I love your work and logic. But I am irked by the following thought: the social context created by dominant religions (like Christianity in America, which reins over the realm of the perceived normalcy of marriage) can still inflict the felt discrimination of exclusion. The separate but equal comparison of civil union to community sanctified marriage is akin in some ways to the former use of black and white drinking fountains. The argument being: the water is the same, so what’s the dif? I know you are wisely and pragmatically focusing on the difference between juridical and religious uses of the marriage contract, and wisely looking to influence the civic realm where logic and reason and justice can sometimes actually prevail; but somewhere in the middle is the realm of an individual’s experience in a social context, and that cannot be fully excluded from the equation of social justice.

You wisely dismiss the illogic and warped traditions of religions but that does not mean their social effect disappears at the time of your own dismissal. Your notion that the effect of religion is contained within the religious group (and thus no need to mess with them as long as they don’t mess with us) is more logical than actual. Prohibitions on eating pork truly do not affect anyone else’s sense of self-worth; but when large and influential institutions (that receive terrific tax breaks from the federal and state government, and often influence elections at every level of governmental office from the presidency to local school boards) are allowed to institutionalize discrimination we have a whole different kind of problem. See? The tyranny of the many, as you wonderfully address elsewhere.

I am all for doing the pragmatic wherever it can be done, bravo, but there is still this bleed-thru effect between the civic and the religious, and between the civic and any ‘moral’ issue. Regrettably, as any African American living in the US can attest to, problems in the realm of actual lived experience are by no means resolved by rational laws.

Best,
CH

As for your main argument in this post, which sidesteps the main arguments for Benatar’s position, I find the emphasis on adoption to be more than a little beside the point. Yes, we should care better for those who exist, and I think even your stupid “breeders” would agree on that. Many people do adopt, either out of desire or out of necessity to have children.

But what you’re talking about is not an argument about whether it’s moral to have children, but rather an argument about allocation of resources. To put it in less morally-charged terms, one could imagine arguing about building a new road that might make some people’s lives easier or more fulfilling. Your argument seems to say — no, we need to take care of the roads that already exist, many of which could be better cared for.

I think you’d be hard-pressed to argue that building a new road is a moral evil simply on the basis that there are other roads to care for. (It might not be an efficient allocation of resources, or perhaps it might in a utilitarian sense, depending on how much good the new road does versus the spending money on the maintenance of the old roads.)

Yet Benatar is in fact arguing that bring a new child into the world is a moral evil. I don’t think your adoption argument has anything to do with that.