You may want to file this under ‘incredibly obvious’, but I haven’t seen it noted elsewhere. Liberals and libertarians have an instinctive aversion to paternalism. Their key objection is: how can anyone else be expected to know what is good for you, better than you do?
I agree with every word in this article. This is why libertarianism doesn't make sense. It is based on an outdated understanding of individuality which includes things like a soul and free will.
"Why then should we give a young woman unrestricted freedom to hurt her far-off 60 year old self, just because they happen to pass through the same body at different points in time?" Excellent point!
Err, the whole point is that it does not require that. I think that plays a role in paternalism, but the whole point of this post is that even if both parties totally agree on all matters of fact, paternalism can make sense if I value future-you more than you do.
"Protecting people from themselves" is not about protecting people. It's about dominating people.
Paternalists usually don't pay the true costs of their paternalism, they force it onto others, while gaining social status for their alleged benevolence.
It's possible that a paternalist thinks in "far mode", while people think in "near mode" concerning themselves, but that doesn't tell us much about who knows best, not even in the special case where all information is known by both parties, since the "mode of thinking" is just one of many possible factors affecting the outcome.
For example, the individual has a strong self-interest, so they're motivated to do what's best for themselves. State paternalism, on the other hand, has to be instituted by politicians and administered through bureaucrats. Those politicians and bureaucrats are primarily motivated by their own self-interests. In real life, this frequently leads to decisions that are sub-optimal in relation to the stated goal and the available information. For example, when decisions are affected by campaign donations, by internal power struggles, or by the consequences the decision has for the politician/bureaucrat personally.Since an individual doesn't have a conflict of interest with themselves, most of these problems don't occur when the individual decides for themselves.
I could give more examples, but the point is that we can't draw any conclusions just because we found *one* factor that speaks in favour of paternalists knowing best. We need to get an overview of the most important factors for and against (and even then, we're unlikely to reach any degree of certainty).
A bit of the issue, in fairness, is that I don't quite understand your position.
Do you dispute that there exist pairs of family willing to adopt and dysfunctional family, such that forcibly moving child from the dysfunctional family to the family willing to adopt improves the child's well being?
In so much as any such pairings do exist, the government can improve the child's well being by moving children away from biological parents to adoptive parents, within those pairs.
The way genetic interests work, btw, is them make you take care of the children that you live with. Who are virtually always your children. We don't really come with some genetic test, like, I dunno, biting the child and having the tongue perform DNA match analysis, anyway, and the fact that you 'know' the children are not yours is abstract knowledge of the kind to which we had no time to adapt. As a side effect, this allows to use parents to raise children of other people.
edit: This also works for other species of mammals. Sometimes, in the zoo, you get a mother that's not interested in well being of the cub - child rearing instincts sometimes fail, in which case you often can move cub to another mother, even of different species. It is utterly ridiculous to suggest - based on no evidence but on handwave about 'genetic interests', that use of this practice can not improve well being of the cubs.
WRT the organ donations, if it is legal to cut up your child for organs and sell them, well, if you look around at the worst of the worst, there are enough psychopaths who will grow their children to, say, age of 10, then cut them up for transplants. Easily several percent. Note that, even though psychopathy is inheritable, majority of the children will likely not be psychopaths themselves as in a family typically only one parent is a psychopath. How the hell is that possibly worse than the chinese approach where they do pick the involuntary donors among the criminals (whom they have a plenty)
I believed until now that domesticated animals are less intelligent than wild ones. This BBC Horizon doc shows some very smart dogs - http://www.youtube.com/watc... Dogs seem to have developed abilities that relate only to humans - like reading our facial expresions and barking as a sort of language that humans can understand. Also covered is the decades old breeding of Siberian foxes in Russia. They are now tame like puppies. There is also a control group - mind your fingers.
What seems to have happened with dogs is that their domestication has traded-off some abilities for others, for which they are now better-off (they live with affluent humans in nice homes). Maybe this change in some way mirrors the our own great leap forward, around 50 kya - a huge increase in culture but with no corresponding change in brain capacity, but instead a more optimal trade-off of cognitive abilities. So what was dropped? One clue is that the bred-tame Siberian foxes have changed in appearance. They have more juvenile characteristics maintained into adulthood (shorter, curlier tale, bigger ears,...). These were not selected for, but occured in parallel with the artificial selection for less aggression.
