[extropy-chat] Gay marriage in Spain, a world of change
David Lubkin
extropy at unreasonable.com
Thu Jul 21 16:17:34 UTC 2005
Amara wrote:
>So I will keep this short: The idea of 'parentage' is to give care,
>support, guidance, and love to a baby, child, young person, and/or
>teenager. Do you really care how that life came to be in this world
>and does it matter what person, persons, or combination of persons
>give the [support,guidance, and love],
>
> *as long as the child gets [support,guidance, and love]* ??
Enter the very messy question of when a third-party can legitimately
interfere with someone's parenting, now and into a transhuman libertopia,
when individuals could create sentient slave species or robotic children.
In the outer community, it is often taken as axiomatic that a member of set
P [ single parent | gay couple | nuclear family | retarded parents |
atheists | etc. ] either [is] or [is not] equally capable of providing
[support, guidance, love] as any other member of set P.
This leads to a conviction that legal or social [benefits | restrictions]
[should | must | should not | must not] be in place for P member p.
These presumed axioms are testable, however. One can measure outcomes in
both individual children and in the set of children parented by p [i], and
compare with p [j] or with a normal distribution across P. Life expectancy,
socio-economic status, incidence of criminal behavior, IQ, malnutrition,
evidence of physical abuse.
At some outcome-values, extant societies deem that an individual child may
be removed from their parents, or have their parenting micromanaged. At
other outcome-values, societies have legislated against member p becoming
parents by [banning marriage | banning adoption | forced contraception or
sterilization | imprisonment].
As libertarians, perhaps there should be a rebuttable presumption in favor
of any p in P. But are there outcome-values that justify pre-emptive steps?
John murders his son, so the other kids are taken away. Versus statistical
aggregates -- 1% of children raised by redheads become alcoholics or 93% of
children raised by sf readers are hypocephalic.
-- David Lubkin.
More information about the extropy-chat
mailing list