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Fecund privilege and the oppression of those who do everything right
Democratic and progressive ideology assume that each person ought to be valued the same in equations of political power. Representatives are allotted according to the number of inhabitants, presidential elections are dictated by the popular vote of states, and equity calculations are informed by population percentages. The infrastructure of our popular ideology is undergirded by a strange and rather aged idea, that each individual magically gets the same political points of influence at birth, regardless of any greater social concern. Yet this way of thinking breaks down when real world social justice claims are considered.
Imagine a situation like the Rwandan Civil War, where the Tutsi minority were killed en masse by the Hutu and their population significantly reduced. It is not morally sufficient to compensate the families who lost loved ones and to punish individual actors. The loss in political power of the Tutsi demands justice, because their reduction in population along with their impoverishment leads to a real loss of political power. Ignoring the specific details of the actual Rwandan events and political system (for example’s sake), in a basic model of democracy the Tutsi could have their future completely controlled by their genociders forever, because the political power lost due to reduced population/fertility is not compensated. The Tutsi would have a legitimate moral claim to re-exert their old political power, and yet our old “magic value” way of thinking about democracy contains none of the complexity necessary to make sense of the Tutsi claim. Adherents can only glue the justice together with ad hoc formulations, perhaps implementing a regional governance system or property compensation system or something other thing which avoids the real substance of the claim. This proves that there are moral considerations involving democratic power that are not adequately addressed by fecund privileged ideology.
For a second thought experiment, imagine two regions of a nation with different cultural values and interests. As chance would have it, a neighboring country invades one region and a defense is launched, and the invaded region valiantly defends the whole of the nation from the invaders. As a consequence their population is halved. The region behaved perfectly and sacrificed itself for the whole of the nation is now the one who might forever lose its past political influence. Does the “sacrificing” region have a moral claim that their loss of political power should be compensated in some form? If they do not, then the basis of our political system appears capricious and superstitious. A constituency of a nation can do all the right things and be harmed from it, or can be harmed from chance. And this for reason other than the idea that the number of current human lives is somehow inexplicably valued over every greater concern, despite this number being essentially governed by chance and historically untied to production or any good.
Perhaps one last example. Within a tribe of 400 humans, 100 of them decide to spend more time working for the good of society, spending more hours raising up two great children versus their neighbors who have 8 and spend little time with them. Within the current fecund privileged system of democracy, the tribesmen who are putting in effort to make the whole of society better by raising better children wind up worse off than their less-caring neighbors, who inherit more of the tribe, whose families increase in influence, and who proliferate their habits and genes. (Remember that humans are living organisms governed by concerns of gene proliferation as much as a fruit fly or gorilla, and it makes no sense to pretend it isn’t so, but even without genes, we can see how worse habits are proliferated). The tribesmen who make the better decision are punished in influence.
To hit home on my bolded assertion above: A constituency of a nation can do all the right things and be harmed from it, or can be harmed from chance. Our society, implicitly and explicitly, discourages high fecundity among those who do absolutely everything right. Our best and most obedient citizens are pressured toward paths that make fecundity difficult, and are propagandized to actually place a ceiling on their number of progeny. They are told that overpopulation is a problem and they incorporate that idea into their future family plans. They are doing everything right and their ancestors will be punished for it, with reduced political power due to the capricious notion of fecund privilege. Their cultural, behavioral, and genetic legacy is irrevocably worsened for making the right choices.
The children of our best doctors will have their power dwarfed by the children of a random 7/11 attendant who happens to be a Salafist, or a Hasidic person who abuses tax schemes to study only his holy book, or an Amish farmer who contributes little to the polity, or the migrants of a random Nigerian that chose children over more prosocial concerns. The legitimate moral concerns of our best citizens have no way to be expressed through the decrepit ideology of “magical political power allotment” and “fecund privilege”. The result is that the descendants, constituency, culture, genes etc of our best and brightest are oppressed by those who simply ignored the greater moral concerns and popped out more babies.
You never actually get around to describing what "justice" "demands" in a situation like this one. I don't think you or anyone else can actually articulate a just response to genocide. I think this is a problem, because you're setting up your reasoning around a moral problem that has no adequate solution, and so can be used to justify any inadequate solution.
