The argument on social networks is widespread: the poor should not have children because poverty is passed on from generation to generation.
At the same time, in some news about the suffering of poor families, the following comments are mostly accusing "parents of selfishness" and "being so poor and suffering children".
At first glance, this view is a little reasonable, but in essence it is absurd. Philosophy, politics, sociology, and ethics would not support such absurd arguments.
(i)
From a philosophical point of view, Hobbes and Locke, the founders of the guiding ideology of modern capitalism, put forward the concepts of "natural law" and "natural rights". The "natural law" of Hobbes's philosophical system is the "command of reason", an objective law. Rights in the state of nature are guaranteed by the "natural law", in which people exercise their rights in accordance with natural law, which upholds the rights of man in the state of nature from arbitrary interference and infringement by others. Locke further elaborated on what natural rights include: life, liberty, property. It is only by ceding these natural rights that people form society, the state, and the government. This philosophical foundation went on to develop the bourgeois golden rule of natural human rights, the equality of all human beings, and the sanctity and inviolability of private property.
As can be seen here, natural rights are first and foremost the right to life, and then there are others. According to Marx's division, the essence of man is divided into natural attributes and social attributes. Your courtship, procreation, and reproduction are part of man's natural attributes; whether you have money or not is part of the social attributes. Having children is a fundamental natural right of man, which is higher than anything else even on the philosophical basis of capitalism, let alone socialist ideas based on humanism and humanistic care.
I also mentioned in the article "The Poor People's Right to Life and Intellectual Property Rights - How to Solve the Core Contradiction in < I Am Not a Medicine God>" that the legislative idea in the world is that the right to life is greater than the right to property. For example, in some crisis situations, there is no compensation for damage to property; for example, a person who is truly unable to repay his debts can file for bankruptcy, but cannot be restricted from personal freedom. In other words, Huang Shiren can take Yang Bailao's dumplings to pay off debts, but he can't move Xi'er in the slightest, which is the foundation of civilized society. However, if it is a serious genetic disease, it will cause physical damage for future generations, and it is also a natural problem that can be limited.
Therefore, fundamentally speaking, the concept of "poverty", which is social property, is not enough to regulate man's natural rights. So why do we have to use whether we have money to criticize the behavior of others who have children, the reason is also very simple, because "money" is too important, prescribing all aspects of society, which is the "alienation" from capital. But in fact, there are some things that "money" should not and cannot stipulate.
The matter of human reproduction is one of them. We don't need to force some people to have children or not to have children, we narrow the problem, according to the logic of those who "the poor are not worthy of having children", go up two or three generations, whose family has not lived a poor life, then their parents are not worthy of being born.
(ii)
First of all, we have made clear the question: the amount of money cannot stipulate whether a person has the right to have children or not. So let's further analyze why poor people shouldn't be morally condemned for their behavior of having children.
To filter out the question of moral condemnation, we must first talk about the concept of "moral deserving."
Buffett mentions a concept in his authorized biography, Snowball: "Ovarian Lottery":
"When I was a child, my conditions were superior in all aspects. My family environment is good because my family talks about funny things; my parents are very intelligent; I go to a good school. I think my parents were the best in the world. This is very important. I didn't inherit the property from my parents, I really don't want it. But I was born in a good place at the right time and I won the 'ovarian lottery'. ”
"My wealth is also due to three things: being born in the United States, a little lucky gene, and a wide range of interests," he said. Both my children and I were fortunate enough to win what I call the "ovarian lottery" (in my case, the odds of being born in the United States in the 1930s were 30:1, and as a white male, I was able to avoid the insurmountable obstacles that many people in society at the time could not overcome). Living in such a market system that occasionally produces distorted results (although this system as a whole benefits our country) has to say that my luck is even more prominent.
The discussion of the original family and class promotion is an eternal topic in human society, which is popularly said to be "reincarnation is a technical work". Like Wang Sicong, birth is the open-hanging mode; more people are born in ordinary families, and there are many "unlucky" people who come to poor families who are "not worthy of having children".
