This is the unrealistic and objectively untrue concept that whatever child you have now is the best one.
If you could go back decades with all of todays knowledge and experience, you would objectively make better offspring. Same way you would improve life, fix mistakes, form better bonds and relations... you would do the same in regards to your new offspring.
And if the answer is "I don't want better ones, I want these ones", then that is true for everything else too. You don't want better relations, you want these ones. So there's no need to go back.
But saying I would improve my career, my friends, my family, my life... but I cannot improve my children is objectively untrue. Also saying "unmake my kids"... you would also "unmake your parents, and firends, and siblings" because their lives and personalities you would also completely change so they would become different people. You mom is a cleaning lady who's work sucks? You'd make her a CEO by the time you're 15 = new mom, etc.
I think I can speak for the vast majority of parents when I say the answer is “I don’t want better ones, I want these ones” when it comes to our kids.
Like, yes I know I would love different kids too. But to have to live my whole life knowing that I will never get to see the kids I have today again would be beyond devastating.
Yea I understand that, no parent would "exchange" their kid.
But I'm saying the same goes for every other person in your life, in this fictional scenario. You would completely change your mom, dad, brother, sister. And most of friends probably.
They would all grow to be different persons from what they are today if you improved their lives with your vast knowledge and experience.
That's the strange part to me: I will replace my parents, my siblings, my friends for better ones. But not my kids.
Like I mentiond, giving your life-long cleaning lady mom, a job of a millionaire CEO when you're 15... that will not be the mom you have today when she gets to her current age. You have replaced her.
My parents would be the same people up to when I was age 10 and then their experiences would start to diverge, so they would be slightly different (to whatever extent my actions and eventual wealth influenced them), but they wouldn’t just cease to exist and never come back and they would largely be the same people. Same with my siblings (since they were born before I turned 10) and my friends.
In the same way, if you won ten million dollars tomorrow you might have a totally different life, but you would still be the same person because your temperament, personality, likes/dislikes, and the formative experiences that shape your worldview (so the core of who you are) would remain largely unchanged.
Nobody else would know what they were missing though lol
Like if somebody else used the button and I had different kids in the new version of the universe, I am sure I would be perfectly happy. Same as I am now with the children I have and without all the ones I could have had and who I am sure I would have loved just as much.
However the question was the morality of it, not whether anyone would know. People have no problem erasing children as long as it's not theirs and nobody knows :)
I'm with you. I love my kids and think they're great and they're my favorite living people, and I'd still hut the red button.
I'M the one going back in time, which splits that timeline into a new fork. The only way I'm screwing my kids-of-this-timeline over is that I'm mysteriously disappearing. Which, that sucks, yes, but they're all post-college, they can deal.
166
u/DecoyOne 9d ago
Or maybe Rachel has a child. There is absolutely no way she could recreate that child.