Ethics1mo ago · 106 comments
Is it ethical to have kids knowing the state the world is in?
Climate, cost, chaos — some call having children hope, others call it a gamble with someone else's life. Selfless, selfish, or just human?
Join the debate to comment
Reading is free. Members pay to post — that's why it stays clean.
Add your comment- Leo1w ago
My son has leukemia. He's seven. And when people ask me if I regret having him — which they DO ask, people actually say this to my face — I look at him drawing dinosaurs on the kitchen floor and the question just dissolves. I can't do this debate today. I just can't.
- Taylor M.3w ago
I think what this debate really reveals is how little we trust our institutions to handle what's coming. If people believed governments would handle climate seriously, healthcare would be available, and housing would be affordable — this question would barely exist. The crisis of faith in systems is driving the crisis of faith in futures.
- Elena K.3w ago
This. This right here. The question isn't really about children at all. It's about whether we believe the people in charge will do anything to make the world worth inheriting.
- Priya3w ago
I've spent 14 years working in pediatric oncology. I have held dying children. I have also held newborns and felt that electric, indescribable thing. I cannot tell you whether it's ethical. I can tell you it is profoundly, irreducibly human, and I refuse to reduce it to a trolley problem.
- Omar S.1mo ago
I'm a pediatric oncologist. I've held hands with dying children. I've also watched kids born into poverty become extraordinary humans who changed their communities. I genuinely cannot tell you what the right answer is. Anyone who's certain is selling something.
- Nina L.2w ago
Both of my children are autistic. One severely so. I would make the same choice again without a single second of hesitation. Anyone who wants to tell me what I 'should have known' can honestly go right to hell.
- Avery1mo ago
grew up in a war zone. had literally nothing. my parents still had me, still raised me, still told me the world was worth fighting for. now i live in another country and i study environmental law because i believed them. so.
- Nina B.1d ago
I lost a pregnancy last year. Late term. I don't really have a position on the ethics of having kids. I just know that right now the question hurts in a way I can't explain. I'll come back to the philosophy when I'm ready. Some of you might keep that in mind — not everyone reading these debates is approaching them from a place of detached curiosity.
- Hana2w ago
My grandmother survived a famine. Her mother survived a war. I survived my 20s. My kid will survive whatever comes next. Resilience is not a myth, it's a family tradition.
- Drew2w ago
Not everyone's family tradition includes survival. Some family lines end in tragedy. I think your story is beautiful and also deeply specific to you.
- Noah2w ago
This. The antinatalist talking points tend to come from people with enough stability and education to have these conversations, but they're deployed in ways that — intentionally or not — land hardest on communities that don't have the same platforms to push back.
- Hana1mo ago
The real question nobody wants to ask: is it ethical NOT to have kids? Because if thoughtful, caring people opt out en masse, who's raising the next generation? People who never asked this question once.
- Diego B.4w ago
My daughter was born with a serious chronic illness. People have said — actual people in my life — that I 'should have known' or 'taken the risk more seriously.' The eugenicist undertone in some of these arguments makes me genuinely sick.
- Priya K.1mo ago
I don't have kids and I don't want them and I'm tired of being asked to justify that. But I'm also tired of people who DO want kids being told they're complicit in environmental collapse. Can we please stop weaponizing personal choices both ways.
- Hana 211mo ago
Hard disagree that it's just a personal choice when the aggregate has real consequences. Individual choices don't exist in a vacuum. That's literally the whole point of ethics.
- Priya 211mo ago
Every generation thought theirs was the end of the world and had kids anyway, and those kids built the things that fixed it. Despair is not a parenting philosophy.
- Omar1w ago
I asked my 16-year-old whether she was glad to be alive given climate anxiety and school shootings and social media and all of it. She looked at me like I was insane and said 'obviously, I have friends.' Maybe teenagers are better philosophers than we give them credit for.
