Having Children is Good for You and the Rest of Your Family

There are several reasons why having children is good for most people. First, having children allows people, as parents, to develop and exercise their human capacities in ways that they wouldn't be able to otherwise. The care, devotion, love, responsibility, patience, teaching, listening, punishing, entertaining, enjoying, etc. required to raise children constitute a set of character traits, emotional dispositions, and skills that, for the vast majority of people, will only be developed and exercised to such a high degree through being a parent. For most people, the substitutes to child-rearing – career, hobbies, socializing with friends, etc. – will simply fail to tap into the range and depth of their capabilities in the way that parenting will. And the idea that it is good to become the most fully actualized and developed version of a human being that you can be is intuitively plausible.

This view coheres nicely with several other attractive philosophical ideas. One is that virtue (i.e. excellence) is essential for the good life, a view that traces back to the very origins of Western philosophy. For example, Aristotle claimed that human well-being consists primarily in activity that manifests excellence through character traits such as courage, generosity, even-temperedness, and friendliness. It's natural to think that the character traits required for parenting belong on that list as well.

Another closely connected idea is that meaningfulness is an important part of a good human life. We can think of activities that, intuitively, seem devoid of meaning (e.g. taking the cap off a pen and putting it back on, repeatedly, for no reason). In contrast, raising children seems meaningful. In Susan Wolf's important work on meaningfulness, she claims that meaningfulness consists in being psychologically fulfilled by activities that are ‘larger than oneself’ (Wolf Reference Wolf2010: 19–20). She suggests that ‘a project or activity's suitability as a meaning-provider rises as it becomes more challenging, or as it offers greater opportunity for a person to develop her powers or realize her potential’ (Wolf Reference Wolf2010: 36). Child-rearing scores high on this dimension. And, again, most people will be hard-pressed to find substitutes in their lives that compare.

Relatedly, achievement seems to be an important ingredient in good human lives. Thomas Hurka (Reference Hurka2011) argues that, for achievements, the more structured – the more sub-goals hierarchically leading to an ultimate goal – and the more extended over time, the better. Raising children is a highly temporally extended, complex achievement, composed of countless sub-projects and challenges over a span of decades. As such, it adds great value to your life.

In addition to the value-making activities of parenting, it is plausible that the value of your life is also significantly enhanced because of the fact that you will, in a certain sense, live on through your children. While your children are obviously separate from you, they share parts of you, including your genes, your physical appearance and mannerisms, and your personality. They also hold you in the memories that they build up through a life of interaction with you. These things will remain when you are gone, and through your children's children and so on, they will (albeit, to a diminished degree) be passed down and carried even further into the future. To have what Samuel Scheffler calls a ‘personal relation to the future’ (Scheffler Reference Scheffler2016: 30) through your children in the ways described here is very important to most people. In the absence of some reason to think otherwise, we should take this to be another way that having children is good for you.

For many of the same reasons that having children is good for you, it's also good for the rest of your family – your parents, your grandparents, your siblings, your nieces and nephews, your cousins, and your other children (if you have any). For your parents, being a grandparent provides a unique and almost certainly irreplaceable opportunity for them to exercise the special set of capacities and virtues involved in that role. Being a grandparent is also meaningful, and, for grandparents with high levels of involvement and care responsibilities, it is a value-conferring achievement as well. It also allows the grandparents to live on through the grandchildren and further through the now-possible great-grandchildren. (It also allows you to form a closer bond with your parents, as you now understand and identify with them as parents, not simply as their children.)

The same things hold, albeit perhaps typically to a lesser degree, for your siblings in their capacities as uncles and aunts, and your grandparents in their capacity as great-grandparents. And cousins benefit from your children in these ways as well.

If you have any children already, the gift of a brother or sister is perhaps the most important thing you could give them. The relationships they will forge with their siblings will certainly cause them to develop and exercise unique virtues, add meaning to their lives, and constitute value-conferring achievements. It will also probably give them people who deeply relate to them and will be there for them in profound ways, perhaps more than anyone else on Earth aside from their parents. Of course, not all siblings turn out to be close or reliable. But that's grounds for giving your children several siblings as insurance.

