Diadem wrote:Adoption is not an optimal start in life even under the best of circumstances. Doing it like this though is much worse. That's (on average) going to cause a lot of suffering. I'm not against adoption, but that doesn't mean I should endorse all forms of adoption.
I'm going to join the chorus of people calling bullshit on this sentiment.
Adoption is not optimal? Neither are disinterested birth parents (the immediate concern), nor a million other situational deficiencies any given set of child rearing individual(s) face. Even implying that the only ethical way to raise children is to do so in the optimal situation is incredibly fallacious. The entire premise behind adoption and drop-offs is to quickly integrate the child into a more-optimal situation that the one they were born into.
Also, how it is that dropping a newborn off with trained first responders going to cause any more suffering than the typical adoption process? A newborn predominately lacks the necessary cognitive abilities to remember the events. No one claims that drop-offs are the best entrance into the system, only a better one than being abandoned somewhere unsafe.
Plus, you're in the midst of arguing that a child of that age may not really be a person, so under your own argument, why does that immediate term suffering even matter? I can kill that non-person, but holy shit I'd better not do anything else but raise it (until it becomes a person) under "optimal" conditions?
No, it doesn't. If you want to make a case regarding infanticide, have fun. We're not making an either-or argument, nor any comparative weighing between infanticide and adoption, for that matter. I took issue with your statement that baby drop offs were unethical, and now your ridiculous stance regarding adoption. Especially given that you haven't listed or formed the ethical system you're using to judge that merit, and have ignored that the default ethical system (that of the conglomerated society in reference) explicitly disagrees with you.Besides, this argument kind of misses the point...