Could having children be unethical?

Of course. Many people don’t have children, or delay having children, for such reasons, or others, such as the extremely high human population and the seeming disasters that high population seems to be leading towards. China even had a single child policy for many years to limit overpopulation.

As for why the morality of having children is taken for granted, there are many reasons. It’s natural and taken for granted and there are many cultural insisted-positive values around children, and many taboos against negativity about children. Some of it probably comes from Biblical entreaties to “be fruitful and multiply” too.

Not having them is my only real regret in life. Ethics is not really something that comes into play unless we have the ability to predict the future.

@ARE_you_kidding_me can you explain what you mean by that?

If we could know what impact those children will have on the world we could quantify the ethics of having them. Without knowing that we cannot determine what is ethical or not.

I mean that having children is an ethical decision because it directly involves the well-being of a person who does not yet exist, and who cannot consent to existing. No one can consent to being born, and no person who is born is guaranteed of having a pleasant life. Lots of people are born with painful and debilitating diseases that shorten their lifespan, for example. Also, lots of people commit suicide or live with mental illness.

Unfortunately some cultures (ugh, that word again) believe that fathering or mothering of a child is proof of manhood or womanhood.

Why should the rest of us have to pitch in to support the result of your fragile ego?

Then there is the whole anchor baby conundrum…

One of the ways I can tell I’m in a not so good part of town is that the baby in the pram is not being protected from harmful UV radiation.

Certainly having more than three could be considered unethical. More than three is unsustainable.

Having one or two is more debatable, as it provides a way for one to care for oneself in old age.

@zenvelo so, are children obligated to take care of their elderly parents, and is that a moral reason for having them? What about all the people in nursing homes whose children never visit them?

@dxs did you mean to respond to a different question? lol

@trolltoll Please don’t confuse morals with ethics. Children are only as obligated to care for their parents as that is modeled for them growing up and how they are raised.

Parents who care for the physical and emotional health of their children don’t need to worry as much about their children visiting or helping. Parents who are abusive or emotionally abandon their kids will end up warehoused and never visited.

@zenvelo please don’t derail the discussion by lecturing me about my choice of words. Most people use morals and ethics interchangeably, and I use them interchangeably here.

Also, you seem pretty confident that only abusive parents end up in nursing homes. This is absolutely not true.

I can think of one that will be on her merry way to one in about a month.

@Seek :(

We have one kid. I couldn’t be happier—she’s 15 and a joy. Seriously. I honestly could give a rats ass about the ethics of it as I can’t dream of my life without her.

@Rarebear just because you prefer not to think about something doesn’t mean it’s not worth thinking about.

Do you think it’s possible you would feel differently if your child had been born with a severe disability? If she wasn’t a joy?

Captain Planet says so.Sorry I don’t have a link.link

how long ago was it that there were only 5 billion people in the world? lol

@trolltoll Lol . In the early 90’s.

@trolltoll To your first point, I didn’t say it wasn’t worth thinking about. I said I didn’t give a rats ass. To your second point, of course I could have felt differently. I got lucky.

@Rarebear then what was the point of your answering this question?

No. You’re going to need people to provide services that you’ll need as you grow older. I’ve done my part to help. you’re welcome

@dammitjanetfromvegas No more free rides. We are turning you seniors into solylent green.~

I think delivering a child that is so malformed that it will only suffer and die is unethical. Not when we have the tech to discover and terminate incidences of deformation.

@dammitjanetfromvegas what if they don’t want to provide those services though? This seems like an argument for indentured servitude.

@trolltoll Well, I agree all kinds of parents end up in nursing homes, and all have varying levels of people visiting or not. But I was trying to point out that raising a child Ina loving home is more likely to keep the family connection together as the parents age than treating them poorly.

@zenvelo of course, but this still does not answer my question about whether it is ethical/moral to have them to begin with.

It is if you consider it contributing to the sustainability of the economy at an even level. Consider that Japan and Europe are looking at how to pay for an aging population with not enough children to support the pensioners.

@trolltroll fair point, thanks! I will flag my own answer.

Edit: I can’t on the iPhone. I will do it tomorrow when I am back on a computer.

@zenvelo I do not disagree that having children serves a necessary function for society. From that point of view, it does seem ethical because it serves to better the lives of people who already exist.

What I am more concerned about is how the condition of being born affects the person who does not yet exist. No one suffers by not being born, but every one who is born is guaranteed some degree of suffering, and many people endure a great deal of suffering in their lifetimes. Some people suffer horrifically, and some people’s suffering lasts their entire lifetime.

No one gives birth to a child hoping that their child will suffer, but it is still a gamble that is being taken with someone’s life. Even the children of responsible, caring parents can have lives that are marked by extreme suffering and anguish. The entire history of humanity is replete with examples.