The American philosopher, thinker, and sociologist Rawls distilled such a reincarnation randomness into a philosophical scenario: the "curtain of ignorance." We were several fertilized eggs ready to reincarnate, behind a thick curtain with nothing to see ahead. Do we reincarnate into Bill Gates' house, or into the slums of New Delhi? Is our appearance a country in the city, or is it invisible to the people? Does our body have the potential to be an athlete, or is it an unfortunate disabled person? No one knows, everything comes from randomness.
Randomness, on the other hand, cannot constitute a necessary condition for morality.
Rawls followed Kant's morality—morality is guided by contingencies and guided by supreme reason. The primordial state and the principle of justice can be seen as a procedural description of Kant's self-discipline and absolute law. Rawls believes that the fairness of distribution has nothing to do with what is rewarded, and in layman's terms, these "rich second generations" are just lucky, these are not what they deserve. Rawls further pointed out that it is not only the second generation of the rich, but even the achievements and wealth of the "rich generation" are not what they "deserve." All successful people often ignore the contingency aspects of their success, such as in capitalist society, I have an entrepreneurial mind; in feudal society, I am good at meeting the sources in the bureaucracy; in the socialist collective farms, I am strong and can earn more work... Then everything is related to randomness. What's more, whether in history or today, the primitive accumulation of capital by many "rich people" is obtained by trampling on laws and morality, let alone moral affirmation.
We can briefly conclude that people such as Wang Jianlin and Wang Sicong do not have a "moral deserving" of their own wealth; likewise, those poor people should not be subject to any "moral condemnation" for their poverty.
I have been saying this sentence: the barn is solid and knows the etiquette, and the food and clothing are enough to know the honor and disgrace. The economic base determines the superstructure. In reality, many poor people have many children in their lifetime, which has aggravated the deterioration of economic conditions, which has attracted the criticism of many netizens: Are you poor and mean to have so many children? But in fact, they do not have that advanced consciousness, poverty blinds their eyes, they do not want to, but they do not know at all, nor do they have the opportunity to "know". That's why I say that we want to eradicate poverty, not poverty. Is it a big deal that you keep people from having children? Related reading: Born Poor.
(iii)
I said in "From "Makeup Is Not Free" to "Mother*Gun Mistaken Country": The Common Dilemma of Contemporary Vulnerable Groups", how do you love to wear makeup and how to wear makeup, that is, before going to bed at night, makeup is put on for yourself to sleep soundly, no one cares, this is a matter of personal choice, but we are discussing the social problems of women being forced to wear makeup on many occasions. In the same way, if you feel that you can't give my own child a good life, and think that he may be wronged because of his lack of financial strength in the long run, so you choose not to have children, there is no problem, this is also a personal choice. This article discusses the social problem of moral condemnation that should not be given to the poor who have children.
In fact, to talk about a very cruel history, we can now discuss whether the poor should have children, which is a kind of progress. In the long course of history, the vast majority of the poor have been wiped out.
During the Republic of China, the American journalist Bai Xiude investigated a small village in Shanxi, and he found that no matter how poor the sharecroppers were, there were several generations of three or four generations, and each of them was a relative of the landlord; and a few generations higher, they were all family members and a father (not necessarily a mother). In other words, a few generations ago, the big landlords divided the land among their sons, and the sons divided the land among their sons, and after a few generations, a relatively even situation of land was formed. But what about the peasants who are not from the line of landlords? Sorry, they're all gone. What does this extinct family mean, it may be that the land has been lost and become a displaced person, it may be that he died young, and the biggest possibility is that he will not be able to marry a wife, after all, the landlord wants three wives and four concubines.
