Why Should People be Entitled to have Children?
This issue also concerns other "rights". It is not clear to me why people have a right to have children and where that right would come from and how it would be justified.
I think that if it was a right that would be problematic for the rights of the child. Because creating a child is creating someone else who can be imposed on and have their own rights.
So why are we frightened to control reproduction and regulate it considering what is at stake?
I think it is a problematic or unjustified stance to assert that people are entitled to have children. And if people had that right then don't they have equal responsibilities?
I think that if it was a right that would be problematic for the rights of the child. Because creating a child is creating someone else who can be imposed on and have their own rights.
So why are we frightened to control reproduction and regulate it considering what is at stake?
I think it is a problematic or unjustified stance to assert that people are entitled to have children. And if people had that right then don't they have equal responsibilities?
Comments (60)
I'm wondering if overpopulation is inevitable, or if there are ways to balance the rates of increase in population with advances in waste management.
It started with our ancient ancestors popping out their urchins and no-one objecting to that because, well, they wanted to have children too and even if they didn't, why should they care? They didn't generally have to take care of those that weren't theirs after all. And besides who even knew where the little squirts came from in the first place? Probably a gift from the gods (to be returned at will). And then it went on with people building civil societies and making laws without ever concerning themselves about whether they or other people should have children because, well, again, who cared? There were other more important things to think about than the Joneses kiddies. So no laws got made that stopped people having children, and they just presumed it was their right to do so, and when everyone presumes something is their right, and finds nothing wrong in it, and no-one stops it happening, then it effectively is their right, and doesn't need any justification.
Then came some philosophers and bureaucrats who tried to spoil the party with their moralizing and doomsaying at all the wannabe mommies and daddies out there. But unless you listened to Malthus (and thankfully not many did as he was hopelessly, outrageously, wrong) or lived in China, you didn't give a damn, and just continued to presume you were all good and effectively exercise the right to churn out the sprogs willy-nilly. And so it goes on today. The "right" doesn't come from anywhere. It's simply asserted in the absence of resistance, and since having children is perfectly natural and not generally considered harmful, it's the resistance to it that needs to be justified morally not the reproduction.
And besides all that God told us to do it. In some book somewhere.
I believe humans have always been intelligent enough to examine the consequences of having children. For example I reached my own conclusions from my own reasoning. It is true that people were less knowledgeable in that past but not that they had not had no ideas about the ramifications of having children.
For example most tribes I have read about and I can cite examples had restrictions on the number of children people had. They worked out what was a sustainable size of population that is why infanticide was widely practised.
Nevertheless I don't think people should have a right to have children based on ignorance. Of course people will have lots of children if they are uneducated and fed religious dogma but statistics shows that education and intelligence and wealth greatly reduce the number of children people have.
The Chinese did this but now they have reversed their policy, but they had massive famines so they resorted to this policy.
However I would prefer people were reasoned with to refrain from having children and not fed propaganda concerning having children so people felt that having children was essential, the ultimate fulfilment, and entitlement and so on.
There is no reason it should be. Humans have made massive interventions into nature. We don't just let primitive nature run our lives but have invented sophisticated mechanisms for survival, including thousands of medications, surgery, numerous technologies to improve our welfare. Having children is the only area that people are reluctant to control or demand rationality.
Sincere question: What do you make of the flustered this is so effing stupid response?
A few years back I had a professor who was one of the leading voices in this weird academic niche of arguing for redistributing children to the most able parents, and I had to take this person's seminar. At the time I remember just being upset every day that we were even having the conversation, which struck me as analytic philosophy gone mad, the result of an increasingly frantic moral-rights talk.
But now I'm seeing a lot of these weird moral-rights talk games become serious conversations among normal people and I'm starting to feel like maybe I'm missing something? Maybe I'm just too close-minded? It just seems to me like a theoretical approach to the rights and duties of child-rearing is itself a stupid and dehumanizing approach, the last vestige of real human relations being drowned in an ever-growing sea of purely formal juridical relations. No long mother and child playing in the garden, but rights-holders and rights-bearers agreeing to participate in an activity that has been circumscribed and approved by abstract moral reasoning.
What am I missing?
I am a nihilistic about rights. I do not think nature provides us with any rights and they are human inventions.