This actually assumes that the paternal agent actually knows what is best for the future you. For example, Communist dictators such as Stalin and Mao used this idea that the short term costs (i.e. seizing of property, killing of political dissidents) were worth it for the long term aim of creating a socialist utopia. The famous phrase used was "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." The famous reply by George Orwell was of course "Where's the omelet?" There of course was not omelet, which is why many of these regimes fell or loosed their control over the economy. Sometimes paternal agents don't know what's best for you now OR in the future.
dmytryl, do you know of any studies on the effects of adoption/CPS compared to leaving children with birth parents? The adoption research I'm more familiar with investigates what happens if twins are raised apart or how similar unrelated kids reared together turn out. And as long as counties receive $4000 in federal grants for every foster child adoption, $8000 if the child is older than 9, I wouldn't trust them to have the right incentives. That's pretty blatantly the case with asset forfeiture, where police have specificially requested that families post bail money in cash (since most people don't know that's not legally required), and then (though the family documented that they had just withdrawn the cash from a bank) claimed that a sniffer-dog detected drugs and seized the money for the police department.
Selling organs is risky because it's illegal everywhere except Iran (because, as Al Roth can tell you, it violates the taboos of most people). But I have heard of a sizable number of cases where it has occurred, and when discussing the issue with others there was academic literature to discuss about organ sellers. I have not heard about a case of parents killing their child and selling its organs. "Shaken baby syndrome" also occurs often enough for there to be medical literature on whether the cases reveal mistreatment of the child, and there's not even the incentive of a shiny car in that situation. Without the documented existence of such a phenomenon, I don't think it serves you as a very good argument. As for whether there is 2 or 3% of the population, again I'd like to see some studies.
If I found the concept of "evil" to be useful, I would deem evil the (extremely common) position that organ sales should be prohibited. And I'm completely aware that many would consider me evil for my own position on that. The irrational instincts inherited from the past are especially pernicious in "far mode", where people don't directly face the consequences of their mistaken ideas (as when you cast a vote affecting people you don't know).
If the important thing is that I know my own history & circumstances, what does it say that I don't perceive myself as the beneficiary of paternalism? I'm also confused by your description of me as a "libertarian poser". A poser is someone who pretends to be something, and I've been explicit on this blog and my own that I don't claim to be a libertarian. I don't believe in rights, and will endorse on rule-consequentialist grounds the use of coercion, including by the state, if it seems beneficial due to externalities. In the case of children I see that their biological relatives have the strongest genetic interests, while unrelated people have negligible interest and any disutility they get from hearing about what parents have done has the least-cost-avoidance strategy of ignoring it.
srdiamond, yes parents' interests only partially overlap with those of their children. That is Trivers' theory of genetic conflict. Unrelated people have even less shared genetic interest (which is why people overwhelmingly flee from East to West Germany or North to South Korea, despite the education & healthcare). My understanding is that currently, being overweight predicts higher fertility (being slightly overweight is also predictive of being healthier, an artifact of our official definitions of appropriate BMI). There was also a study out recently indicating that castrated men live longer, and there has been ongoing research into life-extension gained from metabolic restriction (which significantly reduces fertility). It is not surprising that so many decline to be skinny eunuchs, and I wouldn't bother with any argument that they have some "real" interest they are failing to follow. In my own life I do sometimes think that someone else has greater understanding about something that can benefit me, and I am apt to defer to their judgment. But I don't generally view paternalists as sharing my interests or facing any negative consequences from being wrong, and insofar as I can evade them I will.
@TGGP My point is not original to me, I borrowed it from a generalization Bruce Bueno de Mesquita made about a number of governments.Mesquita's arguments concerned why Stalinist governments are great at universal health care and universal literacy. The answer given is that for selfish reasons, they're concerned with the quality of the labor force.But this constitutes are overlapping interest between these governments and the masses—one concerning some of the masses' most vital interests It is no less legitimate an overlapping interest to cite than is the reproductive interest of parent in child. That interest, too, is only partial: it leaves out many of the child's real interests (that is, the child's lifelong utility function, which differs from its own reproductive interest, hence even more from its parents'). The interest of "loving parents" in their children's health, for example, seems sadly deficient. (Perhaps because you don't need to live that long to reproduce?) What kind of loving parent is indifferent to the obesity of a growing fraction of kids?I think you reach libertarianism by embracing too extreme a form of genetic determinism, according to which the only interests you can rely on are reproductive interests.
