Thank you, Daniele Grosso, for such a heavy question.
The answer to this question partly depends on what we mean by “meaning” and whether the pursuit of meaning is a morally permissible motivation to have a child.
Perhaps we mean something like “life satisfaction”, which is (roughly) an overall evaluation of the quality of our life, and that we generally ought to do things that increase our life satisfaction. Here the empirical evidence is on our side, as more parents report higher levels of “life satisfaction” – they judge their lives to be more meaningful. This is because having children seems to give us the impression that the significance of our life will extend beyond our death, and thus infuses our daily tasks with significance. Generally, we find it morally permissible to do things that will improve our satisfaction with our life.
But even if we think that doing things to improve our life satisfaction is generally permissible, isn’t using your future child as a means towards your own life satisfaction, without their consent, morally objectionable? Furthermore, to bring a child into existence is to inevitably subject them to pain that they would otherwise not have experienced. How can we justify subjecting a child to pain they didn’t agree to for the purpose of increasing our life satisfaction?
First, notice that the problem is not that we use someone for our own satisfaction (we do this all the time; at McDonalds, for instance), but that we do so without their consent. We might say that using someone for our own satisfaction is permissible only with their consent. This seems like a reasonable constraint on my quest for life satisfaction.
Second, notice that this is a problem for parental motivation because the child cannot actually consent (since they do not yet exist). Since using someone as a means is only permissible with consent, I cannot have a child to improve my life satisfaction.
However, we might say that though the future child cannot actually consent, we might think that, were they given the chance to, they absolutely would. We might think that using someone is permissible if they would consent to the usage if given the chance. Given that, overall, existing is much better than not existing, any potentially existing thing, like my future child, would always choose existence over non-existence. Therefore, given the choice between not existing and existing (but being used to increase the parent’s life satisfaction) the child would always choose to exist. In other words, we can justify using the child in this way given that bringing the child into existence is, overall, an obvious benefit to them.
I would like to clarify, however, that whether existence is a benefit is a disputable claim, but in this case it need not be an absolute benefit. This means that there are (extreme) modes of coming into existence that might outweigh the benefits of existence. Understanding the decision to have a child as a kind of contract allows some flexibility in this sense. In most cases, however, I think existence is more beneficial to the potential being than non-existence.
What do you think? What’s a good reason for having children? Let us know in the comments.
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I have a Masters degree in Philosophy from the University of South Carolina where I wrote a thesis on Immanuel Kant’s political philosophy under Konstantin Pollok. I am currently doing a PhD at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) in the project “Universal Moral Laws” under Pauline Kleingeld. I am interested in Kant’s legal and political philosophy as well as contemporary jurisprudence and republicanism. Predictably, then, my favorite philosophical work is Kant’s Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals. This work contains, in my mind, some of most important ideas for the possibility of universal and objective moral laws.