The concept of rights makes people feel entitled as opposed to working with known resources or limitations.
Right seems to come from the idea that a behaviour or belief is vindicated and therefore right. But like values it seems to come from desires as opposed to science. For example I desire that no children should be hit therefore I believe no child should be hit or abused and have a right not to be hit and abused. I desire that women and men should be treated equally therefore I desire they have the right to be treated equally.
It is never the case that I have discovered a law of nature entailing rights. It is understandable why someone wants to minimise harm and that is the most understandable conception of rights as opposed to entitling anyone to do what they like. I think intervening in different ways in the creation of new people is the only way to limit harm and have harm based rights.
You seem to have a fantastical view if the past treatment of children based on Disney.
Huge numbers of children have starved to death and still do and do not have gardens to play in with some kind of Snow white mother figure. Children have the most protections now than any time in history. Children were sent down mines and up chimneys and are still working down mines and in factories. The increase in welfare has coincided with the increase in prosperity
It is an empathetic and not a legalistic mindset that refutes the right of people to have children along side personal experience of dysfunctional families.I can't think of any children's right movements inspired by legalism. The idea that anyone should be allowed to have children is the anathema to child welfare and patently absurd and the source of unmeasurable child suffering.
And also Baden, one could argue that there was at one time an *obligation to humanity to populate the species.
In any case, you've exemplified one concern I have with this type of talk generally. When I say, hey, I'm worried about how this might eliminate the sort of value I see in the simple pleasure of a mother playing with her daughter, you reply with a shocking level of intensity without even addressing the underlying point, which you dismiss as naive.
The immediate notion that there's something insane or unhinged about my concern with preserving the simple pleasure of a mother playing with her daughter...like, WTF are you talking about? Some children starve to death, some children play in the garden with their mothers. Clearly what we want is to eliminate the former category and encourage the latter. If you had a childhood where you didn't play with your mother than I am sincerely sorry for you, but there's nothing "Disney" about such an idea. I have the pleasure of knowing a lot of mothers who enjoy loving relationships with their children.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Well, what do you mean by a "right"? Are you suggesting "Someone with empathy should feel that they are not entitled to have a children under these circumstances" or are you suggesting "Society should use formal or informal mechanisms to codify a set of rights which will prevent people from having children under these circumstances"?
Society does not function based on mothers playing with their children in the garden, rather on hard work, technology, exploitation,sacrifice and the like.
So using some kind of irrational sentimental template to justify the rest of what reality consists of, the real non manipulative harsh reality(famine war, disease, blind chance) I find more than disturbing and not the least philosophical.
No, society functions at its best to enable people to have the means to engage in healthy loving relationships, joy, and the simple pleasures of life. Many of us work hard, use technology and sacrifice on behalf of our children because we love them, want to be close to them, and want them to live a life that's best for them.
On my view, your vision of society, where we work hard, get exploited and sacrifice for its own sake, without some goal towards which we strive, is dystopian.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I don't know. You're talking about abstract reasoning regarding the rights and entitlements which ought to govern the way a whole society operates with respect to who does and does not get to participate in the remarkable joy of having a loving relationship with your child. It concerns me deeply when you think you can reason about these matters of supreme importance and yet you dismiss discussion of the mutual good of having loving playful days with your children as mere 'irrational sentiment'.
The most general “right” ought to be the right not to be constrained except to the degree that it is necessary. So the default position is “why not?”. We wouldn’t seek to impose restrictions on individuals (or individuals upon themselves) until we can supply the good reasons.
You simply start on the wrong foot in asking why the right to have kids should exist. The first moral or practical question is why would we think to want to remove the open possibility. The burden is on you to make that positive argument.
Having a child is imposing on someone. How can you justify doing something that fundamentally effects someone else that did not consent to it? What kind of rights could we have over over someone else and why?
We can supply good reasons to stop someone harming another person but we refuse to do it in the case of child birth which is the source of all harms.
The burden is on people who feel entitled to do something to someone else not on people who seek to stop this harm.
The point of rights as I see it is about self integrity and harm prevention but having a child is not preventing harm or respecting the child's self integrity. It is an action that needs more justification than most.
