How true is this?

[dimpet]

"Contraception is sometimes attacked as 'unnatural'. So it is, very unnatural. The trouble is, so is the welfare state. I think that most of us believe the welfare state is highly desirable. But you cannot have an unnatural welfare state, unless you also have unnatural birth control, otherwise the end result will be misery even greater than that

Comments

[a_priori]

There are lots of things going on here.

First, I'm not sure that the welfare state is unnatural on any account. As Dawkins is quite aware, altruism is endemic in nature. It may be that altruistic systems are "inherently unstable", but many simply prompt the creation of auxiliary punishment mechanisms that root out exploitative individuals. A study about monkeys doing this appeared in Nature or Science just a few months ago. So I guess monkeys are unnatural too?

Second, I'm not really sure what "natural" means at all here. Contraception is unnatural because why? It involves sex without procreation? Animals do that. Because it involves drugs or synthetic materials? Then just about everything we do is unnatural. But I don't see how that is helpful or significant at all. It seems better to say that humans are a part of nature, and thus anything done by humans is natural.

[dimpet]

For your first point, he means purely altruistic. Where the system relies on every single member being altruistic.

I think by Natural he means an Evolutionary Stable System.

[a_priori]

Well then he's just plain wrong. The welfare state does not rely on every single member being altruistic. Many members are not at all altruistic, but are forced to provide some of their bounty to others whether or not they consent. Similarly, not all members are non-exploitative. Some attempt to freeload. But the system has (imperfect yet good-enough) ways of cathing them.

That would be a weird notion of "natural". Then rocks can't be natural, since they are not evolutionarily stable systems. They don't engage in iterative processes, and they're hardly systems. I guess they're pretty stable though.

[dimpet]

You don't understand what exploiting means. Having 10 children is exploiting. What is stopping people from doing that?

They don't need to be evolutionarily stable because they don't change and yes they are stable.

[descartes_rock]

Unnatural isn't a synonym for bad. Brain surgery is unnatural, but if you have a brain tumour, it can save your life.

[dimpet]

It can also allow the population to increase beyond a limit where it is sustainable and many many many people suffer a much worse fate.

[descartes_rock]

I doubt that would happen because very few people get brain tumours.

[dimpet]

You used it as an example and so did I. That type of behavior is unnatural and when you combine all those types of behaviour you end up increasing the population. The only way to reduce the population and still do those things is to have contraception. Simple.
If you want to save people, you have to stop more people being born.

[dimpet]

Have you read it?