THE MORALITY OF HAVING CHILDREN

My Responsibility as a Not-Yet Father

Birth, school, work, children, death. It’s just… what we do. Or at least what society expects of the average person. I was born, I went to school, and I have a career. So the next giant life milestone in this five-part existence is having children. Over the years I have done a great deal of thinking about the ethics of having children and how I can personally justify it. The central concept I’ve wrestled with most is whether or not it is morally good to bring something as capable of such deep and rich experience as a human being into existence without their consent. After all, no person who is alive or has ever lived asked to be born. It’s just how life works.

The thought of having a child simply because it’s an experience my wife and I want to have or because it’s just what people do is as common a sentiment as it is a deeply unsatisfactory one. In order to become a parent, I feel morally obligated to think through the decision and feel that I need to be able to intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually justify bringing a life into the world. 

Antinatalism is the philosophical position which states that having children is a fundamentally immoral act. In short, the rationale for the position is simple: the life in question gave no consent to its existence. Period. This was a view I was fully subscribed to for many years before I ever heard of the philosophy (or its term Antinatalism), and it’s a position I still hold to a degree. What I want to explore, however, is how this fundamentally immoral act can be re-conceptualized as not just ethically palatable, but morally righteous.

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Like every living organism, we have an innate drive to rear offspring. Bacteria will begin reproducing under optimal conditions, as will bears, bunnies, birds, and bees. They don’t think about it; they just do it. Evolution and natural selection have provided them with the hardware and software to instinctually reproduce. No one would ever make a case that what these creatures are doing is immoral; it’s a hardwired, amoral process. All of Earth’s creatures are simply wired in this way and that’s why there is and continues to be life. But why is there a drive to reproduce in the first place?

From a biological standpoint there is a clear and indisputable meaning of life: the propagation of genes. It is the dream of every gene in every body of every organism to spend as much time living on planet Earth as possible. Genetic replication, mutation, and evolution combined with the algorithm of Darwinian natural selection is the infrastructure of life, and the myriad of life with its seemingly infinite dynamism is the result. Every organism is a highly-specialized model of its environment and every instinctual behavior an organism displays was selected by natural selection for its adaptive function. The more generally adaptive an organism is, the longer it will live, and the longer it lives, the greater the opportunity it has to reproduce and get its genes into the next generation.

Humans, in this respect, are no different from every other organism. We are made up of genes just like every other creature and these genes want to keep surviving through our generations of offspring. Because of humans’ unique degree of intelligence and conscious experience, however, we demand much more from life than genetic replication alone. We are much more than reproduction vessels – we are conscious moral agents who have the unique capacity to forge meaning for ourselves.

The 20th century French philosopher, Albert Camus, said one of my favorite lines in philosophy: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” While we may not have control over being thrust into existence, we at least have the unique capacity to decide whether or not to continue participating. Oftentimes those who choose not to participate are lacking – or at least perceive that they are lacking – a significant sense of purpose and meaning in life (even if they have the ability to propagate their genes). The true meaning of our lives is ultimately up to the individual and what he or she decides. We may not have total control over much of the content of our lives, but we are in full control of how we interpret and conceptualize it. The individual and subjective foraging of meaning is what can make or break a life. A meaningful life is worth the innate suffering of existence; a meaningless life is not.

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Life is difficult – sometimes really difficult. And sometimes it’s so difficult that you wonder if it’s even worth carrying on. Under the weight of it all you might think that perhaps it would have been better if you were not born at all. We have all felt that at some time, or perhaps many times in our lives. Isn’t it funny, though, how so many of the lowest and most difficult points of life happen to be the moments where life forces you to dig deep within your soul and become a better, stronger, and more virtuous version of yourself? Perhaps you needed to make the difficult decision of whether or not to break ties with a toxic family member. Perhaps, like myself, you were once suffering terribly from crippling anxiety and depression. Perhaps you lost your job, someone close to you passed away, or you had your home destroyed in a flood. Life can seem like a losing game with cascades of suffering all the way down. But somehow from the ashes we emerge tougher, wiser, and maybe even more grateful for the blessings we have. Suffering often forces us to evolve ourselves into a better person than we otherwise might be.