By your reasoning I should be able to kill people until you make and argument that convinces me not to.
You would have to work hard to survive even if you did not have children you are just passing on a burden.
It is not a sacrifice to take care of child that you created that did not ask to be born. It is like a masochistic imposition on yourself that you are portraying in the most sentimental unreasonable light that doesn't tally with historical evidence.
People can have a child for no reason, with no qualifications, money, no resources no parental ability. There is no restraint on anyone having children for any reason.
A lot of childless people (including Newton, Handel, Schubert & Descartes) have contributed a lot to society. There are to be creative, change the world and fulfill yourself other than adding to overpopulation, resource depletion and inequality.
It concerns me deeply that you can use sentiment to try and mask the vast amount of historical and current suffering of children and their adults selves via sentiment.
The matter of supreme importance is child suffering and suffering and individual integrity not someones desire to enact yet another narcissistic fictional drama with the fruit of their loins where they feature as some kind of heroic self sacrificing benevolent life giver.
In the city I live someone had all 8 of his children taken off him at their birth because he was a drug addict as were his girlfriends. But we mustn't stop them having children because that would imply that parenting is no longer sacred and romantic?
And so you jump straight into a justification ... based on the impact it would have on the unrestrained freedoms of others within the collective.
So as I just argued, this is where any talk of rights does start. And as the conversation develops, we would expect some pragmatic balance between the individual and the collective to emerge. That is what it is all about.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Show me how MY reasoning leads to that. :grin:
Since we've hit the point where you (a) simply refuse to recognize the potential joy and value of life, and (b) reject my initial invitation to have you explain how I am thinking about this matter the wrong way and why I should care about it like you do -- instead offering increasingly frantic assertions about how I'm living in some fantasy land because I love and respect my parents and aim to pass this love on to my children -- then I suspect that, as suggests, there's little conversation to be had without engaging in a needlessly tiring debate.
You are too unwilling to explain and justify your views to an unconvinced observer -- one who literally asks you to help change his mind! -- without resorting immediately to the notion that dissent reveals a lack of intelligence or moral character. God only knows why you bother to start a thread with such a sentiment.
You said:
Quoting apokrisis
You say the default position is "Why not" which entails people do as they please until they feel you have given them a good reason not to do so.(Which could be never).
People should be open to reason before they act. Unless you think people should act without good reason until someone can convince them of an alternative course.
I am discussing whether people are entitled to have children and not whether life has joy and value.
You appear to be claiming that these things justify everyone having children.
You can hold that life has joy in it with out claiming people are entitled to have children.
If you think joy and pleasure count for having children then it would be consistent to recognise that things like, suffering, drug addiction, overpopulation count against people having children.
You were saying people that try and monitor and manage the welfare of children are too analytic and contrasted this with a sentimental picture of motherhood which in no way helps children in need of an intervention
It is questionable sentimentality that seemed to be your only argument after you questionable depiction of those "analytically" concerned with child welfare.
This really suggests having children can't be justified by reason only sentiment which is a suspicion I had already.
So the childless are to be forced to take care of other peoples children that they didn't endorse and had no role in the creation of?
Why impose the burden on everyone else after self indulging in creating a child? My concern with child welfare starts before they are created not as that of a baby sitter for recalcitrant parents. I would take care of a child for his or her on sake not out of mistaken sense of duty to other peoples decisions.
Quoting tim wood
What responsibilities don't they have?
Creating new people is the foundation of society and the route which suffering and inequality are possible. If I were to have child everything that happened to them or they caused would be my responsibility at the very least my causal responsibility.
But of course you can foist this onto the collective conscience. In reality your child would not have suffered if you had not created them.
Not exactly. You're saying things like -- "You would have to work hard to survive even if you did not have children you are just passing on a burden." -- where I simply disagree that the child I raise in a loving home is me "passing on a burden".
Quoting Andrew4Handel
No. I openly expressed a concern about the possibility that getting too excessive with rights-talk and the potentially resulting legal mandates will diminish the goods which parents and children can receive in a loving household. This concern in no way clashes with other concerns about the suffering and harm caused by miserable parents.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Sure. My concern was that you are advancing the sort of conceptual framework that looks at having children from the perspective of entitlement. And you don't seem to be able to get out of that framework because you are assuming that my statements must commit me to some position about who is and is not entitled.