TGGP: With regards to adoptive parents vs biological parents, I know personally families with adoptive children who are doing massively better than they would of done in the original families.
The government works by moving children out of the worst percentile of the families, into the families that pass some testing and which want to adopt. Even though one can make a point that the adoptive families on average are worse than non-adoptive families, they are better than huge fraction of non-adoptive families. (And of course the situation is dramatically different from having a stepfather). By large, CPS only intervenes in the worst of the worst. The same worst of the worst affected by your endorsement.
Now, you endorse "unrestricted freedom to harm their children". That does not affect the regular family; it affects those where government currently intervenes.
With regards to parents not selling their children for organs, well, that is incredibly risky thing to do right now, that the people with endorsement like yours are perhaps 2..3% of population, or even less as there's no selfish incentive to make that sort of endorsement.
There is no way you are so ignorant as to not know what parents did to their children among the segment of population affected by your endorsement. So, assuming it is not product of ignorance, you are simply what majority of population calls "evil" (A meaningless label, if you ask me), that's the issue right here. It's not about the position, it's about failure to have a moral system, or failure to adopt the most people's moral system. You better learn to pretend you aren't, for your own sake and your own survival. Humans are social species, pack hunters, etc; a lot of tweaks on top of individual survivalism; those tweaks sometimes are not innately functional in which case learning helps.
As for whether I have benefited from the government's paternalism, you would have to know what decisions my parents or I would have made without it. But you don't know. You simply assume the conclusion you are trying to prove.The important thing is that you know and I am talking to you. It is generally highly likely that someone's current well being relied on goverment support or otherwise violated the principles of a libertarian poser.
I'm not sure what literature you're citing on the effects of transferring a child to an adopted family. Most twin-adoption studies find negligible "shared environment" impact, but it could be that traits they focus on (like personality, for Judith Harris) are less relevant. I do know that having an unrelated male (or even stepmother) in the home significantly increases the odds of injury/death, but those results don't come from adoption studies (to quote this paper linked from Slate today, "Living in the same household with genetically unrelated adults is the single biggest risk factor for abuse, neglect and homicide of children").
I agree with Eliezer Yudkowsky that organisms are adaptation executors, not optimizers. This is true for both the parents and the children. The substantial overlap in their strategies leads to reduced conflict (although it still exists), and like Robin Hanson I prefer peace. I don't believe in any objective version of "the good" (like forcing people to better serve their real genetic interests by having more offspring), I simply accept the existence of agents with diverse preferences which I use genetic interests as shorthand for, and like "dealism" as an approach for those agents (including myself) to pursue their goals without impeding the goals of others (though I recognize conflict is bound to exist).
Continuing on with the theme of adaptation executions, condoms did not exist during the evolutionary adaptive period. Infanticide did, and sometimes made sense (Steve Pinker had a good article on early-stage infanticide which I recommend but can't link for fear of tripping the filter). I actually favor the legalization of infanticide (to me it's just a consistent stance on the abortion question) even though it doesn't really serve the interest of the child (and the cuteness of babies may be an adaptation to prevent them from being killed by a mother who might have wanted to conserve her resources for another child). However, I've never heard of parents dismembering their infant to sell the organs and buy a car, perhaps infant organs aren't suitable for what's in demand. I have heard that the Chinese government harvests the organs of large numbers of prisoners sentenced to death, and even sends their families bills for expenses. You may say that's just one government (of the most populous nation on earth, and one that has greatly increased in quality over the past few decades!), but the NYPD (the finest of America's most populous city!) recently ran over Tamon Robinson, and then billed his mother for damages to their car. We have about 1% of the population incarcerated, and when the FBI found serious errors in some of its forensic analysis used to convict people (focusing chiefly on the work of one scientist), they didn't inform the convicted. There is Dallas D.A Craig Watkins who has actually worked to free people convicted based on faulty evidence, but generally speaking the government is one of the last organizations I would defer to as more inclined to look after my own interests than myself.
You seem to think I believe in free will. I do not. I don't believe its accurate to model drug addiction as a disease which people are helpless to resist either, but just as something they find very satisfying. Most users, even of hard drugs, drift in and out of use rather than remaining trapped in it. The "Rat Park" experiment showed that even enforced prolonged use of opiates doesn't trap rats in addiction once they have the option to drink drug-free water. Hawaii's H.O.P.E program has had tremendous success in deterring even the most hard-core of meth users simply by credibly promising that they will spend one(!) night in jail if they fail a drug test, increasing the amount of jail time with repeated failures. Most of our war on drugs is not nearly as effective and chiefly serves to immiserate users & their community, while enriching the few suppliers violent enough to climb to the top.
