Is Having Children a Moral Issue?
On the Pronatalism/Antinatalism debate in philosophy
The Plight of My Friends
A friend of mine from college, “Cameron”, was diagnosed with a vicious autoimmune condition the year after we graduated, neuromyelitis optica. She was struck with sudden blindness while doing volunteer work in Tibet. NMO is a congenital disease that slowly destroys the nervous system. It eventually took one of her eyes, destroyed her body, and killed her at age 35. Two years before her death, Cameron conceived and gave birth to twins.
Another friend from college, “Sheila”, was diagnosed shortly after graduation with a very different congenital health problem. This one was not as serious, the kind that can be managed with very careful dietary restrictions and medication during flare-ups. But it is not pleasant to live with, and she was worried she’d pass it on to children, not to mention the risk that pregnancy would have had on her own health. Today, Sheila is alive and well, happy, but without any children.
Middle-age is an interesting time to be thinking about procreation, because (well for me at least) you’re past the point where you’re deliberating about it, but you’ve also had enough experience with friends and family to have intimate knowledge of other people’s choices. And, you see the consequences of those choices.
I have friends who had kids for all kinds of reasons. One wanted to please her mom and grandma. Some were bored. Some did it because their partner wanted one. Some felt left out because their friends were having them. Some felt a deep yearning, foreseeing that they could not lead a fulfilling life without loving a child and being loved by one, no matter how long or short that love would end up lasting.
I have many friends who refrained from having kids, also for a lot of different reasons. Some were abused as children, and were afraid of repeating the cycle. A few didn’t want to go through pregnancy, though the idea of raising children seemed fine. Others liked traveling too much. Many friends didn’t have children because their health insurance wasn’t great during their child-bearing years. Health insurance, incidentally, is often a decisive reason in the US for all kinds of momentous life choices, like getting married, moving, or starting or changing careers.
I even came to learn about the complexity of my own mother’s reproductive choices, shortly before her death. She spent her life raising two children on her own, on a bank teller’s salary. She had children at age 30, not early by the standards of someone born in China in 1949, but she still regretted that choice. She should have waited, she thought, because it was too hard having to raise children while learning English in a new country, trying to make rent, and dealing with and eventually leaving an abuser. But she never considered having children an open choice in life, it was simply a natural progression of life stages, like learning to drive or getting a job, two other things that a lot of young people don’t take for granted any more. My mom had at least one abortion after my sister and I were born, an unplanned pregnancy that she was not in a position to support. But she also had at least one miscarriage of a child she did want, and suffered greatly because of it.
I know people who have destroyed their finances and marriages trying to have children, and people who have destroyed otherwise functioning marriages and finances as a result of having children. The reasons people have for and against having children are personal, complex, and dependent on many contingencies. Some reasons are unique to them, some reasons are not unique at all, and are supposed to reasons for anyone to have or not have children. I don’t know many people who make procreative choices for big political, economic, and religious reasons, but I don’t doubt such people exist. Plenty of people renounce procreation to serve their God, and they have historically been a celebrated class given a lot of power. I have seen documentaries with seas of Russian youth reproducing in baby-making camps on instructions from Putin to repopulate mother Russia. I’ve been to religious ceremonial marriages in very traditional cultures that talk about the religious duty to bear children. I know economists who argue that securing economic growth for the future requires people to have at least three children. Though I don’t particularly like this reasoning, I don’t deny there is at least one economist out there who has procreated for macroeconomic reasons.
I have always considered people’s reasoning about their reproductive choices to be interesting, sometimes wise, sometimes unwise, but never morally praiseworthy or blameworthy. I always thought this was common sense. But a philosopher I interviewed for the show (an upcoming episode on natalism) said that he considered bringing a child into the world to be one of the most morally consequential acts a person can do. He did not say this as though it was a substantive or controversial premise. It was a platitude.
I don’t know which is the “normie” position, that procreation is a moral or nonmoral act. Moralizing procreation is indeed how many of us talk when we serve as advisors, when we’re deliberating for ourselves, or when we gossip about others.
“Look how awful it is that those people on that reality show had twelve kids when they can barely take care of even one!”
“It’s just wrong to bring a child into this world of climate change, rising fascism, and rampant exploitation.”
“You owe it to all the sacrifices we’ve made for you to give us a grandchild!”
All of this is highly moralized talk, as much instances of common sense as my opposing orientation not to moralize reproductive choices. So maybe the normie position is contradictory, or completely underspecified relative to normie talk. Plenty of people in philosophy moralize the having of children, and give arguments pro and con. I want to try and defend my pre-theoretical bias; to find all my friends reasonable and moral people.
Moral Reasons and Procreation
A curious thing about all of my friend's’ reasons for and against having children is how odd they are as moral reasons.
Moral reasons tend to be time-symmetric. If it is wrong for you to cheat on next week’s final exam, then the week after the exam, it was wrong for you to have cheated on last week’s final.
Moral reasons tend to be agent-neutral, or agent-generalizable. If it is wrong for you, the commander, to order the bombing of a hospital, then it is wrong for any other commander to order the bombing of that same hospital under the same circumstances.
