Thank you, Angus Nimmo, for such a productive question!
Philosophers like questioning questions as a start, and this might well be a helpful method here. Why think that it is wrong not to have children?
One answer, perhaps familiar from social pressure, would be to see parenting as a life accomplishment. But, for someone who doesn’t consider parenting all that important to their own sense of happiness, there is no point trying to fulfil other people’s life goals.
Another answer would be to consider children a contribution owed to society. But this would need to be balanced against your liberty to do with your life as you please, given that having children and taking care of them takes years of effort. In addition, there may well be other valuable contributions that you could make to society.
Still, one could insist that we need new people to reproduce our societies in the future. In that case, one first has to explain what is so good about our societies that it is our duty to maintain them (by having kids). Second, given that there are already 7.5 billion people on earth, and that the planet’s resources are fast depleting, it is not clear whether more people are really necessary for our future at the moment. Actually, many people think that in order to protect the planet we should have fewer children, not more.
You could perhaps reply that there are not enough new people in your specific country (and, hence, that you have to make some more). If you lived in a country attracting many migrants, you would need some sort of national claim about why someone who wishes to come to your country is not equivalent to someone born there, but this seems to conflict with the idea that all human beings are equal. If your country does not have much immigration, maybe you could fear that if you don’t have children, then you are not helping to perpetuate your country’s cultural heritage (traditions, language, etc). This raises the question of what makes such heritage so valuable (as we have seen before) and, as a follow-up question, whether everyone having children is the only way for your culture to survive. I’d say that even if you are inclined toward such cultural arguments, it is still a lot to ask someone who doesn’t want to have children to make such a huge life decision solely for sake of perpetuating their cultural heritage.
If you agree with these points so far, then perhaps you would also agree that the ‘burden of proof’ lies with those who claim that we should have children by default, not with those who choose not to have any? Let us know.
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I studied philosophy at the universities of Lausanne, Vienna and Bern, and I am currently finishing my PhD thesis on the concept of political consent (what does it mean to consent in politics?). My areas of specialization lie in early modern philosophy and contemporary political philosophy. I also have a keen interest in ethics, Ancient philosophy, and public philosophy. Thomas Hobbes would be my favourite philosopher, not because I agree with all of his conclusions, but because I love the clarity, precision and comprehensiveness of his writings.