I don't believe that insurance should not exist. I believe that much insurance as it exists now (such as when people are required to have health insurance which covers certain enumerated things, whether they want it or not) does not function as an economist would conceive the insurance function (ex ante benefiting both the customer & supplier). It is intended to redistribute from the healthy to the unhealthy, and a healthy person who would prefer to defer the purchase of insurance to a later date or to purchase a policy more narrowly tailored actually does understand their own interests.
As for whether I have benefited from the government's paternalism, you would have to know what decisions my parents or I would have made without it. But you don't know. You simply assume the conclusion you are trying to prove. It is like saying that because I am doing alright and we have farm subsidies, farm subsidies must benefit me.
Well, there's a zillion and one example of how people do not serve their own interests, let alone their children's.
The practice shows that e.g. putting child into a willing family as adopted child works quite well; better than sub-par biological parents.
Why? Its not following genetic interests! Well, the human brain simply doesn't follow genetic interests, it never did, it's dramatically not how neural networks work. You posting here is example of this, me posting here is example of this, it's ridiculous this point even needs to be made. If the genetic interests do not stop parents capable of raising a child from using condom, why on earth should they stop from killing a child or cutting child apart to sell for organs to buy a new shiny car, or the like? Well they do not! The culture does, the government does, etc. Instincts sort of kind of gently push in the general direction of wanting not to kill the child and into direction of wanting a shiny car, and for males at least, as far as interests go, in many historical societies status translated to more than 1 extra child, so the shiny car is more significant.
And that's without even mentioning that modern environment contains new chemicals and methods of their consumption that are highly addictive to the animals in question, and which, when taken for prolonged period of time, result in craving substantially stronger than any of the above instinctive drives, which is a direct result of how neural networks - entirely devoid of the silly philosophical nonsense idea of free will - work.
"As a 21st century American, I am quite rich by historical standards."
You are quite rich by 21th century standards, no need to go historical. You are living in a shining example of paternalism that, while not perfect, worked for you. It's a bit like, you are growing up under insurance coverage and nothing happens to you and you go on how this insurance took advantage of you and there shouldn't be insurance. People are just this way.
Oh, come on. I'm probably gonna be feeding a troll, but since people have liked this, and I'm bored, I might as well.
Most murders, rapes, and frauds are not made to impose an opinion on others, or even for the good of others. It's done for personal gain. I don't see how you can associate that with being paternal, unless you're talking about mercy killings, which are not always obviously morally wrong, and don't have as much of the negative connotation you try so hard to keep throughout your straw man. And in your second paragraph, you make come to crazy conclusions. You claim that, assuming violence is a justifiable means to an end, it is okay to rape women because they *might* want children in the future.
Well, if you are willing to take really painful means to have a small chance of a slightly good ends, do so. Just make sure (to not be called inconsistent) to congratulate those who chop off their arms because they're itching... because the ends don't have to justify the means, right?
Wow, this actually was fun to write. Hopefully your stupid comment will be removed, or at least downshifted, because it does not deserve to be at the top of the discussion. This was actually a good post, and your comment almost stopped me from reading the better discussion below.
dmytryl, it is a common rhetorical step to use extreme examples (like an economist's simplifying assumption) to make a point obvious. My point is not original to me, I borrowed it from a generalization Bruce Bueno de Mesquita made about a number of governments.
As a 21st century American, I am quite rich by historical standards. I don't know where you're getting all this stuff about race, my point about genetic conflict comes from Trivers and doesn't even require the concept of a race. And judging by the behavior of other (even white!) people I know, society hasn't done that good a job of discouraging access to addictive substances. I'd link to Robin's post theorizing why parents don't want their kids to use drugs and kids reject their paternalism, but too many comments are getting auto-moderated and I already included one link. I can't see where I'm the beneficiary of the government overriding my parents.
Peter D, there's Type I error and Type II error when it comes to governments overriding parental authority. As I stated, there are evolutionary reasons for biological parents to share interests with their children and act on behalf of those interests, as well as SOME tendency for their interests to conflict. There is much less reason to expect such shared interests with the government.
