Should you have children? Part 3: Reasons to have children

Christianity, EA, and the ethics of having children

by Vesa Hautala

In this third part of a series on the ethics of having children (Part 1 and Part 2), I focus on the positive case for procreation. As previously, this is more of a listing of arguments with some analysis, and the examination of an argument should not be taken as an endorsement unless noted otherwise.

Selfish reasons

First the obvious benefit: many people want to have children. People who remain childless against their desire may experience great sorrow and other negative impacts. Children can bring deep contentment and a great sense of meaning to one’s life.

Having children could also have long-term benefits for your well-being. Bryan Caplan has argued that you should think about how many grandchildren you want to have because they can bring you much joy in the latter part of your life, without most of the trouble of everyday childcare. Having more children may also help your senior years go better since there will be more people to care for you.

There is also a very different kind of selfish reason. Having children has moral benefits. A Christian’s goal should be to grow in holiness. Parenthood helps in this by making you care about others more than yourself. It is an opportunity to build character. (Some articulations of this from a father’s perspective here.) This is a challenge, though, because parenting can also bring out the worst in a person. 

Altruistic reasons

Having children can also have indirect altruistic benefits by enhancing the parent’s altruism. "Reproduction is a credible commitment to the future”, as an EA Forum commenter put it. Having children may make you more emotionally committed to taking the future seriously. Julia Wise talks about her experience with this here.

Children of EAs are also probably more likely to become EAs themselves and could grow up to have a large positive impact on the world. Regression to the mean is likely, though. If you are way above average in the “EAness” trait, your children will likely be closer to normal, so significantly less EA than you. In expectation, EAs having children still very likely increases the population’s EAs to non-EAs ratio, but there are currently much more cost-effective ways to get new people into EA.

A similar case could be made from Christian grounds. Your child could do lots of good things for the Kingdom of God, but it is hard to estimate how likely this is. Regression to the mean is less likely than in the EA case since being Christian is more common than being EA. Christians having children also helps preserve the Christian community. Children of Christians are much more likely to identify as Christians as adults.

Perhaps similar arguments could be made about EA community preservation. Patient longtermists especially might have a reason to consider this. Creating a community that endures over generations and could exert positive influence over centuries and millennia would be very good. A pronatalist mindset would seem very beneficial for creating such a community.

Life is good

Another reason to have children is that life is good. This depends on what kind of life is considered worth living, but it seems safe to assume that life is very likely net positive for the children of this blog’s readers. By having children, you would be adding a positive life to the world—”making happy people” is the phrase you might read in philosophical discussions of population ethics. I will talk about how taking the afterlife into account might affect this below.

In the Christian view, life is also essentially good because God’s creation is good in itself. In addition to the subjective value of life, there is a “God’s-eye view” value to life. This kind of objective value might be harder to fit into EA thinking influenced by standard utilitarianism, but it can fit into some other types of consequentialist frameworks. There is also value in being co-creators with God by participating in the creation of new human life. 

Life is eternal

As Christians, we also believe life is eternal. This means creating new lives could be extremely valuable. Applied naïvely, this would make creating new lives much more valuable than saving existing lives from (temporal) death. It would also put having children above any temporary disvalue to the parents.

However, infinities are notoriously difficult to plug into value calculations because they can’t be aggregated. Mathematically, two infinities added together is not greater than one infinity. Perhaps we could get around this by counting individuals instead of time. The number of people experiencing a happy afterlife is finite, and it seems better the bigger it is. But this kind of reasoning works best for people who already exist. This intuition is captured in philosopher Jan Narveson’s slogan, “We are in favour of making people happy, but neutral about making happy people”. The Bible speaks of a finite number of humans existing and no more procreation in the afterlife.

This gets us to the question of whether your child has a good or bad afterlife in expectation. Those who lean towards universalism are hopeful that most or all people will ultimately end up saved. Those who do not must contend (more) with the frightening chance that your child will not be saved and will experience a negative eternal life. This topic is too big to explore further here. How these considerations impact your decisions or not would seem to depend mostly on the kind of moral decision procedure you apply, i.e., whether you base your decision on weighing pros and cons, on consideration of duties, etc.

Concluding thoughts

Personally, I am most sympathetic to some approaches outlined in part two as responses against the opportunity cost argument. I feel like the abstract weighing of pros and cons is not the proper way to approach the question of having children. Based on the Bible, God has mainly prepared two ways of life for people: celibacy and marriage, and in the Bible, marriage is linked with having children—not only as a practical fact of life but also on theological grounds (Genesis creation account). There may obviously be exceptions to this two-paths schema. I’m painfully aware that not all couples can have children even if they want to, and that there exist all kinds of other situations where things do not work out neatly. Still, something like a virtue-ethical approach related to roles and vocations in life seems fit. You choose a path to follow in life and strive for holiness while walking on it. As people interested in EA we would probably think about pro and con arguments anyway, so there is value in listing them and examining them, but I still feel this is an area where the typical EA approach ultimately does not work best.