If you look back, I only asked why I should change my mind and look at things your way because at first sight this looks to me like a silly way of looking at it. That's not an altogether unreasonable request and if you have any interest in winning allies I suggest you take the time to figure out how best to be persuasive and engage in that sort of conversation with someone.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yes. I also believe that rights can only get us so far in dealing with concerns about suffering and openly questioned how you would address my worries about what might be lost if we focused excessively at suffering.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
No. I was expressing my concern that the excessive practice of rights-talk and reasoning about rights might lead us to lose sight of what is good in loving and healthy relationships. I expressed my concern that looking at parents and children as merely full rights-bearing individuals having claims against one another mediated by a higher power - such as judges backed by police - might lead to the type of society we don't want with a deterioration of the simple goods and pleasured to be found in healthy relationships.
That of course doesn't preclude us from punishing awful parents who act despicably.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I mean, if you can't see more to my concern than questionable sentimentality then I suppose that would speak more to your myopia than anything else.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Well I am suggesting that I would be worried about the potential to reduce all Parent-Child relationships to a relation governed by rationality and that this would be bad in subtle ways (it could reduce our potential for love and intimacy, reduce our capacity to be loving to one another without justifying this to some higher purpose or rationality) and overt ways (the potential for government overreach).
Why should having children be the only area in life not constrained by rights and legislation?
I find it worrying that you would think that to preserve some notion of a transcendent family quasi spirituality or something like that,that then all children should not be protected by rights and in a legal framework.
This is the problem I am alluding to. The complete lack of reason and restraint in this area.
Anyway it is rather like saying Handel should not have had a rigorous musical education because that would interfere with the transcendence of his music... but in reality reason, boundaries and discipline are part of creativity.
Personally I think the rights of child and child welfare are the first and most primary area that should be legislated for. Trying to improve society after a reproduction free-for-all is shutting the gate after the horse has run off.
I feel passionately about child welfare and children's rights and there is nothing legalistic in my approach to that.
It also disturbs me that I could have a child if I wanted to despite no one knowing me or my capacities or dysfunctions. It is one of the few things I could do without scrutiny or finance or contract or education.
We don't need to invoke rights if we say people don't have a right to have children.
Saying people have a right to have children is invoking rights.
I think the belief that someone has a divine right to do something leads to a more irresponsible exploitative attitude than skepticism about rights which can lead to cautious actions and claims.
Being granted a right can lead to a lack of justification for that right because one just acts entitled.
The initial justification for the right gets lost in entitlement. Rights can reflect past disenfranchisement and don't usually just endorse the status quo.
I appreciate your passion. It's a great thing to be passionate about. I just hope you find a way to be passionate without dismissing what I take to be some real issues at play in your way of thinking about these matters.
That said, there's not much more to say for me. I don't see how you feel you can hold the first proposition along with the second proposition and I find it bizarre that you take my concerns to be weird, fantastical, transcendental, etc. though there's no help for that if you can't as yet see things from my very mainstream perspective.
I suspect your views might win the day on this. One thing that’s lost sight of in all this back-and-forth debate about “SJWs” is that people once working on obscure philosophical issues that seemed totally bizarre and outrageous to a lot of people have had a huge effect on the way we now discuss issues surrounding identity, power, struggle, harassment, etc. For better or worse, of course. But I definitely see the beginning of a movement surrounding the issues which you clearly care about. So best of luck with that, I just urge you to take the concerns I’m expressing seriously, though if you feel that you have good reason to dismiss them then I hope some day you’ll reconsider.
(Edited.)
The problem with bearing more life is the person being born is stuck with it. There is no simple off button, just the very difficult mechanism of suicide. In tribal societies, it was simply a rite of passage to have children, and a duty to the tribe itself in order to perpetuate it. This, of course, leaves little thought about the individual at question being born. Religion and unquestioned social norms (and lack of birth control coupled with desire for sex) continued this practice of procreation into "the age of civilizations" around the world. Around the 1700s, personal reasons like pursuing happiness came into vogue. Thus having a child would allow the new person to experience their potential for happiness. See? All resolved.. Once the word happiness is thrown in as a reason, then there is no reason to question it, right? Not being facetious at all :).