I agree with every word in this article. This is why libertarianism doesn't make sense. It is based on an outdated understanding of individuality which includes things like a soul and free will.
"Why then should we give a young woman unrestricted freedom to hurt her far-off 60 year old self, just because they happen to pass through the same body at different points in time?" Excellent point!
Err, the whole point is that it does not require that. I think that plays a role in paternalism, but the whole point of this post is that even if both parties totally agree on all matters of fact, paternalism can make sense if I value future-you more than you do.
"Protecting people from themselves" is not about protecting people. It's about dominating people.
Paternalists usually don't pay the true costs of their paternalism, they force it onto others, while gaining social status for their alleged benevolence.
It's possible that a paternalist thinks in "far mode", while people think in "near mode" concerning themselves, but that doesn't tell us much about who knows best, not even in the special case where all information is known by both parties, since the "mode of thinking" is just one of many possible factors affecting the outcome.
For example, the individual has a strong self-interest, so they're motivated to do what's best for themselves. State paternalism, on the other hand, has to be instituted by politicians and administered through bureaucrats. Those politicians and bureaucrats are primarily motivated by their own self-interests. In real life, this frequently leads to decisions that are sub-optimal in relation to the stated goal and the available information. For example, when decisions are affected by campaign donations, by internal power struggles, or by the consequences the decision has for the politician/bureaucrat personally.Since an individual doesn't have a conflict of interest with themselves, most of these problems don't occur when the individual decides for themselves.
I could give more examples, but the point is that we can't draw any conclusions just because we found *one* factor that speaks in favour of paternalists knowing best. We need to get an overview of the most important factors for and against (and even then, we're unlikely to reach any degree of certainty).
quitting smoking and harming children are moral equivalents? This is just swill.
TGGP:
A bit of the issue, in fairness, is that I don't quite understand your position.
Do you dispute that there exist pairs of family willing to adopt and dysfunctional family, such that forcibly moving child from the dysfunctional family to the family willing to adopt improves the child's well being?
In so much as any such pairings do exist, the government can improve the child's well being by moving children away from biological parents to adoptive parents, within those pairs.
The way genetic interests work, btw, is them make you take care of the children that you live with. Who are virtually always your children. We don't really come with some genetic test, like, I dunno, biting the child and having the tongue perform DNA match analysis, anyway, and the fact that you 'know' the children are not yours is abstract knowledge of the kind to which we had no time to adapt. As a side effect, this allows to use parents to raise children of other people.
edit: This also works for other species of mammals. Sometimes, in the zoo, you get a mother that's not interested in well being of the cub - child rearing instincts sometimes fail, in which case you often can move cub to another mother, even of different species. It is utterly ridiculous to suggest - based on no evidence but on handwave about 'genetic interests', that use of this practice can not improve well being of the cubs.
WRT the organ donations, if it is legal to cut up your child for organs and sell them, well, if you look around at the worst of the worst, there are enough psychopaths who will grow their children to, say, age of 10, then cut them up for transplants. Easily several percent. Note that, even though psychopathy is inheritable, majority of the children will likely not be psychopaths themselves as in a family typically only one parent is a psychopath. How the hell is that possibly worse than the chinese approach where they do pick the involuntary donors among the criminals (whom they have a plenty)
I believed until now that domesticated animals are less intelligent than wild ones. This BBC Horizon doc shows some very smart dogs - http://www.youtube.com/watc... Dogs seem to have developed abilities that relate only to humans - like reading our facial expresions and barking as a sort of language that humans can understand. Also covered is the decades old breeding of Siberian foxes in Russia. They are now tame like puppies. There is also a control group - mind your fingers.
What seems to have happened with dogs is that their domestication has traded-off some abilities for others, for which they are now better-off (they live with affluent humans in nice homes). Maybe this change in some way mirrors the our own great leap forward, around 50 kya - a huge increase in culture but with no corresponding change in brain capacity, but instead a more optimal trade-off of cognitive abilities. So what was dropped? One clue is that the bred-tame Siberian foxes have changed in appearance. They have more juvenile characteristics maintained into adulthood (shorter, curlier tale, bigger ears,...). These were not selected for, but occured in parallel with the artificial selection for less aggression.