Moral reasons also tend to be “dischargable” from your position as an “advisor” to your position as an “agent”. For instance, if your friend comes to you for advice after having a big fight with her mom, and as an impartial third party, you advise your friend that she is in the wrong, then you would also be in the wrong if you were in that very same situation with your own mom.
Finally, and maybe this is just a variation of the same theme, moral reasons are quite insensitive to the desires of individuals. It doesn’t matter all that much that a commander really wants to bomb the hospital. It doesn’t matter that he has a deep yearning for bloodshed, and will get a lot of joy out of it. The weight of moral reasons simply swamps that desire. The same is true of desires to do good, like sending food to children starving in a war zone. Even if you do not have this desire, morality demands that you do it.
The reasons my friends give for and against their having children do not seem to me to have these characteristics. Cameron and Sheila were in very similar circumstances but came to opposite conclusions. Cameron came to the conclusion that she should try and conceive, but I strongly believe she would not have said that her reasons generalized: she would not have said that anyone as ill as her should have children. And, similar, Sheila would not have said anyone as ill as her should not have children. Almost all of the reasons I see my friends have given for their procreative choices seem to work this way. If one person takes pleasing mom and grandma to be a sufficient moral reason to have a child, it does not follow that such a reason is sufficient for anyone else to have a child. Not even close. Having bad health insurance is a good enough reason for one friend not to conceive, but its just seems patently false that anyone and everyone who has bad health insurance should not conceive.
If I were an advisor to both Cameron and Sheila at the time they were deliberating about children, (and I wasn’t), I probably would have said that, if anything, Cameron had more moral reason not to have children than Sheila. I might have advised Cameron that, given that she would die soon, maybe even in childbirth, given that she could pass on her debilitating condition to her children, she should not conceive. I might have advised Sheila that, given that her disease was not potentially fatal, that she was in a happy marriage, and that she actually liked children enough to want to work with them for a living, she should conceive. Yet they came to opposite conclusions. And to be honest, if I were in Cameron’s situation, knowing what I know about what I was like in my early 30s, I probably would have decided the same way. If I, or my wife, were exactly in Sheila’s position, I might have decided exactly as she did (Why? I don’t know. Maybe imminent death is a strong motivator for procreation for me in the way it was for Cameron. Someone find me a psychoanalyst.)
No matter how strongly someone would have judged, antecedently, that it was all things considered not morally okay for Cameron to conceive, it just seems false to me that once conceived, it was wrong for her to have done it. Many philosophers who write about procreative ethics recognize this strange time-asymmetry of the morality of having children. If it is wrong for a 14 year old to decide to have a child, it can be perfectly wonderful for that same person, 20 years later, to have had that child at 14. No regrets, no morally wrong act.
Kate Manne recently argued for a feminist antinatalism, but even her view makes an exception for women who have a deep desire and yearning for parenting. There is, then, a species of antinatalism that takes a host of moral reasons not to have children to be quite decisive, but a strong desire for children overrides these other factors. In case after case, reasons cited as moral reasons to have children, or not to have children, just don’t seem to have the properties that moral reasons tend to have.
So here is a working hypothesis: deciding to procreate, and deciding against procreation, is a morally innocent decision. I’m using “innocent” semi-technically here, to mean something like outside of moral judgment, where the strength of reasons, even otherwise moral reasons, cannot ever suffice to make the decision morally reproachable. Usually the idea of “innocence” is associated with evil or good intent. But procreative decisions seem to retain their innocence even when they are done with bad intentions. If I decide to procreate to create an organ match for my other child, if I decide not to have a child to spite my parents for their lousy child-rearing, I have acted in violations of good will par excellence for Kant and Kantians. But as much as someone displays a bad character or faulty state of mind in deciding to have or not have children for these reasons, the procreative decision itself strikes me as fine.
Now there may well be extreme, Nazi and science-fiction-like examples that are exceptions, i.e., not innocent. Maybe there is an evil scientist who wants to conceive her own children with the rarest and most painful genetic diseases just to perform painful experiment on them. Maybe there are people who decide to conceive children so as to sell their organs at a profit. (But even in these cases, isn’t the act of experimenting and the act of harvesting a child’s organs for profit the wrong here?)
Lessons from Procreation in War
A woman in a war zone finds herself pregnant in an environment where her life and the lives of her entire community hangs on a thread. The life of her newborn will be, if lucky, one of malnutrition, pain and illness, a very high risk of maiming, inhalation of toxic dust, and watching her siblings, cousins, or parents blown up next to her. Foreseeing this, the woman carries the child to term and gives birth anyway. Another woman in the same war zone must decide whether to refrain from sex with her partner for the duration of a war that appears to be indeterminate. She ends up refraining. Another ends up conceiving, and aborts, on the grounds that this is not a situation in which to bring a child to term.
