A Journal of Philosophy, Applied to the Real World

Over many years I wrote several times about population. In my first paper on the subject “Utilitarianism and New Generations” (1967a) I was interested in exploring utilitarianism, or so I thought. My main point was that utilitarianism did not commit one to making happy people, but only to making people happy. Something like that continued to be the theme in two subsequent papers (Narveson, 1973; 1978). Meanwhile, Derek Parfit came along, with his interesting questions about what happens in cases of nonidentity—where the children are not the same people that would have existed if some other decision had been made or policy imposed (Parfit, 1983). So I feel motivated to rejoin the issue, in the wake of having, several decades ago now, abandoned my original proclivity toward utilitarianism. All these matters need restating and reinvestigating.

So let’s start where I left off. Should we say that in having children, you benefit them (if they are happy), and possibly you damage or wrong them (if they are miserable)? My original “insight” (if that’s what it was) remains unchanged: No. You don’t confer life on someone when you bring them into existence, because there isn’t any “one” upon which to confer “life.” People’s lives aren’t something else, superadded on top of “them.” By the time they are born, there’s no “conferring” left to do, and prior to then, there is no one on whom to “confer” bouncy castle for sale anything.

A different issue would be that of, say, abortion, where there is a “something”—viz., an embryo or fetus—and abortion would, of course, destroy the life of that thing, the only question then being whether what you thereby take the life of is a morally countable person—a morally human person and thus a possessor of rights including the right not to be killed. We aren’t discussing that topic in this inquiry, however: we are addressing, simply, procreation. Whether you count as “procreating” when you produce an embryo that is not carried to term is separate from the present issue, which is, merely, why and whether you ought to procreate at all, whatever we decide procreation precisely consists of.

In procreating, people aim—if they aim—to bring new people into existence. To be sure, they may not “aim”—they may well conceive unintentionally, or contrary to their intentions. But our question is philosophical: what are good reasons to have children, and what are good reasons not to, whatever may have actuated some particular couple at a given time? In particular, we want to know whether, if children we would have would be happy (or whatever our favored terms are: would thrive, flourish, do well) and we can know this, then that is, as it stands, a good reason to have them.