So I am asking why people feel they have a right to have a child and with no restrictions
Quoting schopenhauer1
It would help if people would question the social norms.
I think the way children are brought into the world undermines a lot of social norms, ethical claims and so on.
There should be consequences from having children including rights for the child and proper apportioning of responsibility and causality.
But instead no one has to be responsible for anything because of this fatalistic attitude towards having children as though it is inevitable.
Good point, especially bringing up the fatalistic attitude. Self fulfilling prophesy.
I think this reflects on the warped values in this area. Marriage is for children and serial killers
This the most common and vague reason now given for having children. Happiness is elusive in terms of what causes it and why it should be perpetuated. I always point out that there are pictures of happy Nazis working at Auschwitz.
But apparently happiness, familial bonds and so on have this mysterious power to outweigh any other consideration even reasonable intervention in the reproduction and parenting process.
I feel one really needs to elaborate a substantial reason for having children to avoid a nihilistic free for all.
Good points. See my thread here about how happiness reason is really about technology. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/3977/on-the-phenomonology-of-technology/p1
I think humans have wide capacities and it is not impossible to care for your own child and care for the welfare of other children. Indeed some women have had their own children and then gone onto foster and adopt dozens more.
It is ironic what people say about a collective responsibility for children but then they don't want any intervention in their own child rearing.
I don't understand what you're saying here. What sort of intervention in the free ability of prospective parents to have children are you imagining?
Having children is not a 'right' in that it is not someone's responsibility to ensure it. A private family life is a 'right' (in the UN declaration of human rights) meaning that it is the signatory government's responsibility to deliver that 'right' to its citizens who might otherwise find themselves bereft of it.
There's no threat to the ability to have children (except perhaps infertility) so if it were a 'right', what would a government's responsibility to ensure it entail?
It sounds to me more like you are arguing for either some restriction on the ability of prospective parents to have children, or more rights for the resultant child.
The reason why neither of these has been further implemented is pretty straightforward I would have thought. If you prevent people from having children there will be revolution because people love having children, it's about as basic a bit of biological programming as it gets. Resource scarcity and pollution would also be halved if we shot half the population (more than that if we carefully chose which half), but we avoid such an intervention because it clashes with people's will to remain living. How is clashing with their will to procreate any different?
As to the second part, there is literally only one positive right in the whole of the UN declaration of human rights (a positive right being something naturally absent which must be supplied, rather than something naturally present whose removal must be mitigated) and that is primary education of children.
The government already intervenes more in the upbringing of children than it does in any other area of life. In Germany children are forceably taken away from their parents for 6 hours a day to be raised entirely in a manner the state sees fit. What greater application of government to the rearing of children could you possibly be asking for?
I am discussing whether people have a right to have a child and if so why?
I am not discussing possible modes of intervention. Even if preventing childbirth was unachievable that does not mean people have a moral right to have a child or did the right thing by doing so
.Quoting Pseudonym
I went to school 5 days a week but I also went to church up to five times a week, my parents were bad parents and authoritarians who didn't show me affection etc. Sending me to school resulted in serious bullying in school.
The school does not act like parents or baby sitters or replace the authority and affection of parents. Sending someone to school does not prevent child abuse in general
The first way of intervening is to change the whole narrative around having children. Lots of people choose not to have children and are happy to do so. I am one of 6 siblings and only one has children.
Most families in the west restrict the number of children they have now they have the option and are better educated. You are taking an unwarranted fatalistic attitude.
No, I just don't understand what you are saying. A 'right' is a legal protection meaning that an authority is obliged to ensure that you have it. People can already have children, their ability to do so is currently unrestricted. If you're suggesting that they should not have that right (or at least not automatically) then that is necessarily in the form of some action by some authority. You can't just restrict a naturally unrestricted right in abstract.
It sounds to me more like what you mean to say is that you'd like fewer people to choose to have children for moral reasons. You're trying to make a case that having children is, in some cases, an immoral thing to do? But this would have nothing to do with rights. That's where I'm misunderstanding you.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
On the contrary, I think sending children to school very often actually constitutes child abuse. To take a child with autism and force them to sit still for 6 hours in a room full of 30 other children is a minor torture. The point is, the German government clearly think it is the most responsible way to bring children up. Presuming you're not advocating a complete absence of procreation you need to have a system for determining in which situations it is appropriate to have children.
