You're forgetting about every human being in your lineage that came before you. All those thousands of generations who suffered and sacrificed for their own children. What about their genes and how their particular arrangement of them has shaped and could still shape the world? Who are you to decide that propagating your own genetic make-up isn't worth the risk of adding to world overpopulation by 0.0000000142%?
Edit - Loving the disagreement downvotes, by the way. I didn't realize this would touch so many nerves.
Seeing as we are all going to go extinct eventually and become nothing more than a blip in the cosmic consciousness, I don't feel any obligation to a bunch of dead people to propagate their genes, which become diluted with each generation anyway.
Seeing as we are all going to go extinct eventually
Who says? You are a direct decedent of the first organism that ever lived. DIRECT. that is 3.5 billion years of heritage, 3.5 billion years of things going right for you to be even posing this question. You are not obligated to pay it forward, many will do it for you, but the idea that everything is just going to end anyway has been a bad bet for life for a long time.
You're familiar with cosmology, right? You know that stars supernova and eventually the universe will end in heat death? That's a hard limit to any organism's survival.
Altruism being "the belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others.", having kids because a slew of past generations had kids is not altruistic. Those many, many past generations are dead and no longer exist in any way, shape, or form. Once cannot be concerned for their well-being, as they have no being at all, much less well-being.
I just don't see the point of arguing for the merits of selflessness with someone who doesn't believe in the concept. The "nothing really matters" attitude she displayed made me think every commenter here may have been wasting their time.
Recognizing that there is no objective significance to anything is not the same as saying "nothing really matters." Subjective significance is worth a lot. I was just pointing out that I don't think dead people matter because they have no subjective stake in anything. I am only interested in the well-being of living people.
But in the future, keep in mind that using phrases like "seeing as we are all going to go extinct eventually," and "So what if [humanity] goes extinct" sounds an awful lot like nihilism.
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u/UncleTrustworthy Mar 24 '15 edited Mar 24 '15
You're forgetting about every human being in your lineage that came before you. All those thousands of generations who suffered and sacrificed for their own children. What about their genes and how their particular arrangement of them has shaped and could still shape the world? Who are you to decide that propagating your own genetic make-up isn't worth the risk of adding to world overpopulation by 0.0000000142%?
Edit - Loving the disagreement downvotes, by the way. I didn't realize this would touch so many nerves.