- Hana1mo ago
I've been trying to get pregnant for four years. Three miscarriages. And people with zero fertility struggles are out here writing philosophical treatises about whether I have the RIGHT to want a child. The audacity is genuinely breathtaking.
- Reese1mo ago
Nobody is saying you don't have the right. Ethics and rights are different frameworks. I can acknowledge your pain and still ask whether bringing new lives into a destabilizing climate system is wise. Those aren't contradictory positions.
- Kofi3w ago
The audacity of asking this question while corporations dump waste into rivers and lobbying blocks every climate bill. My reproductive choices are not the problem. Fix the structural rot first.
- Omar3w ago
ok but like... nobody is actually stopping anyone from having kids. this is a philosophy forum not a policy forum. we can discuss the ethics without it being a personal attack lol
- Avery1w ago
The consent argument has always broken my brain a little. You can't consent to being born. You also can't consent to NOT being born. The non-person who would've existed if you didn't have kids never gets consulted either. So 'consent' as a framework is just doing too much work here.
- Zara 924w ago
I find it kind of fascinating that people who would never tell someone to have kids are completely comfortable telling people not to. Both are profound intrusions on bodily autonomy. Sit with that.
- Ravi S.1mo ago
The consent argument is philosophically incoherent. You cannot get consent from a being whose existence depends on the decision you're making. That's not a loophole — it's a logical impossibility. Antinatalists need a better argument.
- Avery1mo ago
Cool so your rebuttal to 'the consent argument is flawed' is... a logical paradox? That's the whole point. You're making an irreversible, enormous decision for someone else. The impossibility of consent doesn't make it okay — it makes it MORE serious, not less.
- Noah _x3w ago
I had my son at 22 in a one-bedroom apartment with nothing saved. He just graduated college last spring. First in our family. None of the macro-level doom stopped us from building something inside our own four walls. That's not ignorance, that's agency.
- Taylor3w ago
Love this for you genuinely, but also this is exactly the kind of story that gets held up to dismiss people who are in genuinely different material circumstances. Not everyone's 'agency' operates in the same environment. Two identical decisions can have wildly different outcomes based on luck, race, geography, health. Proud of your son, skeptical of the universal lesson.
- Feli B.1mo ago
Nobody ever asks if it was ethical for their parents to have THEM. Because then it's suddenly very real and very personal. Easy to be abstractly antinatalist until you apply it backward.
- Drew1mo ago
I actually have asked that question about my own existence and I genuinely think my parents should have waited or not had kids at all given how unstable our home was. That's not self-hatred — it's honesty. Not everyone is glad to be here.
- Avery2w ago
I'm 31, no kids, probably won't have them, and the number of times people have told me I'll 'change my mind' or that I'm 'missing out' or that I 'don't understand real love' — that paternalism is just as bad as the reverse. Let people decide without the commentary. Both ways.
- Taylor S.2w ago
Yes! The only ethical position is to let individuals make this choice without social pressure in either direction. The moralizing from both sides is exhausting and mostly just serves people's need to feel they made the right call.
- Jordan R.2w ago
Disagree that we should remove all social pressure. Social norms exist precisely to coordinate collective behavior when individual incentives diverge from collective goods. A world where every decision is purely private ignores that children — and their absence — have externalities.
- Priya R.1mo ago
The carbon footprint of a child argument always ignores that the same child could cure cancer, invent carbon capture, or lead policy that saves millions. You can't run the numbers on human potential and call it done.
- Marco1mo ago
statistically they're more likely to be an average person with an average carbon footprint than to cure cancer. the 'one day they might save us all' argument applies to literally any hypothetical being. it proves nothing.
- Morgan1mo ago
What actually gets me is when people say 'I couldn't bring a child into THIS world' while living in a wealthy country with healthcare, wifi, and grocery stores. The cognitive dissonance compared to families in genuinely precarious places is wild.
