Statue

 

Statue at Fuller Seminary

 I came across this one day while I was walking through Fuller Seminary’s campus.

The baby lottery

Found this in the archives, I think this is where it should go:

I have a proposal for how we can manipulate our biological drive to spread our genes to achieve a Rawlsian veil of ignorance in real life.

What do you think of this statement?

“Parents should be able to work hard and provide a better life for their children.”

Sounds pretty good doesn’t it? Then again, why should someone have advantages just for being born into the right house? Furthermore, this kind of thinking promotes destructive competition. Parents won’t support something for the good of all over something that is good for their own child. If I can pay to get my child a better education, or pay to make the entire educational system slightly better, I’ll advance my child.

We can avoid this with the baby lottery. You have a baby, it gets taken away and replaced with a random baby. Your baby is probably living off a single mother’s minimum wage check. Do you want a living wage now? Your baby probably doesn’t have health insurance, how about some health care reform? Your baby is going to the ghetto school. Still think schools should be funded on property taxes? The baby lottery makes the advancement of society more important than your own shortsighted goals.

There may also be some ideologic advantages. You probably don’t want your baby to go to hell. But what if your baby ends up in a family that isn’t religion X? You have to accept that random chance (almost definitely) condemned your child. Or you have to accept that God probably won’t hold your random starting position in life against you. Then you might really wonder whether it makes a difference if the wine (or grape juice) literally or figuratively turns into blood. You won’t know if your religion requiring you to hate gay people means you are hating your own child. Given the wide range of possibilities of your child’s ideologic starting point, you might start to take John 10:16 seriously: “I have other sheep, which are not of this fold.” (Obviously this is either referring to Jesus’ visit to the native Americans as chronicled in the Book of Mormon, or to aliens, or to good people of other religions. You pick the most likely.)

The worldwide baby lottery would be even better. Are you going to let politicians convince you to send your lottery baby out to war, possibly to kill your biological baby? How does diplomacy sound now? Whenever you see a dead child on CNN you have to ask yourself, was that my baby? Osama would have to ask himself: “Are those infidels I’m trying to destroy my parents?” 

As you can see, the baby lottery solves almost all of the world’s problems (I didn’t mention racism and genocide, but those will obviously be extinct in one generation of baby lottery). So I think I’ll make it my platform. Or we could just forego the baby lottery and start helping those in need, being more tolerant, and being less shortsighted now. Save your babies and vote against republicans (the neo-cons specifically).

Update: I should have googled it first: The baby lottery already exists and in a more awesome form than I envisioned.