Is Having Children Unethical?

There’s nothing more natural than having sex and birthing and raising children. There’d never be a human being to write this article, or any other, if the instinct to reproduce weren’t deeply interwoven into the behavioral repertoire of not only our species, but a host of species that precede us on the phylogenetic tree, dating back billions of years. But much of what’s natural is also immoral. Eating meat, for example, is very natural for omnivores and carnivores alike, but if you’ve ever seen the fear in the eyes of an animal on its way to becoming food, you know that there’s nothing less cruel about this process because of its naturalness.

Now, there’s no surer way to guarantee that a living thing will experience death than to give it life in the first place. We tend to speak about life as if it’s a gift, and it’s no wonder why, since it’s such a seemingly rare and inexplicable phenomenon, but a quick look at the statistics on suicide, and we can see that many have sought to return this gift, and felt so strongly about doing so that they were able to override every instinct in their body to commit the act of killing themselves.

Life is a mixed bag and a random draw. It’s very likely that, over the course of our existence, we’ll each experience a significant amount of pleasures and a large amount of displeasures just as well. What’s guaranteed, however, is that we’ll experience the pains of aging and/or death, and when we reflect on the value of life under the only circumstances that we possibly can reflect — as those currently living— we find our reasoning somewhat impaired by an awareness that to give up existing we have to pass through the instinctually aversive experience of dying. We understand that we’ll have to endure pain and fear to separate from our mortal coil, and that we will likely leave suffering in our wake. Who finds our body, how does it affect those who know and care for us, and so on, are all considerations attendant on the general decision to take one’s own life. The philosopher Schopenhauer went so far as to argue that, “…the terrors of death offer considerable resistance: they stand like a sentinel at the exit gate. Perhaps there is no one alive who would not already have put an end to his life if this end were something purely negative, a sudden cessation of existence. But there is something positive in it as well: the destruction of the body. This is a deterrent…”

The question at hand, however, is not one of removing life. It’s one of obviating life. There is no death for an existence that simply never came about; there is no loss or broken attachment either. When we ponder the question, we naturally think on the only experience of living we’ve ever had — our current life. We have to impersonalize life before we can honestly answer whether or not it is morally justifiable to impart existence on a person without their consent.

I wish I could write out a happy ode to life here, and say I stand firmly on one side of the issue, but I cannot. Life in its largest context is meaningless. We come into existence, we exit existence, and eventually we’re completely forgotten. All of life is likely to follow this trajectory. We’re infinitesimally small in size and in the duration of our being. In the end, this is all little more than a dream. There is no one manual for life, and our existence is marred by pointlessness. We are designed haphazardly, as is the world around us. We suffer from anxiety, sadness, lapses in self-control, and failings of our personal ability on a daily basis. We could fall victim to some horrible illness or accident tomorrow and live the rest of our short lives out in pain. It seems like we have chaos coming at us from all sides, both externally and internally. Approaching the issue objectively as best one can, I see no inherent value to life and no inherent meaning to being alive.

If I approach the question as one of not objective value but, rather, subjective value and consider whether life is an experience that I personally feel fortunate or unfortunate to have been granted, I would treat this question as contingent on my answer to a different question: Did my life consist of more happiness or more suffering? A happy life is a pleasurable experience and one that could very well offset the unpleasantness of me, and every other living thing, eventually dying. I’m not far enough along to say whether my life was on the whole a happy one. Moreover, this would be a partial look at the larger question, as it would narrow the focus to my life, instead of life itself. Even though we must use a subjective measure, it must also be general and impersonal, so that the real question is: Are most lives deemed as happy lives when being looked back upon at their end? It does seem so, but there’s no real way to know for sure. If the act of renouncing life were not so distinct from the act of precluding life, we’d have the number of suicides as a fairly objective answer to our question, but alas it is not, so we do not. There is no real way to say whether most lives can, in retrospect, be deemed primarily happy or unhappy experiences. Let us disregard this question, then, and move onto another point.

The second thing to consider is that to be “alive” seems to be such an uncommon state for the stuff of existence to be in. The choice to be alive is not really one between existing and not existing; it is, on the one hand, to not exist for all of eternity and, on the other hand, to not exist for all of eternity save a brief, inconsequential lapse of time. The odds on the wager shift dramatically in light of this, so that the bestowal of life itself becomes something of a gift, due to its rarity alone. The strongest justification I can find for forcing existence onto another is that it is just a small taste of variety in an otherwise unchanging eternity. Being alive seems like a very large commitment as you experience it, but it’s really just a few waking moments marking a brief interruption in a never-ending slumber. This marks the decisive point in this humble disquisition.

I feel some sense of pity that, should I ever have children, I will have knowingly decided to expose them to pain, sadness, fear, infirmity, death, aging, and every other terrible thing that can possibly happen to a person in their life. But I will then assuage that guilt with knowledge that I have also given them access to happiness, beauty, knowledge, sight, sounds, tastes, love, and all the other wonders that accompany being alive. Finally, I will put the matter to rest by concluding that if I have made the wrong decision, then I have only introduced a temporary wrong against a permanent right, but if I made the right decision, I have granted them a miraculous chance to escape the interminableness of non-existence, and to stand alongside me for a time and look out, as the universe unto itself, at all the complex splendor that is.

In conclusion, the act of imparting life on another without their consent is not itself unethical. There are other considerations, in terms of what that life will then have to consume, what changes it may bring about out on other livings, etc., that could be considered in the larger question on whether being alive requires immoral acts in some regard, but this is beyond the range of our current discussion. Life itself is a gamble, but if that gamble should turn out badly, the results of it will carry on for such an insignificant amount of time, relative the whole of eternity, that we should say the chance for a brief intermission from not being is inherently worth it.

Enjoy this article? I’d recommend following it up with: “Arguments Against the Existence of Time”