What is called "the old society of cannibalism" is understood literally. The scholar Wang Mingming has a paper specializing in this problem: "Village Surnames and Power", in which he counted the proportion of villages in Weihai, Shandong Province, which are dominated by large surnames, and found that in Weihai, only 9% of the villages are mixed with various surnames. The author compares the data from Taiwan, which are surprisingly consistent: that is, the absolute majority of villages with one surname and the village with the main surname is the general state and the final stable state of traditional rural areas. On multigenerational timescales, small-scale farmers have either disappeared or been forced to migrate. That is to say, the competition between farmers is very barbaric and cruel, and most of the farmers who can stay in the village are large surname farmers with blood relations to ease the pressure of competition; those small surname farmers bear greater competitive pressure than the big surname, and there are not enough people with the same clan to increase their ability to resist risks, so they quickly "disappear" in most villages. This rapid phase-out is achieved through a mortality rate that far exceeds the imagination of modern people.
This is the same as the problem of "welfare society to raise lazy people", non-welfare society, there will also be so many unemployed people, this is a problem of economic structure rather than a problem of individual willingness to work; the difference is that the unemployed population of non-welfare society tends to be "marginalized": either starvation on the streets, or enter a lower industry - such as going home to farm, and a piece of land was originally three races, and now the unemployed population has returned home to become four races, and the difference is difficult to reflect in statistics. Therefore, "welfare society to raise slackers" is sometimes a kind of survivor bias, that is, the unemployed people in the welfare society can live and you can see. Can people who have not worked well for a period of time can live, which is also humanistic care, isn't it?
So we can now explore this problem, after all, because the children of the poor can survive, and this cannot be a problem at all. Therefore, in the process of continuous development of the general environment, it is blind to some people to propose that "the poor should not have children". It should be noted that the entire Network is permeated with an extremely terrifying social Darwinism and a disgusting stench of elitism. What is even more sad is that the people who uphold this concept are not the top class and social elite, they are just a little better than the people at the bottom of the people, and they are mentally retarded. As everyone knows, according to the "social Darwinian logic" that some people believe in, when they have finished discriminating against the people at the bottom, they will become the second wave of cockroaches that will be wiped out.
(iv)
Finally, back to the question of whether the poor should have children. I've made a similar point in my previous articles: money is important, but money can't dictate everything. Specific to the problem of child growth, there are many influencing factors, not only "poor" and "rich" can be divided binaryly.
For example, love for children, such as companionship and education. I don't have children, but I see too much. Many families with not very good conditions, children can still learn from their parents the qualities of hard work, kindness, integrity, etc., ordinary and fulfilling life, not only to buy Prada's bag life has the meaning of existence.
I have many ABC (American Born Chinese) friends in Beijing, and I am not necessarily born in the United States, and most of them are lost to the United States at a very young age. Although their parents are very rich, they are not yet the kind of capitalists who can live on capital appreciation, most of them are company executives, technology bulls, state-owned enterprise leaders, hospital presidents, senior lawyers and so on, a prominent feature is that they earn more and are particularly busy. These friends of mine were basically thrown into private boarding schools in the United States in elementary school and junior high school, and when they came back from winter and summer vacations, they did not see their parents several times, except for the money to give enough, they were completely in the free-range stage, and I often joked that you were simply a "rich version of left-behind children".
Although these "left-behind children" tend to have a high attainment rate because of their aristocratic elite origins, which is also a matter of course, there are also many extreme phenomena. For example, the threshold they enjoy at a very young age is pulled full, because there is no shortage of money, all kinds of luxury goods, all kinds of famous cars, watches, perfume bags, all kinds of handsome men and beautiful women are not lacking. What to do when the threshold is full, you can only pursue higher and more dangerous stimuli, such as various promiscuous sex parties, laughing gas flying leaves, and finally going to the step of skating and drug use. There is no way, otherwise you will not find something more advanced to satisfy your soaring sense of happiness. Others go to the other extreme, because all the sensual pleasures are full, so there is emptiness and anxiety, and finally depression, bipolar and other mental problems ensued. In large part, no one is around to demonstrate how to live a reasonable life, how to control their thresholds to avoid over-inflating, how to deal with desires and needs – even if their parents are the elite of the elite, children are not happy in this unaccompanied life.
From the social level, the children of these poor families can more deeply appreciate the intergenerational inheritance of poverty, the solidification of classes, and call for fairness. They will be a force to change society.