Seven Danish kindergartens are offering to provide two hours free child are each week so that parents can go home to make more babies, thus attempting to guarantee their income for the future.
Epicurus believed in pleasure, and would thus have no problem with the”going home” part. But he would have been more dubious about creating more customers for kindergartens, or anyone else. He would have put prevention first. Whatever the soul-chasers who run the world religions might say, there are just too many people on Earth already, and they are notably not looking after one another. There are not enough jobs, not enough water, too much Co2 in the atmosphere, and far too much fighting and war.
In short, Epicurus would respond to this news: “Don’t be sucked into this new form of marketing. Moderation in all things.”
This being a subject on which everyone is an expert, are there any comments out there?
From Carmen Grayson
The numbers for our teeming globe seem so obviously near-catastrophic that the idea of state policies encouraging time-off to fool around seems perverse in the extreme. One hardly need be expert to see the disasters ahead. I must say, it sounds rather undignified for the Danes to pursue such a policy. I leave aside the question of how the business would be monitored.
From Daniel Dolan:
I agree that this extreme result is antithetical to Epicurus, but this imperfect, deterrence-based tort system encourages extreme cases like this to enforce the general point of duty to warn. In fact, this result is more comprehensible after reading some Googish points which make it appear that the mfgr knew that the additive to make it smell like butter was harmful. They had already settled suits brought by some workers, without taking into account that there were addicts out there or even sensitive lungs which might also be harmed.
Moderation is justly said to be “the way” in all seasons, but I, at least, follow Epicurus more easily after the Autumnal equinox!