You keep alluding to, but never quite describing, exactly what considerations you think people should be taking into account (outweighing their spontaneous desire to have children) and what threshold they should meet before concluding that they are morally right to do so.
I understand the value of pleasure that comes with baring a child, but at what point is it no longer justified as a free for all for everyone? Is it when we run out of water? That's already happening in places. When we run out of ozone? That's happening too. When we run out of property? That happened years ago.
I don't know what you mean. Homosexuality is natural but it has been heavily restricted and forced underground and punished with prison and death.
I don't agree with your definition of a right. If someone has a right to do something the government will not intervene in not them practising that right.The government can intervene to enforce a right but in general a right means someone is allowed to do X unrestricted.
I am looking for an explanation of why people feel and act entitled to have a child. You don't need legal rights for someone to exhibit a sense of entitlement.
I don't feel entitled to have a child regardless of what the law says.
Quoting Pseudonym
Children are given an a education to improve their welfare. But we are not discussing that. We are discussing the extent to which the government intervenes in parenting. It is quite possible to home school your child. I think it is the parents fault if a child is abused in school because they create a child within this system of schooling and are naive about it. Another issue is bullying by other peoples children in school and having other peoples out of control children inflicted on you.
People are reliant on schools and other social provisions to help rear and protect their children.
Th futures of schools doesn't mean children shouldn't have an education. How do suggest we allow all children a reasonable education?
I said earlier "Huge numbers of children have starved to death and still do and do not have gardens to play in with some kind of Snow white mother figure."
This is one of many considerations to be taken into account. I could give a large list but here are a few.
1) The risk of exposing children to serious harm (Famine/War/Disease/Pollution/Crime)
2) Compromising a child's own wishes (a child may have completely different values to a parent)
3) Exposing them to inevitable life harms of varying degrees, from mental illness, their own eventual death and work hardship.)
4) Issues around Imposing religion and false beliefs and values on them.
5) Your own financial stability and mental stability and parenting abilities.
6) The general state and fairness of the world you are bringing them into (war, pollution, exploitation and inequality etc)
7) Meaning of life, morality and purpose issues (Other philosophical issues)
If a parent has explored all these issues properly/factually/reaonsably I would be surprised if they didn't act as a constraint or restraint.
Yes, that's a good example. People considered that they could have sex with whomever they like, a government decided they could not do so, so they intervened to prevent it. It wasn't prevented in abstract. Reality did not change to make it such that homosexuals no longer had the right to have sex with whomever they wanted. An authority actively prevented them from doings so and that action is what constituted their lack of rights. What action would constitute a lack of right (or restriction of right) to have children?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yes, but we don't enumerate those rights that are no at risk. I don't talk about my 'right' to wear a green shirt on a Thursday because no one is talking about restricting my ability to do so. It is the act of restriction (or threat thereof) which makes it necessary to define a right in order to defend it. As procreation is not currently under threat of restriction, I don't understand what purpose referring to it as a 'right' serves.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
No, but you need a threat to those legal rights for someone to claim 'entitlement'. You're 'entitled to do absolutely everything that is not restricted by some authority. It's the default position. The answer to the question why do people feel entitled to have children is simply, no one is stopping them. People feel entitled to do that which no one else prevents them from doing. What you're referring to is people's decision to actually go ahead and do what they feel entitled to do. I'm definatly 'entitled' to keep all of my money for myself (after tax). I'm entitled to because no effective authority prevents me from doing so. I don't actually keep all my money for myself, because I don't think it fair to, but I'm definitely 'entitled' to.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Children educate themselves quite happily if given the opportunity, but that's a separate discussion.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I didn't just ask for the considerations, I asked specifically for the thresholds. Unless you are advocating having no children at all then presumably there is some threshold level of having met these concerns above which it is reasonable to have children. So how do you know people haven't already considered these issues and decided they meet said threshold?
We have since learned though that there is a natural right to abort one's child, inherent in the very concept of liberty, so why shouldn't we also conclude that having children is also the same sort of right?
