" way is usu. quite clear.)
Human rights are a human invention. They should promote human flourishing, not merely abstract freedoms for individuals that might be detrimental to it.
Individual flourishing is human flourishing. Society is an abstract concept that doesn't flourish.
Humans flourish in a nurturing environment - a society. Left to their own devices, a human individual would be worse off than any animal baby, on top of having to rediscover all of human civilization and social knowledge from scratch, language included.
What differentiates humans from animals is the ability to co-create, inhabit, and pass on, "abstract concepts" (knowledge) and structures (society) to a much much higher degree than any animal gathering.
Try getting born into a dysfunctional society and let me know if it's an "abstract concept that doesn't flourish" and how your individual flourishing can happen just as easily on your own devices in such a society.
If by a politically liberal, yet also largely religious and family oriented society, you would include for example the bourgeois liberal european culture of the 19th century, then the answer is obviously yes, such a society is indeed possible.
For liberals of that time, what today passes of as liberalism I suspect would seem to them to be something more like democratic socialism combined with hedonistic individualism.
Yes that's what I was thinking. Cultural liberalism is a whole different beast. It is mostly a consumer ideology invented by large corporation to make profit. Has nothing to even do with politics.
Cut for higher education and ban degree requirements. People often delay marriage and / or children until done with school.
Ban licensing more generally, good one.
If you look within developed countries, more socially liberal places do not do worse than more socially conservative places in terms of fertility - Nordic countries do better than Anglo do better than Southern European do better than East Asian; South Korea doesn’t just have some of the lowest fertility but also some of the least feminist attitudes. Of course there are other cultural and institutional differences that could produce this, but it leans against an easy equation between the degree of cultural liberalism (within the plausible constraints of a developed context) and fertility.
Yes, and the Nordic countries also demonstrate that when people are provided with a substantial social safety net, women tend to work less and pursue more internally fulfilling and family-friendly jobs.
Nether part of this is obvious:
"Men and women are pretty much the same, and there’s no reason why women should not be just as career-oriented as men."
I'm not so sure that we ought to describe either rejection of psychological dimorphism or disfavor of reproduction as liberal. Liberalism is historically associated with an epistemology of "following the evidence where it leads", as well as an ethics that tends toward consequentialism. If some of the changes attributable to feminism decrease women's average well-being, then continuing to cleave to them in the name of some a priori ideological commitment strikes me as markedly illiberal.
Should probably add robotic caretakers to the list of potential liberal solutions here. If they were affordable and good enough that it was socially acceptable to just leave your kids in their care for 2 weeks to go on a vacation, it would go a long way toward convincing hedonists like me to try raising a family.
I have a few thoughts.
Although it may not necessarily be immoral to have sex outside of marriage it may not be *pragmatic*. At least if you have tons of partners and do it frequently.
There are diseases, unexpected pregnancies, side effects from birth control, psychological and possibly moral implications of abortion, psychological issues with how you view sex that could impact future serious relationships and probably more things as well.
As far as fulfillment I think that there's a trade off between family and a career. Is having a good career and being able to buy more things more fulfilling than the bond you have with your spouse and children? How many people have a career that allows them to answer "yes" to that question? I also question whether men or women get the better deal in the hardcore conservative family structure. Is going to work 40 hours a week at a 9-5 actually better than staying home with kids? Prior to baby formula and the sale of breast milk babies would be physically dependent on their mother. Are there biological or evolutionary psychological factors that may make them prefer this role more than men?
How does government intervention impact these decisions? Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance and other social safety nets offload the risks and socialize the costs of risky behavior as well as crowd out private institutions like family, organized religion and charity to some extent. So would the conservative view be even more pragmatic without them?
Stretching our thinking a little further afield, perhaps it is the fact that the basic structure of our families and households have not sufficiently adapted to the material and social changes that have taken place over the last 200 years. Reading about the traditional family arrangements of the Mosuo people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosuo) I wonder if something like that may be more suited to our modern mode of civilization. Matrilineal families where the male siblings and cousins are expected to support their female relatives in childrearing and provide the male role models for children would remove the need for a stable romantic relationship to start having children, and greater use of extended families to meet the needs of childrearing would enable adults to balance work and family life without sacrificing the latter.
Cringe matriarchial take. Imagine supporting children as a male in a society that has no proscriptions against miscegenation - fundamental misunderstanding of Hamilton's rule and group selection. Sure, I'll take care of white women's half black, Indian, Arab, etc off spring. Liberals cannot stop taking L's in 2023.
That would be a regression, necessitated by sacrificing family life for work and corporate greed
Even if you gave everyone ample leisure time, it would be foolish to think that the patrilinear nuclear family model would continue to operate as it used to in a world where people are wealthy, women are emancipated and birth control is cheap and easily available. One must work within the constraints of the environment one has been given, so if raising birthrates is the goal, the key is to lighten the social and time burdens placed on would-be mothers.
Excellent article! I appreciate that you acknowledge the tradeoff between fertility and prosperity with liberal values, but try to seek solutions that preserve both. When I see conservatives raise this issue, I usually feel like they are trying to use this problem as a vehicle to promote their (false) values, ignoring other solutions.