- Nina1mo ago
ok but 'others have it worse so stop complaining' is not a compelling ethical argument. that logic could justify literally anything.
- Reese3w ago
That's an incredibly dismissive thing to say to people who have genuinely thought through this and arrived at a different conclusion than you. I'm childfree by choice, I'm not depressed, I love my life, and I just don't want to bring someone else into it. That deserves more than a cheap jab.
- Sam1w ago
The anti-natalist position, when you really push on it, tends to require the conclusion that the best possible world is one with no sentient life in it. I'm sorry but if your ethical framework leads you to 'extinction is ideal,' something has gone badly wrong in the reasoning somewhere.
- Zara1w ago
That's a misrepresentation and you know it. Anti-natalism isn't about extinction as a goal, it's about not adding new suffering when the outcome is uncertain. Big difference between 'don't have more kids' and 'everyone must stop existing.' Strawman much?
- Jamie1w ago
I don't have kids. I've chosen not to for reasons that are mine and nobody else's business. What I hate most about this debate is that both 'sides' end up treating it as a contest to win rather than a deeply personal question that different people answer differently for entirely legitimate reasons. Nobody owes you their reasoning. Not the parents, not the childfree people. Just leave each other alone.
- Sam4d ago
What gets me is that we frame this as a rational cost-benefit decision when almost nobody who has a child is doing it that way. You fall in love, or you want to, or biology just... happens. The ethics debate is a post-hoc intellectual exercise wrapped around what is fundamentally an ancient human drive. Which doesn't make the ethics unimportant! But let's be real about what's actually driving the decision for most people.
- Diego _x4d ago
this is actually my biggest problem with the whole debate. nobody sits down with a spreadsheet before having a kid (or the ones who do usually still have kids). so we're arguing about the ethics of something that ethics rarely governs. feels performative.
- Marco4d ago
We apply ethics to things people do instinctively all the time. That's literally what ethics is for. 'People don't reason carefully about it' is a reason to have the conversation, not a reason to avoid it.
- Yuki1mo ago
can we talk about how this conversation is extremely Western and extremely middle-class? globally, fertility rates are already dropping in wealthier countries. in poorer regions people have children for economic survival, community, legacy. imposing an individualist ethical lens on all of that is... a choice.
- Casey1mo ago
I teach philosophy at a community college and I've noticed something: the students most passionately antinatalist are usually 19-22. By 35 most of them have quietly changed their minds. I'm not saying age = wisdom but I am saying lived experience adds data points.
- Maya1mo ago
This is condescending. People change their minds for lots of reasons including social pressure, biological drives, and the sunk cost of relationships. 'Young people are naive' is not a philosophical argument.
- Ravi2w ago
Can we talk about the class dimension here that almost nobody mentions? Rich people in wealthy countries can insulate their children from most of the 'chaos' being cited. They'll have clean water, private healthcare, climate-controlled homes, good schools. The doom is not evenly distributed. The ethical calculus is completely different depending on where you're standing economically.
- Riley2w ago
I'd push back slightly — plenty of working class people also choose not to have kids because of economic pressure. It's not only an elite intellectual position. Cost of living is a very material, non-abstract reason.
- Maya2w ago
Ideas are not genes. Memes spread horizontally. That's literally the most basic point in memetics. Also evolutionary fitness has nothing to do with ethical correctness, otherwise 'invasive species are ethically right to spread' and that's clearly absurd.
- Kofi _x1w ago
The real question nobody asks: is it ethical to have kids and then DISENGAGE from the world, vote against climate policy, ignore systemic issues, hand them a broken system with a bow on it and say 'good luck'? The having isn't the problem. The raising is.
- Maya T.1w ago
This. Exactly this. I know parents who are terrified about climate change and still vote against any policy that would cost them a nickel. The ethical question isn't at conception, it's every day after.
- Casey1mo ago
my mom had me during a recession, a war, and a personal crisis. im 27 now and honestly? pretty glad to be here. not every day, but most days. that counts for something.
