Question If you choose to bring a child into the world, you are necessarily condemning the child to suffer, in at least the following ways, if not more: (1) The child will experience physical pain. (2) No matter how hard you try, you will foist your own failings and fears onto the child, which will directly and indirectly cause the child great suffering and psychic pain. (3) The child will have to go through the difficult and painful process of figuring out how s/he fits (or doesn't) into a society with values that are -- for lack of a better general descriptive term -- pretty warped. (4) The child is likely to have excruciatingly-painful adolescent experiences figuring out the mating system and social cues of humans. If you want evidence for the magnitude of this pain, ask any adult to remember in detail one of these adolescent experiences without cringing. (5) Unless the child believes in God or the equivalent, s/he will live every day of his/her life knowing that any meaning to life is self-generated and death is impending and final. (6) If the child lives long enough, s/he will have to watch people s/he loves deeply, die. (7) The child will her/himself get old, get sick, be lonely, and die. Finally, the decision to have children is clearly completely self-interested. The child does not yet exist, and therefore has no say in the matter. Therefore, it would seem to me that that decision to have children is completely morally reprehensible. Can you offer some explanation for how/why the vast majority of the population feels that it is morally okay to have kids? I simply cannot fathom how anyone could possibly choose to inflict all of that pain on another human being.

Accepted:
December 6, 2007

Comments

I think parenthood is a huge responsibility that is not always taken seriously enough, with the result that many people who are unable or unwilling to live up to the demands of good parenting have children and don't do well by them. We require education and licensure to drive a car yet leave unregulated the far more complex and arguably more consequential task of parenting. I am not defending state regulation of parenting (though I think it is a topic worth serious discussion), but I am claiming that parenting is morally serious business and that adults don't have a right to reproduce without being willing and able to be good parents or provide good parents.

But you're not worried about cases involving bad parents. You seem to think that having children is always in principle "reprehensible," because despite the best efforts of good parents, children suffer, both as children and, later, as adults. Your position curiously seems to look at only one side of life's ledger, viz. the pain and other harms that many of us suffer. But this overlooks the positive side of the ledger, for instance, simple pleasures of the young and old, the joys of friendship, the pride of hard won accomplishments, the transporting experience of passionate creative activities. No doubt, some people are unlucky and their lives are filled with more pain and harm than pleasure and value. It's debateable how many are in this position and whether it would have been better if they had not been born. But I think that many would assume that most people lead lives worth living in which the goods of life outweigh the bads. Indeed, one of your concerns is the cost of living lives in the shadow of death. But consider the alternative. Surely, life is a condition of the universe containing value. It's true, our lives would be better still if they contained less suffering, but they are lives worth living nonetheless. That doesn't make it obligatory to have children, but it would undermine the argument that it's always wrong to have children, because of life's pains and evils.