Laurie Paul on deciding whether to have children

A colleague alerted me that Laurie Paul has a piece on deciding whether to have children (in a position where one does not have any yet). Paul addresses the model on which you rationally decide whether to have a child by reflecting on "what it will be like for you to have a child of your very own" and argues that this model cannot be used. The neat idea is that having a child is a transformative experience, and just as the person who has never seen color cannot have any idea what it's like to see red, so too cannot have any idea what it will be like to live after this transformative experience until one has undergone it. Therefore, she concludes, standard decision theory cannot be used to decide whether to have a child.

Now, I agree that one shouldn't decide on whether to have a child by reflecting on what that would be like for you. To decide to have a child on the basis of what it will be like for one is to treat the child's very existence as a means to one's ends. This is morally objectionable in the same way that it is morally objectionable to decide to rescue a drowning person on the basis of what it will be like for one to be a rescuer (though of course that certainly beats deciding not to rescue her).

But Paul's transformative-experience argument seems to me to fail in at least two places. First, it is false that one cannot make rational decisions on the basis of what it will be like for one after one has had a transformative experience. Paul herself gives the example of posttraumatic stress as a transformative experience. I have no idea what it would be like to have undergone that, but I certainly can know that it would be terrible to live with posttraumatic stress. I can decide to avoid situations generating posttraumatic stress in a perfectly rational way on the basis of what it would be like to live with posttraumatic stress--namely, on the basis of the fact that it will be nasty. I don't have to know in what way it would be nasty to know that it would be nasty. There are many very nasty things that are transformative, and one can rationally avoid them simply on the basis of common-sense knowledge (typically based on testimony) of their nastiness.

I think Paul will resist this line of thought on the following grounds. The decision whether to avoid posttraumatic stress or not is a no-brainer given what we know about it. Just about everybody who undergoes it agrees it's very nasty, I assume (I haven't checked opinion polls here). But parenthood is much more complex. Typically, it has both nasty and nice components. And one doesn't know how the nasty and the nice will balance out until one has undergone the transformative experience. But I think that once we've agreed that there is no in-principle difficulty in making decisions on the basis of how things will be after a transformative experience, then it can just be a matter of gathering the best information we have on the balance between the nasty and the nice for people of different sorts, and seeing what sort of a person we are.

Second, even if one could not make a decision on the basis of what-it-would-be-like considerations, decision theory could still be used. One could use non-egocentric decision theory, like utilitarian decision theory. But even within egocentric decision theory, one could make a decision on the basis of non-experiential values, like the objective value of being the intentional cause of the great goods of life and upbringing.

My own take on the reasons for having children is rather different however. There is some discussion here.

Parental duty

Another excerpt from my forthcoming One Body book, this time from the discussion of gamete donation (challenge to the reader: find the relevance of this to gamete donation):

Now, it is not merely the duty of the parents to bring it about that the children are cared for and appropriately educated morally, religiously and academically. Rather, it is the duty of the parents to care for and educate the child—i.e., to do it themselves. In caring for and educating the child, parents will make use of the help of others, including that of family members, friends, and professionals. How much the parents can rely on the help of others before they have failed in their duty of caring for and educating the child will depend on the circumstances.
There are thus two aspects of the parental duty: (a) caring for and educating, and (b) ensuring that the child is cared for and educated. In other words, there is the aspect of parental activity and the aspect of results. These two aspects need to be balanced prudently, and, moreover, balanced with other duties the parents may have; how they are balanced will depend on particular circumstances. In no cases will it be desirable and rarely will it be possible for the parents directly to care for and educate the child in all respects with the help of no one else. Moral education, for instance, requires contact with virtuous people of a significant variety of different characters, not just the parents. Academic education should typically include education in subjects in which the parents lack competency. The need to work to earn money to provide for the child can force the parents to delegate a significant degree care to a third party.
Here is an observation worth making. In most couples, there will be specialization. Thus, the mother might be working long hours to earn the money needed to diaper, feed, clothe, and house the child, while the father might be changing the diapers, feeding, clothing, and otherwise taking care of the child for most of the day. It might seem that in such cases, each parent will be neglecting an aspect of the parental responsibility to himself or herself care for and educate the child. But we can respond to this by noting that parents should be friends of each other, and bringing in an idea from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle considers what value there in having good friends. He observes that friends share a life, a friend is “another self,” and one can be active through one’s friend’s activity: what the friend does virtuously is something that accrues to oneself.

