(July 9, 2015 at 12:02 pm)Parkers Tan Wrote:(July 9, 2015 at 3:27 am)robvalue Wrote: No problem. That is a very cold and scientific assessment of course. I only refer to the decision to have children in the first place; once you have them, it becomes very much unselfish. At least it should do!
I do hundreds of selfish things every day, so it's hardly a judgement
It's one I disagree with. Raylene and I decided to have our son out of our love for each other and wanting to add the love of a child to our family. We didn't have the money for an attorney or the adoption process, which can be expensive and which has requirements that we might not have been able to meet. Additionally, we weren't sure we'd be accepted, because at that time I was managing a large adult video store ... not something that looks good on an adoption application.
We all do selfish things, but for me, becoming a father wasn't one of those things. I know you didn't mean ill about it, but it feels rather belittling to be told that.
You did it for self-interested reasons. That is, you wanted it, so you did it. "Selfish" is a term that can mean simply "concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure" and that is what you seem to be saying motivated you to have a child. "Selfish" also though sometimes is used to mean "(Of a person, action, or motive) lacking consideration for other people," which is not quite the same thing (though Oxford puts them both in what they are claiming is one definition). We do not have any way of knowing that you did not consider how this impacts other people, and so it may well be that you were not selfish in that sense of the word. I am pretty sure that robvalue did not have this second idea in mind; only the first.
As robvalue has already stated, that does not necessarily mean that there is anything wrong with it. We all do many self-interested things, things that are "concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure" without that necessarily being a bad thing at all. Earlier today, I went to an art gallery, and I did so because I wanted to. I was concerned chiefly with my own personal profit or pleasure. That does not mean that I was wrong to do it. Likewise, that you decided to have a child because you wanted one does not mean that you were wrong to do it.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