This actually assumes that the paternal agent actually knows what is best for the future you. For example, Communist dictators such as Stalin and Mao used this idea that the short term costs (i.e. seizing of property, killing of political dissidents) were worth it for the long term aim of creating a socialist utopia. The famous phrase used was "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." The famous reply by George Orwell was of course "Where's the omelet?" There of course was not omelet, which is why many of these regimes fell or loosed their control over the economy. Sometimes paternal agents don't know what's best for you now OR in the future.
dmytryl, do you know of any studies on the effects of adoption/CPS compared to leaving children with birth parents? The adoption research I'm more familiar with investigates what happens if twins are raised apart or how similar unrelated kids reared together turn out. And as long as counties receive $4000 in federal grants for every foster child adoption, $8000 if the child is older than 9, I wouldn't trust them to have the right incentives. That's pretty blatantly the case with asset forfeiture, where police have specificially requested that families post bail money in cash (since most people don't know that's not legally required), and then (though the family documented that they had just withdrawn the cash from a bank) claimed that a sniffer-dog detected drugs and seized the money for the police department.
Selling organs is risky because it's illegal everywhere except Iran (because, as Al Roth can tell you, it violates the taboos of most people). But I have heard of a sizable number of cases where it has occurred, and when discussing the issue with others there was academic literature to discuss about organ sellers. I have not heard about a case of parents killing their child and selling its organs. "Shaken baby syndrome" also occurs often enough for there to be medical literature on whether the cases reveal mistreatment of the child, and there's not even the incentive of a shiny car in that situation. Without the documented existence of such a phenomenon, I don't think it serves you as a very good argument. As for whether there is 2 or 3% of the population, again I'd like to see some studies.
If I found the concept of "evil" to be useful, I would deem evil the (extremely common) position that organ sales should be prohibited. And I'm completely aware that many would consider me evil for my own position on that. The irrational instincts inherited from the past are especially pernicious in "far mode", where people don't directly face the consequences of their mistaken ideas (as when you cast a vote affecting people you don't know).
If the important thing is that I know my own history & circumstances, what does it say that I don't perceive myself as the beneficiary of paternalism? I'm also confused by your description of me as a "libertarian poser". A poser is someone who pretends to be something, and I've been explicit on this blog and my own that I don't claim to be a libertarian. I don't believe in rights, and will endorse on rule-consequentialist grounds the use of coercion, including by the state, if it seems beneficial due to externalities. In the case of children I see that their biological relatives have the strongest genetic interests, while unrelated people have negligible interest and any disutility they get from hearing about what parents have done has the least-cost-avoidance strategy of ignoring it.
srdiamond, yes parents' interests only partially overlap with those of their children. That is Trivers' theory of genetic conflict. Unrelated people have even less shared genetic interest (which is why people overwhelmingly flee from East to West Germany or North to South Korea, despite the education & healthcare). My understanding is that currently, being overweight predicts higher fertility (being slightly overweight is also predictive of being healthier, an artifact of our official definitions of appropriate BMI). There was also a study out recently indicating that castrated men live longer, and there has been ongoing research into life-extension gained from metabolic restriction (which significantly reduces fertility). It is not surprising that so many decline to be skinny eunuchs, and I wouldn't bother with any argument that they have some "real" interest they are failing to follow. In my own life I do sometimes think that someone else has greater understanding about something that can benefit me, and I am apt to defer to their judgment. But I don't generally view paternalists as sharing my interests or facing any negative consequences from being wrong, and insofar as I can evade them I will.
How does one edit a comment?
@TGGP My point is not original to me, I borrowed it from a generalization Bruce Bueno de Mesquita made about a number of governments.Mesquita's arguments concerned why Stalinist governments are great at universal health care and universal literacy. The answer given is that for selfish reasons, they're concerned with the quality of the labor force.But this constitutes are overlapping interest between these governments and the masses—one concerning some of the masses' most vital interests It is no less legitimate an overlapping interest to cite than is the reproductive interest of parent in child. That interest, too, is only partial: it leaves out many of the child's real interests (that is, the child's lifelong utility function, which differs from its own reproductive interest, hence even more from its parents'). The interest of "loving parents" in their children's health, for example, seems sadly deficient. (Perhaps because you don't need to live that long to reproduce?) What kind of loving parent is indifferent to the obesity of a growing fraction of kids?I think you reach libertarianism by embracing too extreme a form of genetic determinism, according to which the only interests you can rely on are reproductive interests.
