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.

“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.

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.)

“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!

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?

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?

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?