- Riley 923w ago
What gets me is nobody interrogates the decision NOT to have kids with this much ethical scrutiny. Choosing to opt out of parenthood also shapes the future — who cares for the elderly, who runs the hospitals, who pays the pensions. Inaction is also a choice with consequences.
- Taylor B.3w ago
The pension argument is the laziest pro-natalist talking point in existence. My purpose on earth is not to be a tax base for someone else's retirement.
- Jamie 213w ago
Nobody said your purpose is. But collective social systems genuinely do depend on demographic replacement. You can find that uncomfortable and it's still arithmetically true. Calling an argument lazy doesn't make it wrong.
- Reese1mo ago
The climate angle specifically is interesting because the IPCC itself doesn't say civilization ends. It says things get hard and unequal and costly. That is also what every century before this one was. 'Hard and unequal' is not a reason to stop the species.
- Sam B.1w ago
What strikes me is that every human being asking this question was themselves born into some version of an uncertain world. The Roman asking whether to have kids during plague years. The parent asking during the Black Death. The 1940s couple. They all did it. We are the answer to their choice. Seems like it's worked out well enough that the question can be debated at all.
- Morgan S.1w ago
Not necessarily. You can care deeply about preventing future suffering while personally finding your own existence meaningful. I care about factory farming without being a chicken. Caring about the question doesn't commit you to an answer.
- Morgan3d ago
My grandmother had 9 children during the Depression. NINE. They were all poor. Several died young. The ones who survived raised families of their own who raised me and I'm sitting here typing this on a laptop. The 'world is too bad to have children' argument has been available for literally all of human history and it has never actually stopped anyone.
- Alex1w ago
I watched my mother cry at my college graduation. She came from nothing, raised me alone, worked two jobs. If that's selfish — being the reason someone like her exists — then I genuinely don't know what the word means anymore.
- Taylor _x4w ago
Nobody gets a guarantee of a good life. Nobody. And yet most people, when asked at the end of theirs, say it was worth it. That's not nothing. That's actually pretty significant data.
- Priya 924w ago
Survivor bias though. The people who had genuinely terrible lives and would say it wasn't worth it are either gone or rarely the ones being asked. We don't hear from them.
- Sam1mo ago
The framing of this whole debate bugs me. 'Having children' is not one act. It's 18+ years of choices about how you show up. The ethics aren't in the conception — they're in the raising. Focus there.
- Yuki _x1mo ago
Respectfully disagree. The initial decision to create a life is its own ethical moment. The quality of parenting afterwards matters enormously but doesn't retroactively justify a thoughtless decision to reproduce.
- Leo T.2w ago
Hot take: people who are certain it's unethical to have kids are just as dogmatic as people who are certain it's a moral imperative. Both camps are doing philosophy badly. Uncertainty is the intellectually honest position.
- Priya2w ago
The funniest part of this debate is that the people most convinced it's unethical to reproduce are overwhelmingly not reproducing, so their genes and their ideas about this will both disappear from the population within a few generations. There's a certain irony in that.
- Nina2w ago
okay but evolution doesn't care about ethics at all so that point kind of cancels itself out
- Yuki2w ago
Or maybe a 16-year-old hasn't yet had to face the full weight of adult suffering, financial precarity, chronic illness, grief — all the things that make people ask the question in the first place. I don't think that's the data point this topic needs.
- Omar1mo ago
Grew up poor in a 'doomed' decade and I'm grateful every day my parents rolled the dice. Ask the kid if their life was worth it — mine says yes.
- Avery1mo ago
The cost argument is underrated here. In a lot of Western countries middle-class families cannot afford to raise children at the quality of life they themselves experienced. That's not nihilism — that's a real structural barrier. Inflation, housing, childcare. The math doesn't work for millions of people.
