My wife and I just celebrated our 16th anniversary, and are pretty well completely past reasonable child-creating age. No intellectual nor emotional arguments convinced us to procreate, though there have been times that one or the other of us has wanted to (but not enough to make the massive additional sacrifices it’d take to coerce the partner or find a new one).
If you’re serious about convincing more smart people to have children, bottom-up moral or philosophical arguments are unlikely to work. The people you’re targeting (smart, well-read, self-aware) are well aware of the arguments and can model the impact of a marginal smart baby on the world. They may forget to factor in the chance of a marginal genius, but probably not.
The two arguments that came closest to working on us were the “full human experience” argument (that there is pretty much no way other than parenthood to have that kind of bond and closeness with another human) and the ” ’twer best done quickly” argument (if you’re going to eventually do so, you should do it earlier than you probably think—it’s just easier in your 20s and 30s than it will be later).
Those are both valid arguments. They also combine to create a third: parenting completely changes your priorities in life, giving you new perspective, drives, and goals that make those things you were doing in 20′s and 30′s that seemed so much more important than having kids actually feel like a waste of time in retrospect. And you wonder why you didn’t start earlier.
This feels like an argument that proves too much. If you were not in a war, or tortured, you are still missing some kinds of human experience. It could be argued that war is quite common experience. Yet this argument would not convince me to go to war or get tortured, just to achieve the full spectrum of human experience.
Fair point, but in practice when you actually have the debate, it very quickly becomes clear that it’s really the “commonly reported to be positive experiences” argument.
And for some, war and surviving hardship _do_ qualify—there’s plenty of examples of people seeking pain (or risk of pain) just because they crave “adventure”. IMO, this doesn’t reach anywhere as close to universal as parenthood does, but it seems like a related drive.
My wife and I just celebrated our 16th anniversary, and are pretty well completely past reasonable child-creating age. No intellectual nor emotional arguments convinced us to procreate, though there have been times that one or the other of us has wanted to (but not enough to make the massive additional sacrifices it’d take to coerce the partner or find a new one).
If you’re serious about convincing more smart people to have children, bottom-up moral or philosophical arguments are unlikely to work. The people you’re targeting (smart, well-read, self-aware) are well aware of the arguments and can model the impact of a marginal smart baby on the world. They may forget to factor in the chance of a marginal genius, but probably not.
The two arguments that came closest to working on us were the “full human experience” argument (that there is pretty much no way other than parenthood to have that kind of bond and closeness with another human) and the ” ’twer best done quickly” argument (if you’re going to eventually do so, you should do it earlier than you probably think—it’s just easier in your 20s and 30s than it will be later).
Those are both valid arguments. They also combine to create a third: parenting completely changes your priorities in life, giving you new perspective, drives, and goals that make those things you were doing in 20′s and 30′s that seemed so much more important than having kids actually feel like a waste of time in retrospect. And you wonder why you didn’t start earlier.
This feels like an argument that proves too much. If you were not in a war, or tortured, you are still missing some kinds of human experience. It could be argued that war is quite common experience. Yet this argument would not convince me to go to war or get tortured, just to achieve the full spectrum of human experience.
Fair point, but in practice when you actually have the debate, it very quickly becomes clear that it’s really the “commonly reported to be positive experiences” argument.
And for some, war and surviving hardship _do_ qualify—there’s plenty of examples of people seeking pain (or risk of pain) just because they crave “adventure”. IMO, this doesn’t reach anywhere as close to universal as parenthood does, but it seems like a related drive.