Think of a lively, multigenerational family gathering, with grandparents, several of their grown children along with their spouses, and a gaggle of ten or twelve grandchildren. The adults are talking with each other, cooking, and telling stories about times past. The children are playing, exploring the house and the yard, imitating their older cousins whom they admire, and getting lots of attention from aunts, uncles, and the grandparents. The image that comes to mind is so natural and so alive. If the idea of this scene warms your heart, I say: listen to your heart. It's telling you the right thing. Children are a wonderful gift, a good for both you and the rest of your family. They allow all of you to actualize more fully as humans and exercise your virtues; they bring meaningfulness and achievement to your lives; and they allow you and your family to, in an important sense, live on into the future.

But Don't Children Actually Make People Less Happy?

If having children is good for the reasons that I've described, then, naturally, we would expect children to be a great source of happiness in people's lives. It turns out, however, that there is a body of empirical research suggesting that having children actually makes people less happy. (For summaries and references to this research see Bok (Reference Bok2010) and Layard (Reference Layard2011).) If this is true, how can what I've said so far be right?

The answer is that, even if the research is accurate and representative, it wouldn't refute the idea that having children is good for you unless happiness were the only thing that determined a person's well-being. The studies in question assume that happiness is a kind of internal, psychological state, either a positive feeling or a subjective sense of satisfaction about one's life. Apparently, during the years that children live at home, parents’ internal, psychological states of happiness are somewhat diminished as compared to those of non-parents due to the stresses and frustrations of child-rearing. But while it's certainly plausible that such mental states of happiness are part of human well-being, it's not plausible that they are the entirety of it. Imagine that you could take a medication that would allow you to live every day of your life in a sedated state of bliss – a state of internal happiness that is much higher than that attained in a normal human life – but you are doing nothing but sitting on a couch and staring at a wall all day. To most of us, the life in this scenario seems worse than a normal human life. It's devoid of important goods such as virtue, meaningfulness, and achievement. This implies that internal happiness doesn't always outweigh the contribution that other goods make to our well-being.

The lesson applies directly to the case of having children. Even if non-parents have slightly higher levels of internal happiness, that doesn't mean that they have better lives than parents. On the contrary, it seems to me that the virtue, meaningfulness, achievement, and personal relation to the future that comes with having children (as discussed in the previous section) significantly outweighs the cost of slightly diminished internal happiness. Again, for most people, their lives will be better if they have children.

But Children Don't Consent to Being Born

Even if it's good for parents and their families when they have children, what about the moral rights of the children? They don't ask to be born. As Harrison and Tanner point out, ‘ordinarily we must gain someone's consent before doing something that will significantly affect them’ (Reference Harrison and Tanner2011: 117). Procreating is an act that profoundly affects the people produced because it sets into motion their entire lives. Do we, thus, do something morally wrong by bringing children into existence without their consent?

No. First, the concept of hypothetical consent seems to explain nicely the moral permissibility of procreation. It's plausible that most people would consent to being born if they were able to do so. Many philosophers appeal to notions of hypothetical consent in attempting to explain why governments have moral legitimacy. It's not clear why the concept isn't applicable here as well.

However, since the concept of hypothetical consent itself is controversial, and the metaphysics of consent of a person who doesn't yet exist are fairly obscure, I don't want my response to rely on the idea of hypothetical consent. A stronger response is that consent simply isn't required in the case of having children. This is because consent isn't always morally required before we do things that significantly affect people. It's not immoral to collect taxes from people even though this significantly affects them and they don't consent to it. Presumably, this is because of the importance of tax revenue to society. Likewise, I think the importance of children to parents and the family make it morally unnecessary to have the consent of children to be born. A child is greatly benefiting his parents, his siblings (if he has any), his grandparents, etc. by giving them the ability to have deeply virtuous, meaningful lives, and a personal relation to the future. Given that the ‘price’ the child is paying for this is not excessive – in fact, the child would probably agree to it anyway, if he could – it seems very reasonable to think that consent is not morally required.

But Aren't Humans Too Harmful to Each Other and to the Planet?

