Effective altruists and longtermists should be adopting children

⚠️ content warning: hypothetical suicidal ideation in the abstract, evopsych nonsense

People in the "Effect Altruist" (EA) and longtermist subcultures (and other members of the "rationalist community") like to play this game in which they assign a numerical value to human happiness. They say that happiness can be described on a scale from -100 to 100, where 100 is the theoretical happiest a person can possibly be, -100 is pure suffering, and 0 is neutral. At 0, they say, a person genuinely doesn't care whether they live or die. At 0.001, a person has a very slight preference for being alive vs. being dead.

They use this framework to posit that having children is an inherent moral good. They say that bringing a child into the world and giving them even a minimally good life is creating happiness where there was no happiness before.

Critics have pointed out that this philosophy might lead one to conclude that a large population of barely non-miserable people would be better than than a small population of very happy people. They call this the "repugnant conclusion", which is the logical endpoint of the "mere addition paradox". The wikipedia article does a pretty good job of explaining all this, but to quickly summarize:

Say you have a population of one thousand perfectly happy people (ΣH=100,000). Let's call this World A. They add people to their population, and with all other factors being equal (the same number of resources, etc) this gradually lowers the happiness of everyone over time. Say you repeat this process until you end up with a population of a billion people each with a happiness of 0.001 (ΣH=100,000.01.) Let's call this World Z. The EA framework would say that World Z is better than World A because the total overall happiness is greater. That's the repugnant conclusion.

Figure 8.4. Box diagram illustrating the Repugnant Conclusion: for any happy population (e.g., population A)—no matter how good their lives are—there is a population in which everyone is much worse off (but still enjoys positive wellbeing) but which according to the total view is better because it consists of enough people (e.g., population Z).¹

I think this is all stupid, trying to measure happiness like this is anti-human, and the repugnant conclusion is a pretty good argument against it,² although the way philosophers conceptualize (H=0.001) strikes me as odd. Derek Parfit, who first proposed this paradox in his book Overpopulation and the Quality of Life (1986), describes World Z like this:

There is nothing bad in each of these lives; but there is little happiness, and little else that is good. The people in Z never suffer; but all they have is muzak and potatoes.

Later in life, he compared this level of happiness to "cows munching grass or lizards basking in the sun" (Can We Avoid the Repugnant Conclusion?, 2017). William MacAskill, the leading figure of the Effective Altruism movement, thinks this doesn't sound so bad:

We would end up with an enormous number of people with lives that have only slightly positive wellbeing, and we would have to conclude that that world is better than the world we started with, with ten billion lives of bliss. That is, we have arrived at the Repugnant Conclusion.

If you want to reject the Repugnant Conclusion, therefore, then you’ve got to reject one of the premises that this argument was based on. But each of these premises seem incontrovertible. We are left with a paradox.

One option is simply to accept the Repugnant Conclusion—and perhaps argue that it is not quite as repugnant as it first seems. This is the view that I incline towards.³

But in real life, this is absurd. It's the philosophical equivalent of spherical cows in a vacuum. What a happiness of 0.01 would mean to me is that I'm only two mildly unhappy occurrences away from preferring death over life. Say I wake up in the morning just barely wanting to live (H=0.01), but I stub my toe as I'm getting out of bed (H=0) and spill my coffee on my desk and have to clean it up (H=-0.01). This would be enough to make me want to die. Does this sound like a baseline level of happiness you'd want? Would the idea that there's a billion people that might not otherwise exist living lives of equal dreariness be any consolation?

But even if we accept that the repugnance of the conclusion has been exaggerated, it's still obvious to me that members of this community should be adopting children instead of having their own. Say an "effective altruist" has a child, and is able to give them a life of perfect happiness. I sincerely doubt that anyone who views the world this way would be a great parent, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt. Before the child was born, it represented a purely hypothetical amount of happiness (H=∅) and once it developed enough consciousness, it added to the world the theoretical maximum for one human (H=100).

Now suppose instead of having his own child, the Effective Altruist instead adopted an orphan from a poverty-stricken, war-torn developing nation. This child would've been doomed to a life of extreme suffering (H=-50), but being adopted by a rich effective altruist in the US and given the best life that US wealth can provide drastically improves the child's life. Maybe it can never attain (H=100) after the early childhood trauma, but let's say it grows up as happy as possible given the circumstances and reaches (H=80).

In this scenario, the EA not only added a great deal of happiness to the world, he also eliminated suffering with the same action. The amount of happiness went from -50 to 80, a total net gain of 130, 30% more than would be possible by having a biological child. That might not seem like that much to you or me, but to a community that takes the subjective suffering of shrimp deadly seriously, adopting as many suffering children as one can realistically care for should be a no-brainer.⁴

It's reasonable to assume that no matter how wealthy and committed someone is, there's a finite number of children they can effectively parent. Parental attention and bonding are necessary for perfect happiness, and no matter how rich and devoted you might be, there's only so much attention any one human can give; so you'll probably reach a point of diminishing returns after your 4th or 5th child. It stands to reason that, for an effective altruist, having any biological children is a crime against humanity, because each one removes a slot that could've gone to a suffering orphan in a developing nation; if he has the useful maximum number of biological children (generously, 5) that's 250 points of suffering he failed to prevent, the equivalent of two and a half Omelas children.

It's even worse if you take the longtermist perspective, because all the suffering children they fail to adopt might live long enough to have children of their own, in the same violent impoverished conditions, and the amount of suffering will cascade through the generations. This should be unthinkably cruel to any principled population ethicist.

Personally, I think this is all stupid. Whether and how one becomes a parent should be up to the individual. I don't think anyone is obligated or should be pressured to have children, to not have children, or to adopt; do what's best for you. But there are people who claim to think about the world this way, so I'm just asking for some consistency. I think any effective altruist who has biological children instead of adopting is a hypocrite who cares more about their own genes than actually making the world a better place.