By the way, another option you missed is increased immigration. While, since immigrants assimilate to liberal values, it would only be a temporary measure, it would certainly buy us a few extra decades. Alas, it would be really unpopular, in the US at least.
>false) values
Nah, they're true actually. Enjoy going extinct!
Looking at that graph, it's pretty clear that the decline in fertility happens right after the invention of the pill. Implying that all the extra babies born before then were accidents.
That implies women do anything on purpose instead of just stumbling through life on their confused intuition. Women do things because of astrology and vagina tingles, not rational thought.
incel take
Is female privilege a source of the problem? https://youtu.be/wCu94YcZHiE?si=5pKXDqWRQhLahXrq
Just to clarify, by stating that "the liberal views on nearly all of the above points are clearly the correct, rational views" apart from abortion, you are affirming that:
- The main purpose of sex is recreation, not procreation
- Men and women are pretty much the same
- Traditional religion (whatever you mean by that) is demonstrably false
- Homosexuality and transgenderism are obviously fine
These all seem contentious to me.
Taking those points in turn:
- are you suggesting that the conservative position is that sex is only for procreation? I don't think many actual conservatives belief that; and if they do it's probably for religious reasons so it's a doctrine they have inherited rather than a brief they've arrived at from first principles. Personally I think that this is a false dichotomy anyway, for me the main purpose of sex is to express love for the other person. Where does that viewpoint fit on a left-right spectrum?
- this is empirically nonsense and too many liberals buy into the idea; but I'm not sure how relevant it is to the birth rates question.
- Occam's razor implies that God doesn't exist; but surely a liberal also believes in freedom of religion, that the faith of others I'd ultimately none of the liberal's business. A liberal society must be a secular society with church and state kept well apart, but that doesn't mean such a society has no room for the church at all. (Indeed, the most famous society that tried to ban religion, the Soviet Union, was about as far from liberal as it's possible to be.)
- I mean, they are. This one just is obvious to me. And even if they aren't fine, well those people exist and those characteristics are largely immutable, so society has to deal with it regardless.
A couple big-picture things just for context:
- I don't really think in terms of conservative/progressive that much. Like I get the framework and it's helpful sometimes, but I don't subscribe to a view because "I'm a conservative"
- I don't dismiss things because they're based on doctrine, rather than 'first principles'.
Quick responses in turn:
- No, I didn't say "only for procreation"; just that it's not clearly correct that the main purpose is recreation. I agree with you that expressing love is massive – that's probably one of the two main purposes of sex in my view, along with recreation.
- I think we agree on this point?
- Interesting thoughts on liberalism and religion. I don't particularly have concrete views on that, but what you're saying seems to make sense to me. But I'm fascinated by your assertion that Occam's razor implies that God doesn't exist. I know that's not the point of Michael's post, but I'd love to hear more of your reasoning about that? I'm really interested in the topic.
- I mean this in a genuinely non-confrontational way, but I don't think you've left much scope for conversation about this. "They are", "it's just obvious" and "largely immutable" are all just assertions, right? Totally happy to agree to disagree about it, because it seems like we have pretty different presuppositions (one example being about doctrine vs first principles). And just in case it's helpful, I wasn't necessarily arguing with Michael's conclusions about the implications for liberalism; I was just taking issue with his assertion that this list of things is "clearly the correct, rational views".
Thanks for the thoughts and the healthy disagreement
Thanks for disagreeing politely and in good faith. That's rare enough with internet strangers.
To follow up on a couple of queries:
- the way I understand Occam's Razor is essentially "don't make more assumptions than you have to". (I know it's often quoted as "the simplest solution is probably the correct one" but I don't think this is really what Occam was getting at; although it's also quite a useful razor in its own right.) Since there isn't really any additional explanatory power gained by assuming the existence of God, we should probably not assume His existence. (But in any case, I don't think whether God exists or not has any ethical implications, what a good life looks like is pretty much the same either way, and Christian virtues can be a valid moral system independent of the metaphysics.)
- on whether non-heteronormativity is "fine": maybe I was indeed being a bit blunt. I think what I was really getting at was that sexuality is not like a political belief. It is reasonable to ask whether it is okay to be a conservative or a liberal, because people can be persuaded into and out of those positions. But to ask whether it is fine to be gay? You might as well debate the merits and demerits of being tall.
Okay gotcha. Thanks again for your thoughts. I have a couple in response:
- I think the crux of our disagreement then is about whether God's existence adds any explanatory power, because I think it would help explain the existence of the physical universe, objective morality, meaning and purpose, some historical events, etc. If you're interested, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the first two:
How do you think the universe came to exist? Do you subscribe to a multi-verse theory?
And do you think morality should be based on objective moral standards? If so, on what if not God's character?
Only if you're happy to discuss it. Totally cool if not.
- Yeah I can definitely see why you think that. Again, I'm not sure I agree that being gay is analogous to being tall. I think being same-sex attracted is analogous to being tall, but having an intrinsic desire obviously doesn't necessarily make it right to act on that desire - that would be a separate question. Hopes that makes sense.