Even if you aren't doing something wrong to the children you bring into existence, what about the wider world? What about the negative effects caused by a human population of billions? These include both harms caused to other humans (e.g. the millions of victims of tyrannical governments and brutal wars) as well as other species (e.g. those we drive to extinction or deprive of natural habitat). Harrison and Tanner argue that the expected negative effects of continued human existence are so terrible that it's immoral for humans to continue having children. This kind of argument also now regularly appears in the popular media, as mentioned earlier. Is it correct?

I don't think so. Even if the negative consequences of continued human existence are just as bad as Harrison and Tanner and others imagine, or even worse, the idea that each of us has a moral obligation to refrain from having children does not follow. Mitigating the negative collective effects of a large human population would require huge portions of the human population to stop procreating – that is, it would require an enormous collective cessation of procreation. Without that, the problems Harrison and Tanner are concerned about will remain. You as an individual aren't going to stop a nuclear war or the extinction of a species by refraining from having children. Your two or three, or even ten, children won't make a difference for those problems. The same goes for any other individual. (I'm ignoring possibilities such as that one's child becomes a warmongering dictator who oppresses millions. For any individual, the probability that one of his or her children will be such a person is so negligible that it's irrelevant here.) The enormous collective cessation of procreation that would be required to make a difference for the problems in question is not going to be voluntary. Social, cultural, and biological pressure to have children will prevent that. Given this fact, any individual who forgoes procreation in order to stop the collective negative effects of human activity will be making a significant, isolated and futile sacrifice. He'll be a martyr for a lost cause; and it's highly implausible that we are morally required to do that. If collective action is required for a solution but it's not happening because others aren't doing their part, we aren't personally required to be martyrs for a lost cause.

But Isn't It at Least Good to Be a Martyr?

Even if we're not morally required to be martyrs for a lost cause, isn't it at least still good or laudatory to do that in some cases? Doesn't it at least exemplify a virtuous character or symbolize an ideal?

It's hard to see how depriving yourself of the virtue, meaning, achievement, personal relation to the future, as well as depriving the rest of your family of the goods of your children, exemplifies a virtuous character. While recognizing and disliking the harmful effects of a large human population does indicate a properly caring and empathetic character, a person who lets those feelings and concerns overwhelm and shut down a part of his or her life as large and important as procreation seems immoderate and unbalanced.

Would the act of intentionally foregoing procreation to take a (futile) stand against human overpopulation at least be good insofar as it symbolizes an ideal (e.g. the ideal of humans and animals coexisting more peacefully)? Maybe it would. But would it be the overall best thing to do? There are lots of lost causes for which you could be a martyr to symbolize an ideal. You could refuse to pay your taxes and spend years in prison to symbolically protest the use of tax revenue for destructive, pointless foreign wars; you could refuse to work and accept homelessness to symbolically protest the injustice of the capitalist system; you could self-immolate to once-and-for-all end your personal carbon footprint to symbolically protest human-caused climate change; etc. Even if we believe in the symbolic ideals in those examples, which many of us do, it doesn't follow that using our lives to make such large, isolated, and futile sacrifices for those ideals is the best choice overall.

In fact, it seems to me that, for most people, doing so wouldn't be admirable; it would be a waste. While there may be rare individuals for whom being a martyr is a fitting and noble choice, the interests, commitments, and abilities of the vast majority of people render them unfit for such a life. For example, it would be a waste if a talented medical doctor who loves practising medicine ended up in prison for years because he stopped paying his taxes in a symbolic protest against the government. It would be a waste if a beloved elementary school teacher who inspired children to read and love learning self-immolated as a symbolic protest against human-caused climate change. It seems to me that, for the vast majority of people, the same thing applies to the situation with having children. Unless you are a highly unusual person, your interests, commitments, and abilities render you unfit to be a martyr for the lost cause of significantly reducing the human population. If you deprive yourself of children as a symbolic protest against human overpopulation, it almost certainly won't be admirable; it will almost certainly be a foolish waste.

Should the Government Step In to Do the Job?

