Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

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"in which case, what's the point?"

I cannot imagine what system of ethics you are operating from that you would have to ask this question. The point, always, is to provide the best possible life to the greatest number of people, without regard to where those people come from. My goal in life is to maximize human happiness, I do not care what nation a person is from. Unless I'm misreading your words, or you chose your words clumsily, you seem to want a system that works for some set of people but not another set of people. But I'm curious, one what basis would you chose one set of people, and then why would you care about them at all, rather than care about some other group? If you're not going to care about the happiness of all people, then it seems to me you should be consistent and not care about anyone's happiness. But if you honestly care about one group, but not some other group, I'm curious on what basis you chose the group that you care about? And do you really care about them?

"You're only playing a game of managed extinction in cooperation with your country's new settlers"

I think you meant to write "One generation has apparently found it is possible to maximize their happiness without having children, and now gratefully receives help from new arrivals so as to take care of them during old age, as they have no children to care for them."

Your reply was too interesting not to try to answer :)

> I'm curious on what basis you chose the group that you care about? And do you really care about them?

I have two answers for this

1) It is not that, say, I care more about the danish than the syrian.

It is that I find sad that a culture would decide to implode, no matter what culture it is.

This works on a set of assumptions, all of which might be false, but are justifiable (it seems to me) if not correct (for that is harder to predict)

* Receiving a big influx of immigrants that are 20 years or older * Having them and their descendants compose the bulk of your population after a certain year (say, 2070) * Those 2 points significantly affect the makeup of a culture

And moral weights: * That the existence of a culture itself has moral weight comparable to the well-being of individuals

--- 2) There is also the perhaps more immediate issue: If indeed immigrants make the largest part of the population of a country when you are old and need help, can you *really* keep them from voting in a pattern that reduces your ability to get help? For example, from taxing your accumulated wealth now that you are no longer working, or to cut your benefits.

This fear is not unreasonable, and one might be saddened of the (apparent) shortsighedness of not addressing it. Or angry (if one thinks this will happen) that the current middle class and poor of the european country are being sold out by the rich of that country -- they get more labour today, and to live confortably in their old age.

Again it is a matter of weights, you can think that the increase in welfare for the immigrants in question outweights (or even far outweights) these costs and risks (one is a cost only if you value the culture independently of the people, another is a cost only in a probabilistic sense). But neither is absurd on the face of it, and it seems reasonable to be sad that "a culture is doing this to itself".

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The point here is to establish a degree of reasonableness to the other side, so that both sides can start to reconcile their values rather than dismiss them, not to state which side is right (a thing that I frankly do not know)

I cannot imagine what system of ethics you are operating from that you would have to ask this question

Catholic (-ish) ultra right wing nationalism, would be my guess. Surprisingly popular in some places. You can pretty much read stuff like that in the newspaper and, to a degree, on billboards.

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