The value of the pleasure in sex

When loving parents make decisions concerning their teenage children, they put very small, if any, weight on the physical pleasure of sex as isolated from other things. For instance, that some course of action is likely to increase the number of times that the child experiences the physical pleasure of sex counts very little in favor of the course of action—it may even count against it. Parents are either mistaken in this weighting or not.

We would expect parents to be more reliable in weighing the values of pleasures of activities that they themselves find pleasurable. But typical adults do find sex pleasurable, and presumably that includes the parents (and may even help explain why they are parents). Indeed, typical adults find sex physically as pleasant as teenagers do, or more so due to greater experience. Moreover, I think we would expect parents if anything to be better judges of the values of outcomes in the case of their children than in their own case, at least when the outcomes are ones that the parents are familiar with and find pleasant or unpleasant in much the way that the children do. One is likely to be more clearheaded when one is making decisions for someone else.

But if this is right, then parents are probably right when they put very low weight on the physical pleasure of sex in the case of their children. Thus, probably, the physical pleasure of sex has very low value in the case of children, at least in itself. But since this physical pleasure is basically the same in adults (perhaps somewhat greater due to experience, but likely not an order of magnitude greater, at least in males), it follows that the physical pleasure of sex in and of itself, isolated from other considerations, has very low value in general. (Of course, the pleasure as combined with other goods may have significant value.)

Can it be instrumentally rational for a parent to object to a child's receiving contraception?

Let's bracket all moral concerns, and simply suppose that the parent does not count sexual activity by her minor children as having positive utility (or at least counts it as of such low utility as to be negligible), but does count a pregnancy (in the child or caused by the child) as a significantly negative outcome. Rhetoric from those advocating greater availability of contraception to children suggests that such a parent would be instrumentally irrational to object to the child's receiving contraception.

However, this is mistaken. Typically, children also consider a pregnancy a significantly negative outcome. Therefore, in a large enough population, there will be children who would be very unlikely to engage in sexual activity if there is a significant danger of pregnancy, but if that danger were significantly reduced, would engage in sexual activity. In the case of such children, it may very well be the case that the availability of contraception increases the risk of pregnancy. For instance, suppose that without contraception, over the period of a year the child would have a probability of 0.98 of not engaging in sexual relations at all. But if the pill is made available, the child has a probability of 0.50 of using it and having an average sexual frequency for sexually active persons.

Now, if contraception is not made available, the likelihood of a pregnancy is (0.02)(0.85)=0.017, where I shall suppose 0.85 is the probability of conception without contraceptives at an average sexual frequency for a sexually active person. This is actually an overestimate of the likelihood of a pregnancy, since if the child is afraid of a pregnancy outcome, the frequency is likely to be significantly lower. If the pill is made available, the likelihood of a pregnancy then will be (0.50)(0.05)=0.025, where the 0.05 is permthe typical-use failure rate for oral contraceptives.

Therefore, a parent who knows with a sufficiently high probability that her child satisfies the above assumptions and seeks to prevent the child's pregnancy will be instrumentally rational in refusing contraception for that child.

Moreover, since there surely are such children in the population (there is, obviously, a broad distribution in the attribute of caution in teenagers, and there are teenagers who are very cautious), it follows that even if making contraception available to all teenagers were to reduce the overall pregnancy rate (and I am not aware of any data that it would), there would be some individuals the risks for whom would be increased by the availability of contraception. And, of course, there will be individuals the risks for whom would be decreased by the availability of contraception—namely, those who would have a sufficiently large sexual frequency even without contraception. Therefore, making contraception available to all teenagers results in a redistribution of risks—some come to be better off pregnancy-wise and some come to be worse off.