I live in a society where they want to have nice, communal homes they can put their elderly in when they get too difficult to look after or can’t look after themselves. The people who work in these nice, well appointed, expensive communal buildings are very often not native to this country. Culturally, looking after the elderly is not an attractive career. When the children visit, they complain that the staff don’t speak the language well enough. What are the ethics of that mess?

@cazzie why not ask the question in its own separate post? That has nothing to do with the question I asked, which deals with the ethics of childbearing itself.

People were saying that it was ethical to have kids so you have someone to look after you in your old age. I’m saying, it doesn’t always work that way.

@cazzie I agree, and I think that having kids just that you have someone to take care of you when you’re old is actually the opposite of ethical.

How about this ethical problem…. She gets pregnant and has the baby, but he doesn’t want it and it was a one night stand. Now, she’s got the baby she wants, and she forces him to pay for every penny of child support. Is that ethical? What if she shows up on his door and makes him look after the child for 50% of the time and still insists on collecting full child support? Yeah, I can see how sometimes having a child becomes unethical.

@cazzie again, that has nothing to do with my question, which is about whether we are morally justified in having children to begin with.

Life begets suffering. When you have children, you force them into an existence that (a) they did not ask for or consent to, and (b) will inevitably cause them to suffer, sometimes horrifically. whether a person has a good life with little suffering, or a hard life with lots of suffering, is largely a matter of chance. Knowing that, how can anyone justify the choice to have children?

I’m not trying to attack parents or people who want children. This is a legit philosophical question and the subject of many books.

Well, if that’s how you feel, people should just jump off really tall buildings and end their suffering, en-mass. But at least now we know what you were getting at.

@cazzie that is a strawman argument, and also not a response to my question. I did not say that life is only suffering, or that life is not worth living, or that we would all be better off if we stopped existing. I am saying that (and there is no denying this) when you create a person, you have guaranteed their suffering by forcing them into existence, because it is an inevitable part of life. Knowing this, how could having children still be an ethical decision?

I ask this as a person who loves her life and her parents and is glad she was born.

We’re animals, trolltoll. Breeding and sending down our DNA is a very big part of what we are. You may as well ask, ‘what is the use of eating? We’re just going to shit it out anyway’. To live is to have joy and hope and love. Life begets a whole shit-load more than suffering. If everything is happiness and joy, we wouldn’t know what happiness and joy was. We’d be boring things. We have a saying in our house when things get rough, ‘What doesn’t kill us makes us more interesting.’

In the same way my uncle could be my aunt if he grew a big bouncy set of tits

@cazzie you continue to evade the question. Are we ethically justified in having children because it is what animals do? Is it not worth asking ourselves whether it is something we should do, because we have been doing it since life began?

For most people, life is more than suffering, correct. But does that mean it is acceptable to inflict life on somebody who does not ask for it?

I think that if we examine this question from a purely logical perspective, we are forced to acknowledge that it is not ethical to have children, and most of our arguments for having children come from emotional reasoning.

relevant and thoughtful as always, @ucme

I do my best, it’s a gift I know, ironically so are my children

We don’t ‘inflict’ life on someone. Your question is from such a twisted perspective it relieves itself of all meaning as a question. You are trying to make a statement. That is all.

@cazzie oh, but that is exactly what we do. Inflict, give, bless, bestow, grant, endow, all mean the same thing here.

And I thoroughly and utterly disagree that it is a meaningless question, or that it is irrelevant as “why should we eat if we’re just going to shit?”

We should always be open to questioning whether our behaviors are ethical, especially when they directly affect other people. When we demand that people accept that certain things are right to do without question, we fall to complacency and thoughtlessness. We debase ourselves by letting other people decide rightfulness and wrongfulness for us.

Not questioning leads to people doing things for no other reason than “it’s just what people do” and because they don’t want to go against the crowd. It leads to people doing things which they really shouldn’t, because the question of whether they should never even crossed their minds.

As rational people, we should be able to think about a person’s argument and approach it from a place of dispassion. We should be able to react to it without offense and hostility, even if we personally disagree with it.

My question and arguments have offended you, and so you have written them off as having no meaning. But why does it offend you so much?

Of course there are obvious and powerful ethical arguments against bringing children into the world. Let’s start with the undeniable fact that the planet is already overloaded with an infestation of human beings.

I think I’m too old for such idealistic hand wringing. I get the overpopulated earth argument. But your idea that out children didn’t ask to be born so why inflict life on them has only one side. We CANT ask them. It isn’t possible to do the thing to fix that ethical problem.

also, I think that the fact that I had to spell out exactly what I meant to you, despite saying several times the ethics of childbearing itself, sort of proves my point that it’s something we don’t typically even think of at all, which is why you think my question is absurd. You’ve never even asked yourself whether having children was something you should or shouldn’t do. Or that it could be wrong.