- Yuki M.1mo ago
But humans have ALWAYS had children under financial strain. My grandparents raised 6 kids in a two-room house after WW2. The idea that you need financial perfection before reproducing is a modern luxury anxiety, not a universal ethical principle.
- Taylor S.1mo ago
Your grandparents also had affordable housing relative to wages, stable pensions, and a social safety net built on postwar consensus. That comparison doesn't hold up as well as it feels like it does.
- Liam3w ago
The consent argument always sounds airtight until you realize it proves too much. You also can't get consent to NOT be born. Non-existence has no preferences. So the consent framing is philosophically empty — you're smuggling in the assumption that non-existence is preferable, which is the very thing you need to prove.
- Elena3w ago
This is actually a really sharp point and most people on the antinatalist side never have a good answer for it. Benatar tries but his asymmetry argument has serious holes.
- Hana3w ago
Benatar's asymmetry actually holds up better than most critics admit. The absence of pain is good even if there's no one to enjoy that absence. The absence of pleasure is not bad because there's no one deprived. It's not symmetric and that's precisely the point. Dismissing it as 'having holes' without specifying which holes is just vibes.
- Alex3d ago
I'm 34 and I've been told since I was 22 that I would change my mind about not wanting kids. I haven't. I find the question interesting philosophically but I made my choice. What I resent is how the 'ethical' framing gets weaponized against childfree people as if we're the selfish ones. You want validation for YOUR choice, call it ethics. Leave mine out of it.
- Taylor R.4w ago
Ethical is the wrong word. Ethics implies there's a correct answer calculable by reason. This is a values question. Do you believe existence is net positive? That's not ethics — that's metaphysics, and reasonable people land differently.
- Taylor1w ago
There's something almost self-defeating about debating whether humans should continue existing. Like, the fact that you care about the answer implies you find existence meaningful. Which is a pretty decent argument for the pro side right there.
- Avery5d ago
I grew up in the 80s when we were CERTAIN nuclear war was imminent. I mean dead certain. Reagan, missiles, the whole thing. I remember drills. My parents had me anyway in 1979. I think about that sometimes. They must have been terrified.
- Priya2w ago
I keep seeing 'the world is getting better by almost every metric' cited in these debates and I genuinely want to know — better for whom? Better according to which baseline? Better in which regions? The aggregate hides enormous variance and the people citing those charts are almost never the ones living in the bottom of the distribution.
- Reese1w ago
Hot take: the carbon footprint of a child in a wealthy country is enormous and if you genuinely believe climate change is an existential threat you have to at least GRAPPLE with that number. I'm not saying don't have kids. I'm saying be honest that it's a trade-off.
- Noah1w ago
The carbon footprint argument assumes no technological change over the next 80 years. A child born today might live in a fully decarbonized world by 45. Baking in today's emissions numbers to project their lifetime impact is really poor methodology.
- Marco S.1w ago
Or — and hear me out — they might not. Banking on technological optimism to justify a decision made today is itself a gamble. That's literally the whole topic.
- Elena2d ago
There's a specific flavor of self-satisfaction in the 'I'm too ethical to have children' crowd that I find exhausting. It's usually people who also fly internationally twice a year and eat meat daily. At least be consistent about whose future you're supposedly protecting.
- Taylor2d ago
ad hominem. somebody being hypocritical about other choices doesn't make the argument about having children wrong. you can dismiss the person without dismissing the argument.
- Nina R.1mo ago
This whole debate treats children like a philosophical thought experiment rather than actual people. Go talk to some kids. Most of them are delighted to be alive even when their circumstances are hard. Joy is not a privilege reserved for the comfortable.
- Maya S.1w ago
okay but can we talk about how 'the world is in a bad state' looks very different depending on whether you're asking someone in Oslo versus someone in a drought-stricken region with no clean water? This whole debate is written from a perspective of comfort. Some people are having kids into conditions that make this philosophical hand-wringing look embarrassing.