I don’t see how there can be any way in which the morality of the these situations and these decisions fall on any of the women. Not only is it hard for me to morally fault or morally criticize any of these women in their decisions, it seems me that to think that the moral issue in these circumstances consists in their decision to procreate or not offends my conscience deeply. It just doesn’t seem like when it comes to procreating, the job of morality is to keep fixed the situation as it is in the world and to determine the permissible or optimal or required thing to do for a person in that situation. That a woman must make a decision to procreate or not in the middle of a war zone gives quite decisive reason to end the war, or take all child-bearing women and children away from the war zone, or conduct the war in such a way that does not risk their lives and livelihoods.
What if procreative choices are a fixed point on which other moral reasons revolve, but are not themselves moral choices? That’s is what moral innocence involves, and what I think it means in these circumstances. And if this is true in the harshest conditions of adversity, in can also be true in much easier circumstance of adversity.
From Individual to Population-Level Ethics
I understand the macroconcerns that animate economists, demographers, and philosophers. There really are global consequences of changing birth rates. When they climb exponentially, entire ecosystems get destroyed, and thousands of other species go extinct, the remaining ones suffer greatly, as do many humans. Similarly, when populations fall exponentially, they will have very large effects not just on natural but social ecosystems. This is true of the biological reproduction of every other nonhuman species, so how can it not be true of us?
Yet nonhuman reproduction, nonhuman ecological change, are morally innocent par excellence. No one thinks to morally evaluate giant pandas, much less plankton or algae, for their reproductive practices. Why not the reproductive choices of humans?
A working assumption for everyone is that as soon as something becomes a human issue, it becomes a moral issue. I actually like this assumption, I think it is mostly true. Lions killing isn’t moral or immoral, but human killing is. There really are deep and difficult moral issues about how policy-makers should and should not react to the effects of exponential population change. But this is consistent with thinking that individual-level decisions about procreation are morally innocent. In fact, taking them to be morally innocent places very different constraints on policy-making than taking them to be morally culpable. For one, morally innocent decisions are not liable to punishment, penalty, or coercion, whereas morally culpable decisions are. There is a standing obligation, very difficult to defeat, in preserving the morally innocent, but not the morally culpable. Given these basic normative truths, there are few things I find more repulsive than policy-makers treating reproductive choices as morally culpable, whether those choices are pro or anti-natal.
In the end I think it is super normie to say that whatever you end up deciding about children, whether it ends up being good for you or bad for you, you’re morally in the clear. In this case I do think common sense wins out. In the end, even if every philosophical claim in this post is refuted, this is one species of common sense I take to be Moorean, something I’m far more certain is correct than any philosophical theory justifying or refuting it. None of my friends have done anything wrong.
Here’s a kind of story about why procreative choices would look “innocent” even though they’re not different in kind from other choices.
It’s not that there are no reasons that bear on procreative choices—that procreation is a rationality-free-zone. That would be a weird, brute normative fact (as I take it Victor is suggesting). Rather, it’s that third parties are generally not in a good position to judge the wisdom of procreative choices, because the factors that reasonably bear on decisions about whether and when to have children vary from person to person in ways that are pretty opaque to third parties. So it makes sense to have a social practice of not judging people for procreative choices, even though there can be better and worse such choices.
Some reasons to like this picture. First, it makes sense of the behavior of people who reject “innocence”. If you think the factors that bear on whether to have kids are that all kids are going to be born into a dying earth, or that it’s always wrong to subject people to serious risks to which they can’t consent, then those considerations are not opaque to third parties, and they don’t vary from person to person, so it also makes sense that you’d be an across the board anti-natalist, condemning all decisions to procreate.
Second, it puts procreative decisions in a category with other choices that we tend not to moralize about. Take, e.g., decisions about what sort of career to go into. I think we treat them a lot like procreative choices, in that we tend not to judge them (with rare exceptions), but there it would be even weirder to think anything goes, or that moral reasoning doesn’t get a grip. If you join doctors without borders, you probably think it’s in part for moral reasons, but we also don’t condemn people who don’t do that, but could have.
Topics like these always beg the meta-ethical question of what morality actually is. In my view morality, like so many things in life, is first and foremost about survival. The vast majority of commonly-accepted moral precepts can be understood as rules which promote the adaptive fitness of the community and I don’t think that’s happenstance. In my view morality is the cultural DNA of society and its purpose is to provide the generational wisdom which promotes the survivability of the cultures which adopt it. By that light the obvious conclusion is that reproduction not only is a moral topic but in some sense it’s the most important moral topic. Without reproduction there is no society and without society there is no morality. Morality is therefore subject to something like selective forces, and it makes no more sense to call anti-natalism moral than it does to call sterility adaptive.
As a meta-ethical imperative survivability doesn’t directly translate into individual-level dictates, that’s where specific (perhaps context-dependent) moralities must intervene. I can imagine contexts where it can be either moral, immoral, or morally neutral for a particular couple to reproduce. However I can’t imagine a world where the concept itself is outside the scope of moral consideration. Given our falling fertility levels we may soon come to a point where the very survivability of the species depends on reproductive choices. In that context I have a hard time seeing how one could avoid forming moral judgements about it.