It's quite obvious that she's arguing that bodily autonomy is valuable only presupposing that people exist, not that it has value in a vacuum and should be aspired to blindly. You didn't have to be mean and deliberately obtuse about it.
I was mean because I was intellectually exhausted dealing with her, having gone through it too much. Which is why I asked her, repeatedly, to stop quoting me and trying to engage me before "going mean".
However, I wasn't obtuse at all, and you're giving her too much credit. She's an avowed anarchocommunist, and believes that any and all cases of society making demands of individuals are always immoral -- even when those demands are necessary to the survival of the species.
Note for further example that she has consistently failed to acknowledge the point of exigency.
She's perfectly happy allowing the principle of bodily autonomy to be upheld even when doing so is. This is not a sane or viable moral stance.
And that? That was what I was "getting at" when I pointed to the fact that bodily autonomy is only meaningful when there are still bodies. Because she doesn't actually agree that's true. What you said was "obvious" isn't actually anything of the sort, as she directly contradicted that position.
You've also picked a really poor example. Krogans imploded because of how the genophage interacted with their culture.
The Krogan Genophage didn't just have cultural implications; it reduced the viably fertile female population to less than 1% of all female Krogan. For the Krogan, that's survivable in the long-term due to cohort sizes.
For humans to avoid societal collapse -- with the incipient ecological destruction following this extinction-apocalypse -- in that scenario, all fertile women would need to have a TFR above 20. And even
that would result in a massive drawdown in total human population after fifty or so years. (And after a hundred years, the total population would be reduced by 80%.)
By contrast, the TFR of contemporary post-industrial societies is 1/10th that number.
You're equating most of those regular deaths with the unusual deaths caused at the tail end of this aging process, and that presumes that humanity hasn't spent those decades focused on finding solutions.
Actually no; I was simply thinking longer-term. It
is also true (at least currently) that a hypersenescent population (that is, excessively "old" population) can result in potential economic collapses --
there have been case studies on exactly this issue in Japan -- but it
is true that things like automation and antiagathic therapies could help alleviate the issue -- but all those do is avoid total socioeconomic collapse; and they only work when there's a viable technological society that can support them.
Which, in turn, requires a certain minimum population level of trained technical workers (something like a hundred million people, for contemporary society; but that number varies wildly based on the technological level of the society and degree of automation.)
EDIT: After all, the number of remaining fertile human females would have to be large enough to stop the decay of human civilisation for this example to have merit, so we're not talking about just a few thousand children of Omelas here.
Indeed, there really are no non-ugly ways to ensure the survival of the species in such a scenario, given how interdependent we have become. As a species we'd be reduced to near exigency for a very, very long time. But
eventually, as you yourself noted -- as long as we still survived we'd find a solution to that problem and have a chance at creating that better future.
And while it's true that realized individuals have more moral weight than potential individuals, the fact of the matter is that you cannot discount the moral weight of
literally infinite potential individuals to zero -- doing so is literally how we got into the climate crisis in the first place.
Which, again, brings us back: what is morally viable in exigent circumstances
isn't morally viable in times of prosperity -- and trying to treat them as the same thing is just a good way to screw everything. When the boat is sinking, sometimes you have to choose to let some passengers drown in horrible ways. When someone's arm is completely crushed, sometimes you have to cut it off even when they beg you not to -- in order for them to survive. This principle holds as true at the societal level as it does at the individual.
To bring this back from derail: Lily's access to this style of thinking mostly comes from the standard mores of Eclipse Phase, where the entire setting is tainted by the aggression of the TITANs. It's not an accident that one of the bylines of the setting is: "Extinction is coming.
Fight it." It's just
accepted in that setting that despite all the wonderful advances, there's a certain underlayer of exigent-circumstances tying everything together. The key difference between Eclipse Phase and Fallout however is that the extinction-level-event was external. And that combined with the significantly higher level of automation has resulted in Lily's ability to just drop-in and kick off a recovery that Fallout-natives couldn't have hoped to accomplish.
But that's as much cultural as it is technical. So there's a lot of things that are just "obviously how you do things" -- like establishing the Bank of Megaton and the power/water and so-on and so-on. One of the things that's really interesting about this story is watching her batshit crazy views actually work productively.