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Part of the wisdom of our religious traditions is that they recognize the fundamental moral landscape as the push and pull between ultimate good and ultimate evil. It’s a landscape that every conscious moral agent participates in. The forces of good and evil are always contending with one another, whether it be at the global level, in the local community, the family household, or within the inner dialogue of one’s own mind. When a child is born, it is precisely this landscape into which they are thrust.

If the moral landscape in which all conscious beings operate within is that of an infinite spectrum between good and evil, then it’s our actions in the world which influence the balance between the two. We have a moral imperative to live lives which tip the scale toward the good, if only just a little. Of course, not every moment of our lives can be lived righteously. We often do regrettable things that not only make ourselves and our immediate environment worse off, but in turn the universe as a whole becomes a little more evil as a result. And sometimes we need to be a little evil in order to be good. Often, it’s through regrettable actions and decisions that we have the opportunity for a new and improved version of ourselves to ultimately develop and rise like the Phoenix. This rebirthed version of ourselves can be accompanied by a greater sense of vision, meaning, responsibility, and purpose.

On the individual level, good moral character is a push and pull – always two steps forward and one step back. It’s a meandering journey of ups and downs, rights and wrongs. If we take living ethically in the world seriously, however, the whole of our journey will ultimately move us toward the good. When one’s life is lived in this way, the world not only becomes a better place in the presence of your positive moral force, but on the grand scale; the very truth of how the universe ultimately unfolded is better off having had you in it. It is precisely in this way that I rationalize the act of having children. It is part of my life’s work to create a creature who has the capability, capacity, and will to be a driving force in tipping the balance of the moral landscape toward the good. This, in my view, is the fundamental reason for having a child: to make the world a better place by generating a creature with an ever-evolving sense of purpose. 

What’s more is that having a child almost becomes a necessity if you believe that you and your partner have something worth passing down. Our capacity for moral fortitude, deep love, strong family connections, friendship, admiration of beauty, and intellectual wonder are all aspects of life worth continuing for as long as the universe will allow. It is not unlike how I understand the way that art functions in the world. If an artist feels as though they have something worth communicating, they have a moral obligation to give sound to their voice and to communicate their message to an audience. 

It’s not just that a child has the potential of creating a better world – the parents can also undergo a positive transformation by properly raising one. I would argue that most parents who take the project of raising children seriously would say that they themselves are better people for having taken on such a deep responsibility. Part of what can make a child grow into a good moral actor as an adult is parents taking care to do right by their children, handing down a righteous ethos and teaching the child everything they know about how to be in the world. These acts make a parent a better person, and when parents become better people, the moral landscape of the universe, again, ticks a little bit more toward ultimate good.

Of course, having children is not for everyone and I certainly recognize that happy accidents happen. The choice to forgo the rearing of offspring is a perfectly respectable decision (as should be expected from my general position outlined here). I think our culture (and many cultures) have the question backward. In my view, we should not default to having children and then explore reasons not to. I think societies would be better off pressing themselves intellectually in order to identify strong enough reasons to have a child. Given the moral implications, we have a deep responsibility to think the decision through.

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We have not the slightest inclination as to what this thing called life is. Perhaps whatever grandiose universal system we are participating in admits of one and only one opportunity to stand in the sun in what would otherwise be an eternity of unconscious darkness. A child opening its eyes for the first time is, in a very technical sense, the universe sharpening its gaze upon its own self from within. And what a gaze it is. Family, friendship, love, devotion, wonder, passion, moral justice, and admiration of beauty are at the core of what living is about.

It is from this vantage point that I can justify having a child.

“Most people try to make a better world for our children when what they should be doing is making better children for our world.” - Carlos Slim