I would certainly like to know these questions...and the three-year-old child who has such wisdom! Surely this question is a joke...?

I am probably not the right person to answer this question, because I am not entirely comfortable with talk about moral obligations. But perhaps I can start a conversation (or dispute). I don't think you strictly owe your parents anything at all, just on the basis of their giving birth to you or raising you. They made these decisions, in most cases, without consulting you at all (obviously, in the case of deciding to give birth to you, and often, too, in their decisions of how to raise you). So, it is not as if you agreed to some exchange: "give me these things and I will care for you in your old age." You never made any such agreement, so they can't really suppose you now owe them for decisions that they made (mostly without your consent or equal participation). I don't see how you can incur a debt without consenting to the transaction that creates the debt. But again, I am generally uncomfortable with deontological analyses of most moral issues. As a virtue theorist, I would...

When your daughter is looking for colleges, I hope you will encourage her to considering coming to where I teach! Ethicists take different general approaches to replying to such questions, and one of the interesting things about this question is that it may allow us to see how different approaches will sometimes provide different answers to ethical questions. Very roughly, a consequentialist would say that in order to determine what to do in this case, one must calculate the benefits and detriments to all who may reasonably be expected to be affected, and do whatever maximizes benefit and minimizes detriment. In simple terms, you weigh the damage to the friend if you snitch against the damage done by leaving their wrongdoing undetected and do what will minimize that damage. A deontologist might count the requirement always to expose wrongdoing as a fundamental duty. (I actually doubt that any serious deontological theory would put is in such an unqualified way, in fact.) If so, a...

I stuck my neck out on another question like this, so I suppose I should go ahead and compound my earlier error by responding to this one, too. I really think that the ethics of having children is more complicated than your examples make it. Each example seems to give a reason not to have children--or at least not to have them as long as the reason continues to apply (for example, one would hope the alcoholic would dry up first, and then reconsider having kids). But a single such reason, it seems to me, does not necessarily rise to the point of duty . If considerations of initial conditions worked this straightforwardly, then most people would have a duty not to have children, because most people would find they have one or more failings that could (or even certainly would) have adverse effects on their ability to raise children. Consider: Are wealthy people the only ones who have the right to reproduce? Does poverty leave one with the duty not to reproduce? I think that...

I think some philosophers would argue that there are good reasons not to have children, given population pressures. But I am inclined to take a rather different tack here, by asking you why you seem to suppose that self-interest is the same as the vice of selfishness. One of the things I found extraordinary in my own experience of having children was how much love I found I was capable of having and sharing. Did that bring value to my own life? Most certainly it did! Did it bring value to the lives of others? I think (and hope) so. Did I become a better person, all things considered? I think (and hope) so. And if I am doing a good job with my children (as I hope I am), then everyone with whom they come into contact is potentially better off. Plainly, not all parents are good people, and parenting does not always improve those who do it. But if you desire to have children, I think that is at least one indication that you could do something that is valuable not just for yourself...