Don’t deny your moral responsibility here. You can’t ask them, but you can decide not to have them. You can weigh the misery and suffering of their lives which cannot be avoided and decide whether it’s right to force them to endure it by giving birth to them .

Anyway, it’s obvious where you stand.

Meh.

If you don’t want to be a parent, I totally agree that it is unethical to become a parent. By extension, it’s also unethical to force someone who does not wish to become a parent to become one.

I can’t ask an ovum if it wants to become an infant any more than I can ask a head of lettuce if it wants to become a salad. Using consent in this instance is a futile exercise.

There can be suffering and there can be happiness.

@Seek ah, so my question is invalid, and childbearing needs no ethical defense or consideration at all. We should do it because “it’s what we do.” No need to ask whether it’s right or wrong since it’s morally equivalent to making a salad.

@jca there is no guarantee of happiness. Lots of people are miserable and wish they had never been born. But there is a guarantee of suffering.

No one is harmed by not being born, but a person who is born is guaranteed to be harmed. In light of this fact, there is an undeniable ethical component to the decision to have children. Deflecting it by saying that you can’t ask a non-existent person consent is just denying your ethical responsibility for the decision to have kids, and lazy reasoning.

There is a chance for happiness, and many people on Earth are happy. I am aware that many are unhappy, too. It’s a gamble.

Many will agree with you, @trolltoll, and many will not. It’s an opinion, and everyone is entitled to theirs.

@jca The happiness of the majority of people does not invalidate or make irrelevant the abject misery of a minority of people. Nor does it prove that we shouldn’t or needn’t bother asking whether having children is moral.

Let’s try a thought experiment.

Say you are invited to press a button, and pressing this button will have one of two possible outcomes. One outcome, which has a ⅔ probability of occurring, is that you win $100,000, and you have the option to share as much of it as you want with one other person. The other outcome, which has a ⅓ probability of occurring, is that you still win $100,000, but now the other person gets cancer.

Pressing the button is a win/win for you personally, and you have a good chance of getting the better outcome. But there is still a 1-in-3 chance that the other person will end up with a horrible disease.

Do you decide to press the button, knowing that it could have devastating consequences for this other person? Do you decide that it is worth the risk to their health and happiness?

@trolltoll: I think your points are valid, although I don’t think I’d compare having a child to your comparison above. I think also that many people here make valid points for the opposing stance. Like I said above, many will agree with you and many will not. It’s an opinion, and everyone is entitled to theirs. I’m also no longer going to argue this point as I’m not that into it, not that invested in it, but you seem very into your stance.

@jca why don’t you think it’s a relevant comparison? One in three people will develop cancer in their lifetime. When people become parents, they take that risk, but it’s another person who pays for it.

@trolltoll – your thought experiment lacks one key point: The other person has the ability to consent to the risk or not. How does the other person feel about this? Why don’t we ask them?

Again, you can’t ask an ovum whether it wants to become a person, as it is not congnizant.

If you feel this strongly against childbirth, then simply take appropriate measures to assure you do not breed. That is all you can do. You cannot make choices for other people.

@Seek, nope, but I can have an opinion about the morality of other people’s actions and ask them to defend them.

And let’s just say the other person doesn’t have a say in consenting to the risk. Who says they should? Only you and you alone know what happens when you push the button.

Nice dodging the question maneuver, but the issue of consent is still the issue of consent.

an ovum does not have the ability to consent or not consent

Maybe your sperm would rather choose to attempt to become a person than die in a tissue behind your bedside table. Are you going to ask all of them individually? How will they let you know?

i have no idea what your point about ovums is or why you seem to think it invalidates the fact that

no one can consent to being born. no one signs up for the risks of life. it is a choice made for them when their parents decide to give birth to them.

you’re a parent and this consideration has made you feel insulted, because it has to do with the morality of a choice you have personally made and have never second guessed. My opinion is unpopular but that does not mean it’s wrong. You can always go find reassurance from other parents, you are in league with billions of like-minded people. you don’t have to keep engaging me on this if you have no actual rebuttals to my arguments.

I mean, if you just let go of the consent thing, what do you say to my original question which is “can having children be unethical? are we justified in questioning the ethics of having children?”

Parents make every decision for their children until the children are legal adults. I’m not sure why you’re leaning so hard on that point.

Opinions are like bellybuttons. Everyone has one and most are full of lint.

I am not insulted by this rather silly argument. Anyone can be justified in questioning the ethics of anything. Asking questions is good. Trolling people because they don’t agree with you is silly.

and yet, you still refuse to answer the question itself.

“Parents make every decision for their children until the children are legal adults. I’m not sure why you’re leaning so hard on that point.”