TGGP: With regards to adoptive parents vs biological parents, I know personally families with adoptive children who are doing massively better than they would of done in the original families.
The government works by moving children out of the worst percentile of the families, into the families that pass some testing and which want to adopt. Even though one can make a point that the adoptive families on average are worse than non-adoptive families, they are better than huge fraction of non-adoptive families. (And of course the situation is dramatically different from having a stepfather). By large, CPS only intervenes in the worst of the worst. The same worst of the worst affected by your endorsement.
Now, you endorse "unrestricted freedom to harm their children". That does not affect the regular family; it affects those where government currently intervenes.
With regards to parents not selling their children for organs, well, that is incredibly risky thing to do right now, that the people with endorsement like yours are perhaps 2..3% of population, or even less as there's no selfish incentive to make that sort of endorsement.
There is no way you are so ignorant as to not know what parents did to their children among the segment of population affected by your endorsement. So, assuming it is not product of ignorance, you are simply what majority of population calls "evil" (A meaningless label, if you ask me), that's the issue right here. It's not about the position, it's about failure to have a moral system, or failure to adopt the most people's moral system. You better learn to pretend you aren't, for your own sake and your own survival. Humans are social species, pack hunters, etc; a lot of tweaks on top of individual survivalism; those tweaks sometimes are not innately functional in which case learning helps.
As for whether I have benefited from the government's paternalism, you would have to know what decisions my parents or I would have made without it. But you don't know. You simply assume the conclusion you are trying to prove.The important thing is that you know and I am talking to you. It is generally highly likely that someone's current well being relied on goverment support or otherwise violated the principles of a libertarian poser.
I'm not sure what literature you're citing on the effects of transferring a child to an adopted family. Most twin-adoption studies find negligible "shared environment" impact, but it could be that traits they focus on (like personality, for Judith Harris) are less relevant. I do know that having an unrelated male (or even stepmother) in the home significantly increases the odds of injury/death, but those results don't come from adoption studies (to quote this paper linked from Slate today, "Living in the same household with genetically unrelated adults is the single biggest risk factor for abuse, neglect and homicide of children").
I agree with Eliezer Yudkowsky that organisms are adaptation executors, not optimizers. This is true for both the parents and the children. The substantial overlap in their strategies leads to reduced conflict (although it still exists), and like Robin Hanson I prefer peace. I don't believe in any objective version of "the good" (like forcing people to better serve their real genetic interests by having more offspring), I simply accept the existence of agents with diverse preferences which I use genetic interests as shorthand for, and like "dealism" as an approach for those agents (including myself) to pursue their goals without impeding the goals of others (though I recognize conflict is bound to exist).
Continuing on with the theme of adaptation executions, condoms did not exist during the evolutionary adaptive period. Infanticide did, and sometimes made sense (Steve Pinker had a good article on early-stage infanticide which I recommend but can't link for fear of tripping the filter). I actually favor the legalization of infanticide (to me it's just a consistent stance on the abortion question) even though it doesn't really serve the interest of the child (and the cuteness of babies may be an adaptation to prevent them from being killed by a mother who might have wanted to conserve her resources for another child). However, I've never heard of parents dismembering their infant to sell the organs and buy a car, perhaps infant organs aren't suitable for what's in demand. I have heard that the Chinese government harvests the organs of large numbers of prisoners sentenced to death, and even sends their families bills for expenses. You may say that's just one government (of the most populous nation on earth, and one that has greatly increased in quality over the past few decades!), but the NYPD (the finest of America's most populous city!) recently ran over Tamon Robinson, and then billed his mother for damages to their car. We have about 1% of the population incarcerated, and when the FBI found serious errors in some of its forensic analysis used to convict people (focusing chiefly on the work of one scientist), they didn't inform the convicted. There is Dallas D.A Craig Watkins who has actually worked to free people convicted based on faulty evidence, but generally speaking the government is one of the last organizations I would defer to as more inclined to look after my own interests than myself.
You seem to think I believe in free will. I do not. I don't believe its accurate to model drug addiction as a disease which people are helpless to resist either, but just as something they find very satisfying. Most users, even of hard drugs, drift in and out of use rather than remaining trapped in it. The "Rat Park" experiment showed that even enforced prolonged use of opiates doesn't trap rats in addiction once they have the option to drink drug-free water. Hawaii's H.O.P.E program has had tremendous success in deterring even the most hard-core of meth users simply by credibly promising that they will spend one(!) night in jail if they fail a drug test, increasing the amount of jail time with repeated failures. Most of our war on drugs is not nearly as effective and chiefly serves to immiserate users & their community, while enriching the few suppliers violent enough to climb to the top.