If it's morally permissible for individuals to have children and, in most cases, it's unwise and wasteful to choose to forgo procreation as a symbolic protest, what about the idea that restrictions on procreation should come from the government, not the individual? Although Harrison and Tanner are focused on individual decisions about procreation, the question whether governments should enforce anti-procreation policies in order to protect humans and the planet arises naturally in a discussion of this topic. So, should the government get involved?

Many people are uncomfortable with the idea of the government implementing anti-procreation policies. Political liberals might think it violates the moral rights of individuals to control their own bodies and lives. Those who think that women have a moral right to choose to not have children might find it hard to consistently maintain that women don't have a moral right to choose to have children. However, most liberals aren't so absolutist about individual liberty that they think that negative consequences can never override it. Perhaps the collective negative effects of human behaviour are so bad that they override a prima facie moral right to have children. Regardless, I don't want to assume the truth of political liberalism as a starting point in the consideration of government anti-procreation policies. If there's a case against such policies that is consistent with numerous theories of political morality, both liberal and non-liberal, then that case will be dialectically much stronger.

I think that there is such an argument. It's based on the simple, intuitive idea that it's wrong for a government to force its citizens to make significant, isolated, and futile sacrifices. In the real world, any government that implemented anti-procreation policies would be doing just that. To see how, suppose that Sweden, but only Sweden, implemented a successful zero-procreation policy. This would remove approximately 10 million future people. That's approximately .001% of the world's population. It would not make a significant difference in the negative effects of human activity. The other 99.999% of the population would continue on, causing the kinds of destructive effects that led to this discussion in the first place. If the Swedes were to self-obliterate in order to save future humans and other species from suffering and destruction, their sacrifice would be isolated in the context of the global population, and futile. The same holds for even much larger countries. If the population of the United States – 32 times larger than Sweden's – produced zero children, the world population would only decrease by approximately .04%. The other 99.96% would continue on. Even if China – a country with over a billion people – produced zero children, approximately 99.8% of the world's population would continue on. (These figures assume that the world's population isn't increasing. But it probably is, which would mean that the reductions of population I've listed here would be even less significant than stated.) In our world, unilateral national anti-procreation policies of this sort would amount to coerced, isolated, and futile sacrifices. They would force entire national populations to erase their countries and deprive their people of good, normal human lives, all for a hopeless, lost cause. Such policies would be deeply immoral.

What about multilateral agreement? Enough countries working together could, in principle, significantly reduce the global human population through coercive zero-procreation or highly restrictive procreation policies. But let's note how far from reality we are at this point. The idea of even one country implementing an effective policy of this sort is far-fetched. China is well known for its infamous, draconian policy that restricted huge numbers of citizens to having one child. But during the 36 years when that policy was in place, China's population grew from 1 billion to 1.4 billion. To significantly reduce the global population, governments all across the world would have to agree to implement policies far more restrictive than China's. To get a sense of the scale: even if all 44 independent countries in Europe (including Russia) as well as the United States agreed on and implemented a zero-procreation policy, it would still leave intact approximately 99.9% of the world's human population. The level of global political cooperation and enforcement required to achieve significant results would far surpass any degree of cooperation and enforcement attained for any issue in all of human history. For a world that can't even come together to agree and implement policies that would moderately reduce carbon emissions, the idea that we'd come together to brutally restrict one of the most basic, natural, human activities – having children – is absurd. Any such policies implemented and enforced by human beings in the actual world would certainly be confined to one nation or a group small enough that it would be forcing people to make an enormous, isolated, and futile sacrifice. Thus, any real-world attempts of governments to reduce the global population through restrictions on procreation would be deeply immoral.

Targeting the Conscientious

If you are reading this article, you are almost certainly a conscientious and intelligent person. It's people like you who are most in danger of being influenced by anti-procreationists such as Harrison and Tanner and the steady flow of anti-procreationist material appearing on news and magazine sites. People who are less conscientious and intelligent – who don't read articles like this and don't care about their carbon footprint or whether they are destroying the habitat of other species – won't be influenced by the anti-procreationist arguments. They will continue having children. If people like you don't procreate, ironically, the world will be filled with fewer conscientious and intelligent people, and the problems that you are concerned about will be even more neglected.