Now, while it can be licit to have a public health initiative that redistributes risks, increasing those of some and decreasing those of others, significant gathering of empirical data is needed before any such policy is put into place, to ensure not only that the overall risk is decreased, but also that no subgroup's risk is increased in a way that is morally unacceptable. For instance, if a chemical added to the water were to improve the dental health of a majority ethnic group but decrease the dental health of a minority ethnic group, the introduction of that chemical would be morally problematic—significant amount of information-gathering would need to be done, and attempts to limit the application of the initiative to the minority might well need to be made (e.g., not adding the chemical in the areas where members of the minority group are more likely to be found).

In particular, the following empirical outcome is imaginable. It could be that the availability of contraceptives significantly increases the likelihood of pregnancy among religiously conservative teenagers, because without the availability of contraceptives they have two reasons to avoid sex: (a) religion and (b) pregnancy (and disease, but what I say about pregnancy applies to STIs mutatis mutandis), which two reasons may result in a high probability of abstinence and hence a close to zero pregnancy rate (rape can happen despite abstinence, so it's not exactly zero), while with the availability of contraceptives the second reason largely drops out, and the abstinence rate may significantly decrease. If that were so, then there would be an identifiable group for whom the risk of pregnancy would be increased by the availability of contraception. I do not know if it is so or not—that is an empirical question, and either answer is possible depending on how the probabilities work out. But it is not irrational for parents of religiously conservative children to worry that the availability of contraception might increase the risks of pregnancy for these children, and it might well be irrational to be confident that it does not increase these risks unless one has significant empirical data (of which I am not aware).

Children and God

This builds on a comment I made to yesterday's post, which was inspired by a remark of my wife's.

If God does not exist, then, in normal cases[note 1], the biological parents of a child are the persons directly and fully responsible for the child's existence. Thus, if God does not exist, then the parents, collectively, have the sort of role that, on traditional Christian views on which God directly creates the human being by creating the human being's soul, God has. But for the human parents to see themselves as having this God-like role distorts the parent-child relationship. There is thus moral reason for parents to believe in a deity who directly creates each human being.

If one thinks—as I think one should—that the fact that one has moral reason to believe p is itself evidence for p (it is much more likely that one have moral reason to believe a truth than to believe a falsehood), it follows that the above considerations not only give a moral reason for to believe in a deity, but they give an epistemic reason as well.

Sexual reproduction

Sexual reproduction happens like this.[note 1] The male and the female join as one biologically complete whole, and this whole produces the offspring. (Note: The two moments—the joining and the reproduction—should not be seen as separate, since the joining occurs in and through the striving for reproduction.)

This has an interesting consequence. While we think of someone's parents as two individuals, Bob and Jane, there is a real sense in which the origin of the child lies not so much in Bob and in Jane, as in the united Bob and Jane.

Suppose that Bob and Jane are no longer "together", whether through divorce, or because their sexual union was completely a one-night stand. Then there is a sense in which the child is an orphan—the united whole from which the child originated no longer exists.[note 2]

And if the child originated not from a biologically united whole but from in vitro fertilization (IVF), then the child never had an originating biological whole. Interestingly, a child produced through cloning has more of a biologically united whole at the origin—for the parent from whom it is cloned is such a whole—than a child produced by IVF.

The above is merely descriptive. Can any normative consequences be drawn just from these considerations? Is there perhaps an argument against reproduction except through sexual union in the context of a 'til-death-do-us-part marriage in these considerations? Perhaps it is impermissible to make a child without a commitment to at least strive to keep the child from being an orphan, by striving to maintain the relationship and preserve the lives of the individual parents?

In general, we can ask whether a child can have a right to have a particular kind of origin? I actually think the answer is positive. For instance, a child has a right to not to be procreated with the sole motive being the production of organs, a right that goes beyond the right not to be afterwards used as a mere source of organs. A child has a right not to be procreated in a way that treats the child as artifact. If these thoughts are right, then one may have a right to a particular kind of origin, even though, of course, one wouldn't exist without that kind of origin.