| | I nearly put this into the "Future Generations" thread, but on second thought I judged it rather too tangential.
Because two rational individuals' best interests cannot contradict each other, I'd like your thoughts about a problem that can arise when a somewhat irrational individual becomes more rational.
Imagine a person (I'll call her Lotta Learnbetter) who once accepted (but who now no longer accepts) the notion that she must have and rear children "because future generations have a right to exist" (or for any other self-sacrificial reason, such as "it's the duty of all adults to marry and to rear children, even if -- or especially if -- that's a sacrifice for the adults involved" or any other similar premise)
Back in Lotta's less-rational days, when she believed in self-sacrifice "for the sake of future generations," Lotta sacrificed her career and various other immensely important things in her life so that she could have and rear children. After a few years as a mother, she comes to the realization that sacrificial action is actually evil and wrong (and that therefore she should not have become a mother, because she sacrificed in order to become a mother).
Both before and after coming to this realization, Lotta has striven to be as good a mother as she possibly can -- of course, her mothering great improved after she became rational enough to reject the "self-sacrifice" premise and all the evil that flows from it. (Assume that Lotta is now an excellent mother -- or, at least, better than anyone else available to rear or adopt her children -- and that she recognizes herself as such: so, even though she did not originally want to have children, she could not now rationally give them into the care of another.) However, despite Lotta's present excellence as a mom, Lotta's children (and eventually grandchildren) learn sooner or later that they exist because of her sacrifice. The older ones know this because Lotta told them so, early and often, in the days when Lotta regarded sacrifice as a virtue -- the younger ones (born after Lotta corrected her philosophical error) know this through other means (because the children/grandchildren eventually asked Lotta about her life, or because the children/grandchildren eventually found other observable evidence that led them to deduce that Lotta never, ever wanted to be a mom -- just as the "future generations who have a right to exist through our self-sacrifice" will, eventually, figure out that it *was* through such a sacrifice that they exist.)
Since it would have been in Lotta's rational self-interest for her children and grandchildren not to exist, how should those future generations (assuming that they are rational) integrate the knowledge that their existence is against the rational self-interest of a (now) rational person. If the children/grandchildren are rational people who feel a proper repugnance to self-sacrifice, how should those future generations deal -- emotionally and intellectually -- with the knowledge that their very existence is the consequence of another's morally wrong, morally repugnant course of action: namely, Lotta's self-sacrifice which Lotta herself now recognizes as repugnant?
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