Do We Have a Duty to Breed?

by Will Wilkinson on April 18, 2007

Commenting on Tyler Cowen’s post reporting on Hans Peter-Kohler’s paper [pdf] on the the effect of children on subjective well-being, Ross Douthat (subbing for Andrew Sullivan) writes:

Europe seems to have this pretty well figured out. And I don’t mean to be flip — the European “let’s stop at one” approach to childbearing really is well-calculated to maximize a certain kind of parental well-being, narrowly defined. Of course, it’s also calculated to seriously diminish the “subjective well-being” of all the second and third children who don’t get conceived because their parents decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. And while the theory that parents have children “either for the benefit of the firstborn or because they reason that if the first child made them happy, the second one will, too” may be true in many or even most cases, it also reflects a certain degree of deplorable solipsism. The chief reason parents should take on the trouble of conceiving and raising a child is that the child is a good in and of itself - one of the greatest goods there is, in fact, in any moral scheme worth considering - not because they think that it will make them or their already-existing offspring happier.

That bringing a child into existence is “one of the greatest goods there is” may be a truism in Ross’s moral scheme, it somehow figures into none of the major moral philosophies in the history of moral philosophy, as far as I can tell. Does Ross think that the entire history of moral philosophy is not worth considering? That he is a moral innovator of the first order? I think he’s just not making sense, and insulting low-breeders on the way.

First, you just can’t “diminish the ’subjective well-being’ of all the second and third children who don’t get conceived because their parents decided it wasn’t worth the trouble,” because it is a logical impossibility, an embarrassment to reason. Ross is saying that there exists a person who is harmed by the fact that it has not been made to exist. It refutes itself.

Second, setting aside the logically impossible theory of harms, what is Ross’s moral scheme? We know this much: there is more than one thing that is objectively, non-instrumentally good, producing new human beings is one of them, and is one of the most valuable. Let’s just suppose this is true. Now, it is possible to acknowledge that some things are objectively good without falling under an obligation to produce them. That a state of affairs is valuable is almost always a reason to bring it about, but it does not create a duty to do so. Does Ross think there is a general moral duty to maximize the quantity of such objective goods, like blushing babies? If so, why?

And even if we do have some such amazing duty, it appears that there are other goods in Ross’s moral universe. Do we have similar duties to create beauty? Truth? Even if babies approach the summit of Ross’s taxonomy of goodness, surely some quantity or combination of other goods outweighs the value of an additional baby. A life spent realizing one’s potential, achieving one’s valuable ambitions, say. Certainly Ross understands that pregnancy and motherhood often require the sacrifice of a woman’s other ambitions, other values she could have brought to the world. Surely there are things, even inside this fantastic moral taxonomy, that men and women could do with their lives to compensate for their choice not to have children. Surely not all childless lives are deplorably solipsistic. Surely living a happy life is of some value and must weigh something. Would a mostly unhappy world swimming in billions upon billion of children really be better than ours? Ross seems to think so.

Anyway, I doubt Ross’s deplorably thoughtless moral scheme (”the only kind worth considering”!) merits being taken even this seriously. What Ross seems to have offered us is a little bit of autobiography: he thinks he has some kind of duty to sire a big family. I don’t mind that, and I’m sure the future mother of his future children will know what she’s getting herself into. I do, however, mind the implication that those of us who believe our lives may produce more good by having just one child, or by having none, are spoiled monads who do too little of value to compensate the universe for our existence.

Viewing 24 Comments

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    Society needs to produce about 2.2 children per female. If YOU don't have any, someone else needs to make up that slack. Otherwise, we will need to enter a sort of Logan's Run world where people too old or otherwise unable to produce enough to justify their existence would need to be forcibly terminated.
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    "Society needs to produce about 2.2 children per female. If YOU don’t have any, someone else needs to make up that slack. Otherwise, we will need to enter a sort of Logan’s Run world where people too old or otherwise unable to produce enough to justify their existence would need to be forcibly terminated."

    You wanna explain that to me? Use really simple terms, 'cause the point obviously shot over my head on the first try.
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    Society only needs to produce 2.2 children per female if you assume that population maintenance is not only a necessity, but the only measure by which value can be determined. We have already entered into an era in which the number of human exceeds the amount of labor demanded. This would seem to negate the objective necessity of population maintenance: society can continue to grow and refine even if we do not have as many people tomarrow as we did today.

    An additional problem faced by your argument is that it fails to understand the global world in which we now live. Less children does not mean population decline. In the US and Europe much of the declining birth rate is off-set by immigration. If I have only one child my neighbor doesn't need to have three if, between the two of us, there is one immigrant.

