Topics Ethics

Question My question has to do with moral obligation towards persons not yet conscience or even existent. The question is this, how may I weigh the possible happiness and suffering when deciding how many kids to have? For instance, given the income I make I could make one child very spoiled or I could have many children and spread out the wealth. The dilemma is that these kids are nonexistent, I mean if I really had many kids it would be unfair to spoil one; however, if I only do have one child that I spoil then I am negating the possibility of sharing with other children. To put this question on a large-scale basis we could, as a "global community," let's say, either use our resources to make everyone happy now (hypothetically of course) or continue to allow the population to grow to where there are more people (with the ability to feel pleasure and pain) although now (pretending that) we would share all the resources, of course now there is less so every gets the minimum amount to survive. so how do we measure the happiness of the future? I hope my question was not to confusing. I really appreciate any response.

Accepted:
December 31, 2006

Comments

I think it is extremely difficult to predict future happiness, andespecially so on the basis of expected family income -- human lives arecomplex, and that is a narrow and uncertain basis for prediction. So, Idon't have any philosophical insight about your question as it relatesto expected happiness of your future family members.

Happily,however, the larger-scale question you raise is easier to answer:environmental ethicsists moved by insights from the deep ecologicalmovement have argued that humans have an ethical obligation to reducethe destructive impact of our species by limiting our populationgrowth. The destructive consequences of human existence are easier topredict than individual human happiness, and reflecting on the ethicalsignficance of that harm may give you a good reason to limit the numberof children that you create.

A modest reaction would be todecide to have just one or two children; a stronger one would be todecide to adopt a child already born rather than creating a new one.Some deep ecologists conclude that exists an obligation to reduce thetotal human population and so advocate taking more extreme steps,including steps that may require us to act unjustly towards each otherin order to prevent greater environmental evil.