I admit to being slightly mystified by the argument Ross Douthat is having with the anti-procreatives. The terms of debate don’t make very much sense to me.

On the one hand are people who seem to be arguing that one shouldn’t have children because those children might suffer, and avoiding causing anyone to suffering is a moral imperative. A non-life is superior even to a mostly joyful life marred by some suffering. Unless I’m missing something, this is an argument for mass suicide. After all, if none of us existed, then none of us would be suffering. Right? And since animals either can suffer or can’t, this is also (presumably) an argument for the extinguishment of all animal life – if they can suffer, their destruction will prevent future suffering, while if they cannot suffer then they are not part of the moral calculus, and can be annihilated with impunity (which will ensure that they won’t evolve into something that suffers). Surely I’m missing something here, because the argument is so ludicrous on its face I don’t really know how to grapple with it.

On the other hand, Douthat seems to think that such refutation requires articulating some kind of abstract obligation to reproduce. But on what could that obligation be based? “The earth must be peopled,” said Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, echoing Genesis, but that obligation, I think we can safely say, has been discharged. Viola (as Cesario) in Twelfth Night, articulates what you might call the eugenic obligation to Olivia: she is sinful if she doesn’t have children because she has been blessed with beauty, and this beauty should be passed on for future generations to enjoy. That’s actually quite a powerful argument, but again, not one I imagine Douthat is going to make (because the contrapositive – an obligation not to reproduce on the part of the unattractive, or stupid, or flawed-of-character, would strike most people as morally repugnant).

Douthat himself makes the “pay it forward” case:

Life itself is an extraordinary gift, the act of bringing a life into the world (and nurturing it and protecting it and rearing it and so on) involves enormous sacrifice on the part of parents, and so the best way to express an appropriate gratitude for what Burke calls “the unbought grace of life” is to make the same sacrifice yourself, and extend that grace to another generation (and thus to generations beyond that).

Conceiving of one’s life as an unearned gift would seem to incline one to showing proper gratitude – to one’s parents, first of all, and beyond that to the author of life itself, assuming one posits such. But why should that gratitude necessarily take the form of having children? It seems to me that conceiving of life as a gift means making proper use of that gift, using it in a way that shows some kind of appreciation. Is the only proper way to make something of your life to make more life? Is it even the most proper? Or merely the baseline and most obvious way?

Anyway, do people really have children based on an abstract obligation? When people do have children out of obligation, it’s not generally abstract – it’s concrete. I’ll have this kid to please my mother, or my husband, or to win the battle of the womb with the Zionist enemy. Those don’t sound like the kinds of motives that Douthat is aiming for. And when people undertake to live their lives based on an abstract principle, there’s generally (in my experience) a concrete motive underneath. And, of course, the same thing is true on the other side of the ledger. I refuse to believe that there is a single human being who has refused to have children because of some abstract argument about the environment or some such. There’s bound to be a much more concrete reason, with “the environment” serving as a useful piece of intellectual justification. The main limiting factor on childbearing in modern, developed societies is simply status anxiety: can I afford a child (or another child) or will that expense push me (or my children) down a rung or two on the economic ladder?

And by the way, is a gift truly free if it comes with an attendant obligation to be discharged? What must it feel like to think: I cannot accept the gift of my life until I have discharged the debt I owe (to my parents, or to my God) for having been born? It doesn’t sound like a good feeling. It’s common on the traditionalist right to mock “emotivist” arguments, but really, don’t we want people to have children because they want to have them? In Douthat’s terms, don’t we want people to want to give the gift of life freely, rather than feeling obliged to?

So let’s get away from this “who is less selfish” competition. Is it more selfish to have children, and chew up more of the future’s resources for one’s own progeny? Is it more selfish to have no children, and live only for one’s own life, not for your children? Who cares? “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” some wise guy once said, and for most people I know, having children is a mixture of sacrifice of self and aggrandizement of self – I give up a good measure of personal freedom, and acquire certain unshirkable obligations, but I also get little copies of myself, with pliable little minds for me to warp.

Have the kids you want. Don’t have the kids you don’t want. And let’s worry, as a society, more about whether people who want to have kids can have them, are prepared to raise them, can afford them, and so forth. Because there’s no dearth of people who want kids. And if people who don’t want kids need books to justify their decision, well, whatever works for them.