Proving What We Already "Know"

[bennyboy]

Destruction is intrinsic to some events and relationships.  OFC it takes a moral agent to notice an item of moral import - but it doesn't take a moral agent for destruction to be present.  This is what it means to be extrinsic or intrinsic, of possessing attribute x itself.  This is all it means.  

Destruction is not harm. When we metabolize a sugar molecule, it is destroyed. I would not say that it is harmed.

Utilitarian arguments are realist arguments, whether they're right or wrong.  If there really is utility in having more people and a person makes a utilitarian argument for it then it's true or false with respect to the facts it purports.

Between those two, only one of them can be true or false, only one of them refers to an attribute (purportedly) intrinsic to x.  More people = more brain genius.

Implicit in "get off my lawn" is the idea that we already have an uncomfortable population density, and that more births are likely to increase our discomfort.

 
Personally, i think the question "is a new pregnancy good" requires far more..and far more intimate, detail, in order to render any moral conclusion we might call true.  As even if we stay off of someone's lawn, and even if we do breed people for utility, there remain a great many questions to be answered.  It could go either way depending on the details, couldn't it?

Not necessarily. The brain of the "get off the lawn" guy is collating uncountable experiences of his own, as well as a billion years of evolutionary history that leads to territorial feelings, empathy, guilt and so on. He's a truth-processing machine, but he has to reconcile a trillion truths like a time-traveling wizard.

But a woman who wants a baby is, too, and she is working with a different collection of truths-- for exapmle, that women who don't reproduce aren't represented in the subsequent gene pool, something that was true long before there were people.