That is what I want to know.
When people actively decide to have children they must, I suppose, have decided they passed some threshold that made reproducing acceptable.
So I want to know
Why thought it, necessary, morally acceptable, why they thought this was a good world to bring a child into and so on.
At the moment in most countries children can be taken way from their parents for a range of reasons such as physical and emotional neglect types of abuse, inability to parent. There are already some thresholds upon which governments or societies deem people to be unfit to have access to children.
Spiritual abuse is new category in UK law. So it is already possible and enforceable to take control of peoples children, the reluctance is to take earlier measures or suggest people should not have children.
Quite right. Many parents are emotionally &/or morally unqualified to be responsible for children.
Parenting should be a privilege for those who are qualified, and not a right.
But a (impossible) better society would be needed in order to implement such a system. You can't lift yourself by your bootstraps.
Michael Ossipoff
Such metaphysical power you attribute to your supreme court. Natural rights theory is nonsense anyhow. They are both legal rights (and conditionally ethically justifiable) only the right to have children is significantly less controversial for obvious reasons. And that's fine with me. The latter isn't going to be widely recognised as a moral issue until and unless it starts causing problems in practice (highlighting the incoherence of referring to it as a natural right).
You've answered your own question;
Quoting Andrew4Handel
If the government does not take your child away (or prevent you from having them) then it seems a reasonable presumption that you've met the thresholds society thinks are appropriate to bring a child into the world.
If you disagree with that decision and wish to debate that, you'd need to explain where your thresholds are so that we can discuss the reasons and consequences of having them there.
Handel and Schubert may have been childless, but J. S. Bach fathered and supported 20 children plus turning out a massive amount of music (and he was Lutheran, not Catholic).
You sound a bit unhinged when you make statements like "marriage is for children and serial killers". A free rhetorical tip: don't go off the deep end too often.
Yes, sometimes people who are very poorly equipped to bear children do so, with adverse consequences for everyone concerned. Yes, people have difficulty managing fertility. Yes, some children (a few million) are exploited, are made to work, are abused, and so on.
Conversely, don't forget, millions of children are born to capable parents, raised well, and become sensible adults.
Yes, I think there are too many children in the world. Over-population will continue to be an issue, and of necessity, will focus attention on how many children people are having. However, the demographics are tricky. China succeeded in reducing its birthrate because it had a strong and capable central government and a reasonably cohesive society. The 1-child policy produced a mushroom-shaped demographic: many older people on top supported by a relatively narrow stem of younger people. The 1 child policy has been relaxed, and this will in time produce more problems (inevitably).
The heart of the population problem is that 7.3 billion individuals make the decision to have sex and 3.15 billion women decide to bear the resulting children (or not). Controlling 7.3 (soon to be 8) billion people sufficiently to make childbearing a means-tested option involves a level of bureaucratic interference most people do not want--at all.
Look: we're probably screwed no matter what. The climate is warming; no country is close to achieving reductions of CO2 and other gases which cause climate change. Never mind peak oil. We are past peak fresh water. It is estimated that about 1 billion people are now dealing with insufficient fresh water supplies. One billion will be two and three billion fairly soon. We face too many challenges to address. We have neither the resources nor the organizational wherewithal to deal with all of the effects of global warming, over population, resource depletion (which includes depletion of fertile soils), and so forth that we are up against.
Humans have never been able to solve all of their problems. When societies have reached a limit on their various adaptive capacities, they collapse. That doesn't mean they all drop dead (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how fatalistic one is). It means that it may be centuries before a given area has recovered.
We started moving a long time ago and the window of opportunity for us (humanity as a whole) to stop to consider has closed. Therefore, we have to do things on the go. Some of us will take matters into consideration while the rest continue with what they're doing and then they'll find a way to fill them in on the outcome of their deliberations, all the while, on the go. It's the way of our lives. You know how, when you're in a car moving really fast, everything outside seen through the window seems to be a blur of moving objects while inside everything seems stationery? It's the same for us. If you can take a moment to look outside of the window, you'll see how fast human progress really is. I think the best we can do is to help humanity advance even faster.
I was referring to the common claim that marriage is for rearing children made by conservatives opposed to gay marriage. The absurdity being that killers could get married and all sorts of other bizarre marriage unions happened that were not campaigned against by those opposing gay marriage.