    Successful societies will always have immigration, unsuccessful ones will face emmigration. Darwin's theory applies to systems and ideas just as much as it does ot organisms.
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    If what William adduces in the first paragraph above is true - i.e., that population can continue to decline (in advanced countries?) because the population size outstrips the amount of labor needed, and so we can "grow and refine even if we do not have as many people tomarrow as we did today - then why is it that Europeans need a constant influx immigrants? Seems the first paragraph conflicts with the next two paragraphs.

    As to the issue of successful societies being predicated on immigration, there's the nagging little problem that people immigrating to Europe do so in order to escape poverty and nothing else; immigrants to the U.S. largely do so for the same reason, but with an important, additional, distinguishing motive: they by and large come here to pursue the 'American dream.' There is no corresponding 'European dream' to speak of whatsoever. Europe is a deeply historical society, United States is not, owing much to the fact that it is "one of the highest and most extreme achievements of the rational quest for the good life according to nature" (Bloom, _Closing_, p. 39).
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    Just to clarify above: 'historical people' = historical right, historical identity, and in contradistinction to 'natural right.' And pursuing 'American Dream' connotes assimilation; and national identity as an American, even if - or often times, especially if - as an immigrant.
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    "You wanna explain that to me? Use really simple terms, ’cause the point obviously shot over my head on the first try."

    Hmm, well, a society has a certain percentage of people who produce goods and services, and the rest of the population essentially lives off of that labor. If no one has children, then eventually the population of people capable of working goes to 0. It doesn't matter how much wealth you have accumulated which might enable you to retire, if there are no people around capable of plowing the fields and making you food, then you don't eat. Thus, in a large sense, people who don't have children are dependent on other peoples having children. The 2.2 children / female number is of course dependent on a huge number of factors, such as the ratio of workers/non-workers, and the productivity of the workers. Depending on immigration to make up the gap in one nation's shortfall isn't a valid argument, since someone else is still having children to make up for your lack of.
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    This is still an incredibly silly way to describe the situation. Society requires that X tons of grain be produced annually... how many tons of grain have YOU produced? Who's picking up your slack?
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    Beauty smackdown, Will!
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    For anyone who has trouble taking this demographic problem seriously, this topic was recently done to death by Mark Steyn in his book America Alone. An excerpt can be seen at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/172323....
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    That bringing a child into existence is “one of the greatest goods there is” may be a truism in Ross’s moral scheme, it somehow figures into none of the major moral philosophies in the history of moral philosophy, as far as I can tell.

    Do all the world's major religions not count as moral philosophies?
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    I think society should support the people honest enough to admit they wouldn't be good parents.

    All the people I know that have chosen not to have kids have only produced a life of perpetual adolescence for themselves, though.

    Anyone thinking they need to remain child-free so they can become the next Isaac Newton will probably spend their later years rather disappointed.
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    An odd argument from a Catholic, given the exalted status of celibacy within the Catholic Church.
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    If there's nothing higher than the individual, then perhaps there is no moral obligation to have a couple of children. But if you think things like your family name or nation or even species have a value - a transcendent value - then there's certainly some sort of obligation there for at least some people to have more than 1 kid.

    I can't tell if Virginia Postrel is mocking the Catholic Church or not, but surely she doesn't believe they teach that everyone should remain celibate?
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    'An odd argument from a Catholic, given the exalted status of celibacy within the Catholic Church.'
    -Virginia Postrel

    Not at all. Just because some are 'called' to celibacy doesn't mean child-bearing is without value. Besides, who would the celibate minister to?
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    I think Virginia's point was that Catholics don't think of their celibates as guilty of "deplorable solipsism." And, if not, then why think any worse of non-catholics who believe they are called to things other/higher than breeding?

    The point has bite since monks and nuns may be the most solipsistic people in the world. Maybe it's not the deplorable kind, though. Who knows?
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    Because they don't think those things are higher.
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    You nailed it here:

    "What Ross seems to have offered us is a little bit of autobiography: he thinks he has some kind of duty to sire a big family."

    I interpret Ross's post as an apologia for Roman Catholicism. The Catholic church has a single goal: to perpetuate Catholicism, and they know the best way to do that is to convince Catholics to have large families, and to raise their children as Catholics. All religions do this, of course (well, except the Shakers -- and look what happened to them).

    It reminds me of Wendy Shalit's book A Return To Modesty, which makes a different argument (about female sexuality) but is basically an apologia for Orthodox Judaism. Both authors are describing how different religious groups use different strategies to survive in a competitive religious ecosystem.

    Evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics provide useful models for interpreting such phenomena. It's a pity that Ross is unable to peek outside his religious blinkers -- but that's just what the religion meme is designed to do. They don't call religious belief a "worldview" for nothing!
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    The point of celibacy is to channel all of your energy, including sexual energy, into the service of others (God). By way of full disclosure, I'm an atheist.
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    It seems the point has been lost here. I don't think Ross was implying that one must have children, only that if one is going to reproduce it should be for the sake of the child being created and not for one’s own gratification. Perhaps I missed something but I fail to see how his comment leads to the conclusion that there is an inherent duty to procreate.
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    It strikes me that Ross was in fact saying that you are harming the children you don't have. We have a duty not to harm. So we have a duty to have those children.
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    Being a Catholic imposes an economic burden on its adherents, since the church expects them to sire as many children as they're physically capable. In the struggle for religious mind-share, the high cost for being Catholic gives other religions a competitive advantage.

    What Ross is really doing is trying to level the playing field between adherents of Catholicism and everyone else, by forcing everyone to assume the same child-bearing cost as Catholics have, thus nullifying the advantage.

    It's the same reason why the epithet "Cafeteria Catholic" is hurled at Catholics (by other Catholics) who only loosely conform to Catholic doctrine. Those Catholics that strictly follow the party line are assuming a greater "cost" for being Catholic, so they attempt to shame less-strict Catholics into behaving in the same, more-strict way, so that the cost of membership is shared equally.

    (Yet another example: in season 2 of Sopranos, Big Pussy's wife confesses to Carmella that she's thinking of leaving him. Instead of expressing sympathy for having to live with an uncaring spouse (that is, actually supporting the wife's desire to end her marriage to Big Pussy), Carmella responds by arguing that Catholics don't believe in divorce. By convincing Big Pussy's to stay in the marriage, Carmella ensures that the cost of being a mobster's wife is the same for all the wives.)
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    Charles said:

    "Perhaps I missed something but I fail to see how his comment leads to the conclusion that there is an inherent duty to procreate."

    For Ross, there certainly is a duty to procreate: it's the cost of membership in the Catholic tribe. Members of different tribes don't have that cost, and that's what makes Ross so nervous.

    Different religions optimize differently. The evolutionary stable strategy for Catholicism is to maximize the number of children in Catholic families. That might explain why the Catholic church is so hostile to gays, since if there were certain Catholics who didn't have to assume the cost of children (here I'm assuming that gays have fewer children than straights), then that would weaken the justification for requiring that Catholics sire many children.
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    "That bringing a child into existence is “one of the greatest goods there is” may be a truism in Ross’s moral scheme, it somehow figures into none of the major moral philosophies in the history of moral philosophy, as far as I can tell."

    It figures in Plato's writing in the Symposium, through the words of Diotima. Although Plato puts the reproduction of ideas higher in the hierarchy of goods he describes there, reproduction of children gets a high place, much higher than, say, financial welfare.

    It also plays a key role in Aristotle's thought.

    After the Greeks, though, moral theories became more individualistic. It's then open to think of having children as minimizing one's welfare.
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    Breastfeeding allows you to provide your baby with all it needs for growth and development. Breast milk not only contains all the nutrients your baby needs, in an easily digested form, but it also contains antibodies to protect your baby from all kinds of infection.

    There are substances in breast milk, which cannot be reproduced. You alone can provide these living factors for your baby. Breastfeeding is a really positive thing to do. It is not only good for your baby, it is good for you. The advantages are numerous.

    The main advantages of breastfeeding for your baby
    * Breast milk is the only food specifically designed, by nature, to meet your baby's individual needs.
    * It contains the right balance of nutrients in a very easily digestible form.
    * Antibodies are passed on through breast milk to protect your baby from all kinds of infection. The longer you can feed your baby the better but if you breastfeed for the first three or four months this protection can last for up to a year.
    * Your baby is much less likely to need to be admitted to hospital.
    * Your baby is less likely to develop diarrhoea or constipation.
    * Breastfeeding reduced the incidence of allergies such as eczema and asthma.
    * Breast milk contains growth factors and hormones to help your baby's development. These cannot be reproduced in formula milk. Children who have breast fed for eight months or more have been shown to achieve more at school than those who have been bottle fed.

    The main advantages of breastfeeding for you
    * Breastfeeding helps your body to return to normal after the birth and burns up to 500 calories a day.
    * Breast milk is always ready and it costs nothing
    * Women who breastfeed often feel a special bond with their baby and may be less likely to develop postnatal depression.
    * Breastfeeding may offer you some protection against developing ovarian cancer, breast cancer and hip fractures.
 

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