antinatalism
Which of the following is false?
- It is immoral to cause someone great suffering without their permission, unless doing so is morally necessary.
- Every life involves great suffering, and can reasonably be expected to contain such in advance.
- One is not morally required to have children.
- It is permissible to have children.
- (unstated premise required to link these together)
My current guess (that preserves most of the commonsense intuitions above, or the commonsesne parts of them) is that it’s actually morally obligatory for many people to have children iff they genuinely want them; if you don’t want them then you’ll likely make a bad parent, so it’s not actually “up to you” but just conviently identical to what it would be if it were. But that might be too convenient.
It is immoral to cause someone great suffering without their permission, unless doing so is morally necessary.
This is blatantly false under any schema that anyone actually uses; it privileges inaction over action, and suffering over joy, to such an extent that it makes basically any human activity impossible. (Forget having kids – if you marry someone, you’ll be causing him great suffering somewhere down the line. If you hire someone, you’ll be causing him great suffering somewhere down the line. Etc.)
EDIT: I do realize that “without their permission” is doing a lot of work here, but it’s not enough work. We take actions that have ripple effects all the time, often without consulting any of the people who will be affected, and even people who do sign on for the base action rarely sign on explicitly for all the knock-on suffering.