I never said anything about making choices for your children. You’re just continuing to run in circles around the consent issue.

Silly question? The question is central to an entire branch of philosophy called anti-natalism. no need to be flippant about what you don’t care to learn about or understand.

@Seek you had children knowing there was the possibility they could get raped, tortured, mutilated, burned, or have any number of horrible awful things happen to them. But you decided it was worth the risk and had them anyway.

I believe it is more ethical to not have children than to have them, due to overpopulation. I also believe that is is not super ethical to have children if you know you’re likely to pass down a disease that causes a lot of suffering. (I use these beliefs to make decisions about my own life, not to tell anyone else what to do. I plan to adopt.)

I answered the question several times. You disagreed with my answer, and have refused to accept it. That’s a personal issue with you, not me.

@Seek you didn’t, actually.

Your first response had nothing to do with the original question. Your second, third, fourth, and fifth responses nitpicked over the consent issue. Your sixth response was to say that it was a silly question and to call me a troll. So I still have no idea what you think about the question in the title.

Allow me to return you to my first response:

“Meh”.

@Seek What a lazy and insipid response.

If all you can say to it is “meh,” why bother saying anything at all? Is it so below you to think about?

Meh

You bring children into the world knowing that they will suffer and die and all you can say is fucking “meh?”

here I thought fluther members were of a higher mental caliber than most people.

Literally everything dies. The universe will die, eventually. We come to terms with that fact and enjoy all of the things that happen before the dying part.

Jesus, life in your head must be miserable.

@Seek yep, and not nearly as roomy as life in yours.

May I ask what steps you have taken to assure you will not procreate, @trolltoll?

Assuming something beyond “living in my grandmother’s basement” is necessary.

Not that it’s any of your business, but i have had an abortion and would have another one if I ever got pregnant again.

Not that I get laid that often, living in grandma’s basement and all.

I’m glad to hear that. I was raised by someone who never wanted to be a parent, and it’s the main reason I’m steadfastly pro-choice.

Anyone who doesn’t want to become a parent, shouldn’t.

This seems to be a good choice for those who are serious about not procreating. I’ve considered it myself.

Yes, reproducing is selfish and in some cases the most inappropriate people choose to procreate and hand over their misery to the next generation. Over the years I have come to believe that reproduction should be limited only to those who are wealthy, well in mind and body and mentally balanced. Unfortunately few are those who should even consider bringing more pain-ridden people into this mess of a world. What many of us do is add to this self-defeating cycle of misery.

If only the wealthy and “well in mind and body” procreated, we’d assure the complete destruction of the human race within a generation.

Who’s going to teach the children of the wealthy how to make food, purify water, run wastewater treatment plants, and build safe housing structures?

@Seek if imagining me as a sexless, basement-dwelling troll surrounded by crusty jizz tissues has been helping you deal with being asked challenging questions, then I am truly sorry to have burst your bubble.

I’ve heard about essure and I’ve thought about a tubal, but I would really just prefer if my bf got a vasectomy. It’s less invasive and he can freeze buckets of his sperm if he’s really intent on procreating someday.

I’m not challenged at all.

We are animals. Our instinct is to procreate. There is no ultimate purpose to life, so all we have is life.

I am a realist. I understand that life is hard, but it’s also wonderful, and the thing that all of us will do for the longest. The people who exist are the lucky ones. The many billions who never get the chance to exist miss out on this awesome cosmos all around us.

I’m not Michelle Duggar having way more kids than I can care for. I know my resources are limited. I have one child. I have no plans to have more at this time. My husband is getting older and I don’t think more kids are in our future. We are below replacement value in our breeding. I think in the grand scheme of things that’s pretty goddamn ethical.

And I repeat: If you don’t want to have a child, please take steps to assure it does not happen. No child deserves to be born unwanted.

I just asked my seven-year-old son, and he assures me that he does enjoy life, is glad he was born, and thinks the universe is super-cool, and wanted to know whether we could watch that documentary on black holes again.

@Seek of course not, my apologies. To be challenged would require you to think critically and honestly about this question, which I now see you cannot do.

Aren’t you tired of talking about this, since it’s so meh?

@Seek and I’m sure your son will think the same exact way, whether he is 7, 17, 37, 57, or 87.

It seems that the concept of normative ethics cannot be applied in this case. From a consequential point of view, reproduction could be seen as immoral, since it ultimately results in suffering. However, the antinatalist position rests on the basis of moral absolutism—it cannot be proven that morality is objective. The philosophy of negative utilitarianism, which asserts that reducing harm is ethical, is based on a premise that can be argued from a relativistic view of morality. Overall, ethics is concerned with what is best for people as a whole. It relies on instinct and emotion over logic and reason. There is no definite answer as to whether reproducing is ethical or not from this perspective.