mythago, this doesn’t have…
mythago, this doesn’t have to do with my personal preferences. As it happens I like kids a lot and I’d be glad to help out; that’s why I framed it as a hypothetical to be supposed. What I’m concerned with is how we ought to treat people who don’t happen to be interested in volunteering.
That said:
Unfortunately, Rad Geek, you live in a society that has a minimal level of communal support—you know, tax breaks for charity, funding for soup kitchens, and so on.
I can’t see how this appeal cuts any ice at all. I was also born into a society where heterosexual marriage is widespread, where homophobia is widespread, where a minimal level of sexist jokes, are widespread, etc., but that’s not an argument for sexist jokes or homophobia, and it’s not an argument for forcing me to get heterosexually hitched either. Why should the fact that I was born into a society where people carry on a certain way affect whether or not (1) I ought to support them carrying on that way, or (2) I ought to be forced to carry on that way myself?
Even if you think all poor people should curl up and die, you still have to pay taxes that go to feed poor people.
I’m aware that I am. I’m questioning whether forcing people to contribute to causes they don’t support is right, not whether it is done.
You might say that if I’m taking advantage of communal support that I’m unwilling to contribute to later, then that’s at least a vice on my part. Perhaps that I’m, say, selfish or ungrateful. Maybe so, but I don’t think that just pointing this out:
If this makes you curmudgeonly, do consider that you’ve been the benefit of ‘public good’ projects—if not directly, then indirectly.
… proves that to be the case. I wasn’t asked whether or not whether I wanted to benefit from various cooperative or tax-funded projects, so I don’t see how I have even any prima facie moral obligation to support them now. Let alone an enforceable debt to them.
I would suggest that. Although I don’t much like the communal child-raising pipedream, if that were the mechanism we selected as a society, you would owe it support and fealty. … Otherwise, get out. If you won’t support society’s requirement to transmit itself through time, then you don’t deserve to participate in the side benefits that such societies tend to provide. Go live in the woods and be a lonely hermit.
If you want to voluntarily dissociate from childless people who don’t support the raising of other people’s children (by whatever means is prevalent in a given community), then you are of course free to do so. I don’t see, however, where you think you get the right to tell me whether or not I can live on my own land (which happens to be in the middle of a city, not in the woods), or whether or not I can interact with and trade with other people who happen not to share your views (most shopkeeps don’t care very much whether or not their paying customers are sufficiently child-friendly, and while I happen not to be a child-hating curmudgeon, I know plenty of people who wouldn’t hold it against me if I were).
If you’re just suggesting that I have a right to be a sour child-hating curmudgeon, and you have a right to ostracize me and encourage your neighbors to do the same, then we’re in agreement (although I think the reasons you’re suggesting for the ostracism are rather silly). But if you’re suggesting that you have a right to force me to move out, or to force other people not to interact with me, then I have to wonder what you think gives you the right to treat me and them that way.
Just for the record under my red nightmare no-one would be required to work doing child raising. It would just be one of the many forms of work that people would do.
Well, that’s fine. I don’t have any problem with it, then. I think it sounds pretty nice, in point of fact.
My concern is with the phrase “collective responsibility.” People sometimes use “responsibility” to mean something that you can choose or not choose to take on; sometimes they use it to mean something that you are required to do, and can be forced to do, whether you like it or not. And when they start talking about how X or Y is a “collective responsibility” a lot of times they mean the latter rather than the former (since it suggests that you’re talking about a burden for everyone to bear, instead of something that they willingly choose to take on because they want to do it). Why not talk about child-rearing being something “open to all,” or something “everyone can help out with,” instead of a “collective responsibility”?
I don’t know what Maia is envisioning when she refers to the collectiveness of child-rearing, but I’d like to see some acknowledgement of the necessity of certain institutions needed to simultaneously raise children and keep a roof over one’s head
I would too, and I happen to dislike sour child-hating curmudgeons on both an individual and societal level (although not because I think they’re somehow ungrateful; the problem with them is that they’re generally petty and mean).
My question isn’t about the ends to be achieved; it’s about the means used to achieve them.
Anticopyright.