Disclaimer - I do have a physics degree, but big bang cosmology was not my specialism so I'm not really qualified to answer that question! But I would note that "God made the universe" creates as many new problems as the questions it answers, unless you can find a way round the infinite regression of "what made God?", "what made the thing that made God?", "what made the thing that made the thing that made God?" etc.
With regard to morality, I mean this is fairly easily explained by acknowledging that God and morality are both things that humans made up. Perhaps we invented the former as a way of justifying the latter - I'm a strong believer in the notion that "if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him"; that is, while I am personally an atheist I still believe that religion is a net benefit to humanity. (God may not exist but He has inspired millions of people to live good lives!)
One more thing to add: it's fascinating that you talk about reaching "higher" but "falling short". Wouldn't language of reaching higher imply the existence of objective moral values to aspire to?
Hey Alex. Not sure I agree about God being so ineffable that there's not much point talking about it - I think it's relatively easy to describe the classical conception of God for the purposes of a conversation like this. But I'm happy to drop it if you'd prefer that.
Your comparison between morality and money is an interesting one. I agree that money is only valuable because of our subjective assignment of value to it, and I also agree that the assignment of value makes it objectively valuable (as long as we all continue to assign it subjective value), so that we are rightly more upset about losing real money than monopoly money.
I'm not sure that's analogous to morality though. On your view, the same way we *assign* financial value to (for example) a gold coin, we also *assign* moral value to (for example) generosity. But then surely it follows that, in the same way as we might all one day decide that gold coins aren't actually financially valuable, so also one day we might all decide that generosity isn't actually morally good.
So, in that sense, generosity isn't *objectively* morally good. It's only *subjectively* morally good. And what you have been calling "morality", if it is invented, is a real thing in some sense, but it is a sociological thing, not what we have all traditionally meant by "morality" (meaning an objectively binding set of values and duties).
Thanks again for the friendly disagreement
Hey Alex, sorry for the delay – things have been crazy lately.
That's cool you studied physics. My brain definitely doesn't work that way haha. But to me the question of the origin of the universe seems like it's probably more of a philosophical question than a scientific one? Because the question isn't "how does some stuff become the universe"; it's "how did the universe come to exist in the first place".
I don't think the proposition that God made the universe creates the problem you described, because it's part of the classical definition of God (and always has been) that he is uncreated and eternally existent. So if an entity like that exists, you don't need to explain what caused it because it's uncaused. Whereas the universe doesn't seem like the sort of thing that could be uncaused, especially given big bang cosmology.
On morality, would that mean you don't think that morality is objective – as in we say that things are wrong, but we really just mean that we don't like them? I'm assuming probably not, because you talk about "a net benefit to humanity" and about living "good lives". But then can a life be objectively "good" if "good" is just a made-up concept?
Again sorry for the delay. It's totally fine if the moment has passed. I just find these questions fascinating.
Interesting article. I have a different take on the impact of prosperity:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/a-manifesto-for-the-progress-based
libertarians aren't always pro-abortion in fact there are two theories against abortion created by them:evictionism and departurism, and yes we must ban abortion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Departurism
I've heard some people claim that it's not prosperity, but education, that's causing fertility to decrease. A rich low education family will have more children than a low paid but highly educated family. That seems worth looking into more closely.
Regarding the problem with incentives that you mentioned, Robin Hanson got a solution for that. There's no reason to think that the government owning the right to the money people pay in taxes is the optimal allocation of that fincancial asset. So the the right to collect taxes should be auctioned out to the highest bidder (potentially career agents that can make the tax payer earn more). With a system like that we get a perfect policy lever for incentivising fertility. Give parents the right to collect a part of their childrens taxes. And also the abillity to sell that right to whoever they want. That asset will be worth more money for a high productivity child than for a low productivity child, which solves the incentive problem in your post.
In no particular order or rigor:
* Instead of tax breaks directly to families, give them to businesses with high-earners who provide daycare.
* Make schools outside high-income neighborhoods better (by any of the obvious-but-unpopular methods).
* Promote daycare, including (especially? wealthier families would utilize it more) live-in daycare, as lucrative and respectable careers.
* Reform educational systems (teacher demographics, teacher protections, scholarships, outreach, etc.) to get more men into high-earning careers. (Again, we want more children from wealthy families, but more high-earning men will also result in more marriages.)
* Make surrogacy easier?
* Encourage immigration of high-earning families?
Not only do prosperous nations have a lower birthrate, but within prosperous countries such as the U.S., birthrate decreases with increased income. https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ I wonder if this has been true historically as well. For example, did European nobility historically have fewer children than the lower classes?
Given this correlation, I'm not sure how much economic incentives such as tax breaks will do to combat declining fertility rates. A shift in cultural values might help to some extent. For example, in fundamentalist circles, having children is considered extremely praiseworthy while couples that have fewer children or women that have full-time careers are criticized or shamed. This is not a good way to promote having children, but there are probably healthier versions of pro-natalist cultures.
I think the most significant factor is the opportunity cost of children. The more disposable income you have, the more opportunities are available to you such that having children imposes a greater opportunity cost. The nominal cost of having children also increases with income as well, given that richer couples will spend more income on any children they have.