It is all propaganda to justify norms.
The government threshold for acceptable parenting is not the same as each individual's is. I don't personally support anyone having children. I don't think the government has legitimised people having children. I used it as an example of how we can intervene in the parent child relationship and enforce this intervention.
But if I did legislate on reproduction I would make the process of considering having a child much more profound and the consequences more serious.
I would increase parental accountability
and I think we would need a whole new philosophy that reflects the real dynamics of creating another person and its causal and ethical ramifications.
Half his children died in childhood. His own musical contribution was greater than his genetic contribution and he hasn't left behind many descendants.
I think parents are more like to make a negative contribution overall rather than birthing the next Einstein. I think the narrative around parenthood is to self aggrandising around parents making it an esteem boosting endeavour..
So you're suggesting that we just let the human race die out? That seems a rather oblique conclusion from your original post.
I find it hard to justify making children. The original post was asking why people feel justified in making children.
I was hoping someone would try and persuade me why it is ethical, desirable or a right to have child.
I think if people are going to have children we need a rational evaluation of the process and it's ramifications and extend the rights of the child.
Seems like a fools errand to me. Does anyone here expect that Andrew4Handle or schopenhauer1 or anyone else of that ilk will be persuaded this time?
It depends what meta-ethical framework you're working from. Ethics can theoretically be debated within a meta-ethical framework, but it's difficult to raise arguments to persuade someone when you don't know what their criteria are. What is it that you measure the 'rightness' of an action by?
I have a non moral concern about harm. I don't think you can prove something is right or wrong.
If someone gives a moral argument for having children then I can critique that. I don't think any of the standard moral positions can defend having children.
If you believe it is wrong to harm other and that consent is fundamental then that morality would be undermined. I don't see how virtue ethics would defend reproduction based on the previous issues.
I would critique societies current values and misrepresentation of the dynamics of creating new people. Societies are run on false beliefs and false premises. Society is not consensual when people are forced into existence. I think if Persons A and B create Person C they are responsible for Person C and not Person C themself. However I Person C creates Person D they are responsible for person D along with Person A & B.
What is important is that a childless person has no responsibilities or obligations. Having children endorses and props up society but childless people need not support or endorse any product of society. When a childless person collaborates with society it will be so as to survive and avoid further harm. But some childless people endorse people having children so I think they then bear some responsibility for the system.
I describe people as being forced into existence and when you have a horrible life and or reject life you are like a hostage having society and life and the world imposed on you.
The only seeming escape route is self murder which is a brutal solution or to fight against the unjust dynamics of society. There maybe things that could make life for someone in this circumstance more bearable.
I think asking why we were created is THE biggest question in philosophy because our parents reproductive actions are the only reason we exist. It is a fundamental existential question. And one along with all other philosophical dilemmas my nonexistent offspring won't have to ponder.
I have no issue with a very strict responsibility on society towards its children, one of my professional areas of interest was in child development and I strongly believe that children's rights are being undermined.
Where I take issue is with the notion that there's no moral duty, or justification to having children.
I think a significant number of people agree that we have a moral duty to take good enough care of our natural resources to ensure a reasonable standard of living for future generations. Thus we have established that it is possible to have duty towards a person who does not yet exist. Your approach would also require this (you claim we have a duty not to cause suffering to the not yet existing child).
Duties are social. We have a duty to others because they have a duty to us. It follows then that those yet to be born can be understood to have a duty too, at least their potential existence can be said to have a duty.
So, when society is doing well, bringing a child into the world is right because they will, on the whole, experience happiness. When society is not doing well, we have a duty to future generations to make it better. But that duty might take more than one generation. You have a duty to make the world a better place for your great grandchildren (or those of your neighbours), but in order to carry out that duty, you will need to bring into existence a child, who immediately has a duty to do the same (grow up, make the world a bit better and have child to carry on the process).
Of course no one gets a choice in the matter, but that's not how duties work, we don't choose them, they result from the relationships within society.
You might think you can opt out, but who's going to look after you when you're older? Who's going to build your roads, fix your car, defend your borders? It'll be someone else's child. That creates a responsibility on you to look after them now.