You've made a reasonable argument that democracy is not actually a general solution to the problem of governance. This is a serious problem to those who take a principled stance that democracy is such a general solution. If such people exist, I do not think you will find them here. Assigning this particular failure mode of democracy "fecund-privileging ideology" gives us no new information to work with, other than you apparently don't like people having kids the wrong way, whatever that is.
Yes. Life is unjust in an infinite number of ways, for arbitrary definitions of "justice". If you and yours die in defense of an ideal, the actual day-to-day upholding is going to have to be done by those who survive you. This is one of the costs of dying for something, and why you want to do it only for things actually worth dying for. Yes, this can be described as "unjust". You are free to bring charges against Causality in whatever court will take the case.
They also decided who to share a tribe with, and how. Maybe they should have made those decision better. No one is entitled to a perfect society. We all receive the society we collectively make together. Sometimes this is deeply unfair to those of us who actually try to build society up, as opposed to those who simply consume and destroy. There are mechanisms to handle this problem; we choose not to use them. If that choice results in bad outcomes, perhaps it was a bad choice?
And of course, the choice of how to have children, the choice of who to have them with, and the choice of how to raise them are likewise all extremely important. Choosing poorly has serious consequences, for oneself and for others.
It seems to me that you're groping around the idea that humans have a responsibility to those around them to make good choices, not just from their own selfish perspective, but in some greater, more "objective" sense. I think it evident that society as a whole is coming around to this idea, but both you and society are doing so in a completely backward and counter-productive fashion, and for much the same reason: neither of you want to accept that the old conservative formulations actually worked, and what we've replaced them with does not. Democracy works when values are homogenous and coherent. It stops working when values drift to incoherence. "we're all in this together" works so long as there's a meaningful "we". There's no need for "fecund privilege", especially since without fecundity there is no future to be concerned about.
Framing something as a moral failure doesn't actually make it a moral failure, and there is no guarantee that any given injustice can actually be made whole in any meaningful sense. Failure to recognize these two truths results in much moral confusion.
I’m not sure if “genocide is fundamentally unsolvable” cuts it. Were we to ask the Tutsi what moral demands they have, one of them would surely be the reinstantiation of their past political influence. And so a model that de-prioritizes births as a metric of power is already better justice than the democracy model. We note that the Tutsi as a cohort were harmed, that they are a group whose power was unjustly cut, and we address that harm against the cohort. This is already moral progress!
The Tutsi are ALREADY back in charge. They got right back up on that tiger.
as I specified in my OP we are discussing a hypothetical example based on the Rwandan genocide
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Why is that an acceptable demand? Why is that a sufficient demand? How do we distinguish it from "we have to do something, this is something, so we have to do this"?
You're claiming that reinstatement of past political influence moves us from less justice to more justice, but I submit that a similar claim could be made for nearly any action, and with a near-identical amount of rigor. I don't see how "reinstatement of past political influence" actually solves the problem of genocide in any meaningful way. The problem with genocide isn't loss of political power, it's all the people that get killed. How does giving people who didn't get killed more political influence straightforwardly address that problem?
I don't concede that there is a way to solve the problem of genocide; it's not axiomatically obvious why there should in principle be any such solution at all. Counter-genocide or mass enslavement approach the magnitude of the crime, but are themselves unacceptably monstrous. Anything less seems grossly insufficient, at which point the argument isn't about justice, but rather about things we want for other reasons. You can't demand something through an appeal to justice if it doesn't meaningfully secure justice.
I don't see how. It's not obvious to me that apportionment of democratic power is itself necessarily moral in any meaningful sense. Are all non-democratic societies inherently immoral? I certainly don't think so.
Births mattering is contingent on the populations having values-incoherence. If the populations were values-coherent, there would be no genocide and birth-rates would be irrelevant. But if the populations are values-incoherent, how does "de-prioritizing births as a metric of power" help to solve the resulting conflicts?
The basic problem you're looking at is that different groups of people have trouble getting along. I agree that democracy doesn't actually solve this problem, as it just encourages people to frame one of the most basic and necessary functions of society, the production of future generations, as another front for tribal warfare. What I don't see is any argument why the majority in an established democracy should cede power to a minority because the two groups don't like each other. That's... not really how people work, and vague claims that it's "moral progress" seem unlikely to bridge the gap.
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