I don't believe that insurance should not exist. I believe that much insurance as it exists now (such as when people are required to have health insurance which covers certain enumerated things, whether they want it or not) does not function as an economist would conceive the insurance function (ex ante benefiting both the customer & supplier). It is intended to redistribute from the healthy to the unhealthy, and a healthy person who would prefer to defer the purchase of insurance to a later date or to purchase a policy more narrowly tailored actually does understand their own interests.
As for whether I have benefited from the government's paternalism, you would have to know what decisions my parents or I would have made without it. But you don't know. You simply assume the conclusion you are trying to prove. It is like saying that because I am doing alright and we have farm subsidies, farm subsidies must benefit me.
Well, there's a zillion and one example of how people do not serve their own interests, let alone their children's.
The practice shows that e.g. putting child into a willing family as adopted child works quite well; better than sub-par biological parents.
Why? Its not following genetic interests! Well, the human brain simply doesn't follow genetic interests, it never did, it's dramatically not how neural networks work. You posting here is example of this, me posting here is example of this, it's ridiculous this point even needs to be made. If the genetic interests do not stop parents capable of raising a child from using condom, why on earth should they stop from killing a child or cutting child apart to sell for organs to buy a new shiny car, or the like? Well they do not! The culture does, the government does, etc. Instincts sort of kind of gently push in the general direction of wanting not to kill the child and into direction of wanting a shiny car, and for males at least, as far as interests go, in many historical societies status translated to more than 1 extra child, so the shiny car is more significant.
And that's without even mentioning that modern environment contains new chemicals and methods of their consumption that are highly addictive to the animals in question, and which, when taken for prolonged period of time, result in craving substantially stronger than any of the above instinctive drives, which is a direct result of how neural networks - entirely devoid of the silly philosophical nonsense idea of free will - work.
"As a 21st century American, I am quite rich by historical standards."
You are quite rich by 21th century standards, no need to go historical. You are living in a shining example of paternalism that, while not perfect, worked for you. It's a bit like, you are growing up under insurance coverage and nothing happens to you and you go on how this insurance took advantage of you and there shouldn't be insurance. People are just this way.
Oh, come on. I'm probably gonna be feeding a troll, but since people have liked this, and I'm bored, I might as well.
Most murders, rapes, and frauds are not made to impose an opinion on others, or even for the good of others. It's done for personal gain. I don't see how you can associate that with being paternal, unless you're talking about mercy killings, which are not always obviously morally wrong, and don't have as much of the negative connotation you try so hard to keep throughout your straw man. And in your second paragraph, you make come to crazy conclusions. You claim that, assuming violence is a justifiable means to an end, it is okay to rape women because they *might* want children in the future.
Well, if you are willing to take really painful means to have a small chance of a slightly good ends, do so. Just make sure (to not be called inconsistent) to congratulate those who chop off their arms because they're itching... because the ends don't have to justify the means, right?
Wow, this actually was fun to write. Hopefully your stupid comment will be removed, or at least downshifted, because it does not deserve to be at the top of the discussion. This was actually a good post, and your comment almost stopped me from reading the better discussion below.
dmytryl, it is a common rhetorical step to use extreme examples (like an economist's simplifying assumption) to make a point obvious. My point is not original to me, I borrowed it from a generalization Bruce Bueno de Mesquita made about a number of governments.
As a 21st century American, I am quite rich by historical standards. I don't know where you're getting all this stuff about race, my point about genetic conflict comes from Trivers and doesn't even require the concept of a race. And judging by the behavior of other (even white!) people I know, society hasn't done that good a job of discouraging access to addictive substances. I'd link to Robin's post theorizing why parents don't want their kids to use drugs and kids reject their paternalism, but too many comments are getting auto-moderated and I already included one link. I can't see where I'm the beneficiary of the government overriding my parents.
Peter D, there's Type I error and Type II error when it comes to governments overriding parental authority. As I stated, there are evolutionary reasons for biological parents to share interests with their children and act on behalf of those interests, as well as SOME tendency for their interests to conflict. There is much less reason to expect such shared interests with the government.