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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.
There are many non-majoritarian institutions which address your general concern, including consociationalism and the various limits on majoritarianism enshrined in the US Constitution
See also the work of Lani Guinier And, no, her arguments explicitly apply to all minority groups, including, eg, evangelical Christians, not just to racial minorities.
You are making a lot of unwarranted assumptions here, including 1) that the legitimate moral concerns of our "best citizens" generally differ in any substantial way from the the legitimate moral concerns of our not-so-best citizens; 2) that, even if they are in the minority, the concerns have "no way of being expressed"; 3) that somehow the descendants thereof will be "oppressed" simply because they are outvoted; and 4) that the descendants of members of each group will have interests, moral views, etc, identical to those of the members themselves.
Re 1, my sentence was unclear — the first moral concern is “creating healthier/better humans versus abundant humans”, a concern of many wealthy westerners, and the second moral concern in the sentence is just that fecund people get privileged legacy, influence, and control in democracy. Re 2, this concern over downstream consequences of fecund privilege has no way of being expressed with the dogmas of democratic ideology, I argue (I see no evidence the concern can be expressed). 3, being stripped of your influence for capricious reasons is itself oppression.
Per 4, they need not be identical to qualify as oppressed — it is sufficient that they share in culture, behaviors, habits, and/or genes which all children and parents have in common to some significant degree. And indeed, the parents are oppressed for having their legacy reduced in influence.
That seems a very odd definition of "oppressed." Are people who are pro-choice oppressed if the majority of their neighbors elect a pro-life representative to their state legislature? Or if a ballot initiative banning abortion passes? My values are almost certainly different than those of my grandfather; is he oppressed thereby? if so, your definition of "oppressed" reduces the term to a triviality that carries little moral weight and hence is irrelevant.
If I arbitrarily take thousands of dollars from someone and their family, and they have no recourse, it would be an oppressive action and they would be said to suffer from oppression. If I arbitrarily take their property, it would be oppression. And so this same idea of oppression is merely extended, to something more important than money or property, which is the ability for people to fairly and justly have influence over political matters and the future of their community.
Pro-choice voters would be oppressed if pro-life voters had extra points allotted to their vote. And fecundity places extra points on groups and “kinds of people” capriciously.
Granted, but there are strong trends of political interest by demographics and families, and so while in your case you “accidentally” happen to be unaffected, that doesn’t mean others aren’t negatively affected. There are also other ways in which your influence is reduced — not at all the polls but still in the polis. If you have to transfer your resources to others with worse values and behaviors, or your children attend a school in which worse students negatively affect your children, or you have to pay more for policing. Now I suppose we can construe these things to also be political opinions (“I am pro all welfare and redistribution”), but it takes the bite out of the moral claims underlying these things, and then it’s the question of “is a slave who loves his slavery really a slave?”
Now you are using more terms (arbitrarily, unjustly) without defining them or explaining why they rise to the level of oppression.
You are completely moving the goal posts. Your claim was that "parents are oppressed for having their legacy reduced in influence" -- i.e., that my grandfather is oppressed by my rejection of his values, not that I am.
Democratic ideology already acknowledges that, were a power to take the property of a citizen without good reason, it would constitute oppression. I’m arguing that fecund privilege is arbitrary because it reduces the power of cohorts of citizens, whether we’re looking at cultural or genetic cohorts etc. It is arbitrary because it reduces the power of a cohort for something out of their control —in some cases the antisocial actions of others — and which has no bearing on the functioning of the polity (the number of children of others). As the examples have shown, a cohort that does all of the right things will have their power arbitrarily reduced.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/arbitrary
As my claim is that children are connected to their parents in identity (well-acknowledged across domains, and even in progressive ideology), a grandchild shares in the oppression of their grandfather just like a Tutsi in the fallout of genocide. If a Tutsi has to live under a society governed by Hutu because they committed genocide against his grandfather’s generation, that Tutsi is oppressed. Also, my argument answers why your grandfather would be oppressed: “there are strong trends of political interest by demographics and families,” and “shared values and behaviors”. His influence over the polity is reduced in a Democracy-filled polity, even if you vote totally different.
We already have a system that allows for inheritance of power, concentration where you have fewer kids and disbursement when you have more: it's called property.
Why turn votes into property?
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