- Maya B.1mo ago
every child born is a vote for the future. i know that sounds cheesy but i mean it literally — future generations are the only ones with a stake in fixing the long-term problems. no kids, no future voters, no pressure on the systems causing harm.
- Kofi3d ago
I'll be the one to say it: people who are financially stable, in loving relationships, with community support, raising kids with intention and care — they're not the ethical problem. The systems that make housing, healthcare, and education inaccessible are. Redirect the scrutiny.
- Taylor B.1w ago
I studied philosophy for six years and I'll be honest: the academic literature on anti-natalism (Benatar etc.) is more rigorous than most people here assume. The asymmetry argument is genuinely hard to dismiss. That doesn't mean I agree with it, but calling it obviously wrong is a lazy move.
- Elena1w ago
six years of philosophy and you still ended up citing Benatar unironically. spend those six years differently next time imo
- Theo B.2w ago
The framing of children as a gamble treats human life like a product that might be defective. It makes me genuinely uncomfortable. Children aren't investments or risks. They are people. The moment we start calculating expected utility of a person's existence we've already lost something important.
- Avery2w ago
And yet people DO make these calculations — prenatal testing, genetic counseling, IVF selection. Society already embedded these decisions. Pretending we don't calculate is the comfortable fiction.
- Hana2w ago
there's a difference between medical information and writing off a person's entire life as not worth living. one is care, the other is judgment
- Ravi3d ago
Bringing kids into a difficult world isn't a gamble with someone else's life — it IS giving someone a life. You can't gamble with stakes that don't yet exist. The whole 'without their consent' argument assumes the person is waiting somewhere, being wronged. They're not. There's nobody there yet.
- Reese3d ago
The suffering argument cuts both ways though. If a potential person can't be wronged by not existing, they also can't be benefited by existing. Which means the 'giving them the gift of life' framing collapses just as fast as the consent one. Neither side gets to use the non-existent person as a rhetorical prop.
- Drew3d ago
this is genuinely the first comment in this thread that made me stop and think. respect.
- Theo1d ago
What no one says out loud: the people most anxious about whether it's ethical to have kids are usually the most thoughtful, prepared, financially stable ones. Meanwhile nobody is moralizing at the people having kids with zero reflection. The ethics police always go where they're least needed.
- Marco4d ago
Nobody ever asks if it's ethical to bring a pet into this world. That animal also didn't consent. That animal also will suffer and die. I'm not being flip — I'm genuinely asking where the line of 'creating life is an ethical issue' starts and stops. Bacteria? Insects? Dogs? Where?
- Reese1mo ago
Selfish. Full stop. You want the experience of parenthood. You want someone to love you unconditionally. You want legacy. None of that is for the child.
- Kofi 211mo ago
lmao by this logic every decision humans make is selfish. eating is selfish. breathing is selfish. at some point you have to stop treating normal human motivation as evidence of moral corruption
- Ravi1w ago
Having children is the most optimistic thing a human being can do. Full stop. You are literally betting your heart, your money, your sleep, your entire future on the hypothesis that tomorrow is worth building toward. I'll take that bet every time.
- Hana K.1w ago
It's not optimism if you haven't done the math. Optimism without information is just wishful thinking.
- Feli1mo ago
You're not creating a happy child, you're creating a person who WILL suffer, without their consent, to satisfy your want. That's the part the 'hope' crowd skips.
- Sam T.1mo ago
Funny how this question is always aimed at ordinary people and never at the systems making the world unlivable. Police the polluters, not the parents.
More debates people can't stop arguing about
Is it wrong to choose not to have children just because you don't want to?
110 comments
Netflix's 'Adolescence' shows a teenage boy becoming a killer — did the show actually get modern boyhood right, or did it miss the point entirely?
109 comments
Would you still eat meat if you had to kill the animal yourself?
109 comments
Is judging someone by their height as shallow as judging by their weight?
108 comments