Why am I passionate about this?
I have been researching and teaching about moral issues for more than a decade. How people procreate and how often they procreate has a huge impact on both the children born and others who interact with them. Yet even in academic philosophy – a discipline that often questions the appropriateness of ordinary behavior – the moral scrutiny of having children has been lacking. As I observed the population continue to rise and the circumstances of future people become more precarious, I thought the ethics of procreation needed deeper investigation. I hope my recent work on this topic will help others think more carefully about the moral complexities of having and raising children.
Trevor's book list on philosophers about whether it’s okay to have kids
Why did Trevor love this book?
In this book, David Benatar defends a strong version of antinatalism – the view that it is morally wrong to procreate – and David Wasserman attempts to defend the moral permissibility of procreation.
Like most people, I originally found antinatalism deeply counterintuitive when I first encountered it, but some of Benatar’s arguments are hard to refute. I consider many of Wasserman’s responses reasonable, but as his exchange with Benatar progresses, the caveats and limits on permissible procreation become harder to ignore.
Even if antinatalism is false, this debate left me with the impression that the moral standards for procreation are much stricter than most believe.
1 author picked Debating Procreation as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
While procreation is ubiquitous, attention to the ethical issues involved in creating children is relatively rare. In Debating Procreation, David Benatar and David Wasserman take opposing views on this important question. David Benatar argues for the anti-natalist view that it is always wrong to bring new people into existence. He argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm and that even if it were not always so, the risk of serious harm is
sufficiently great to make procreation wrong. In addition to these "philanthropic" arguments, he advances the "misanthropic" one that because humans are so defective and cause…