Nevermind the economic burden of looking after anybody else: I can think of few greater psychological burdens than knowing I was brought into the world primarily in order to look after just my parents when they were old, or—perhaps even worse—because my parents figured that they and their peers might enjoy their public spaces more if they were decorated with children. I would resent parents who thought like that a great deal, I think.
over solutions involving manufacturing people and expecting them to do the work for us.
Putting aside the fact one can expect one’s children to look after oneself in old age, or that one can have children in part because it is necessary for cultural forms to continue, without it being their ‘primary purpose’, your phrasing here suggests that you have a fundamentally different idea of what it means to have children to me.
I’d be curious to know more about which situations you think having children is acceptable?
After all, I could phrase having children like so: “The great selfishness of creating people who never asked to exist, placed in a position of massive helplessness and dependence for 8 years, who are inevitably imprisoned in some way and forced to do things they do not want to do, and who are then brainwashed by their captors.”
Putting aside the fact one can expect one’s children to look after oneself in old age, or that one can have children in part because it is necessary for cultural forms to continue, without it being their ‘primary purpose’, your phrasing here suggests that you have a fundamentally different idea of what it means to have children to me.
I’d be curious to know more about which situations you think having children is acceptable?
After all, I could phrase having children like so: “The great selfishness of creating people who never asked to exist, placed in a position of massive helplessness and dependence for 8 years, who are inevitably imprisoned in some way and forced to do things they do not want to do, and who are then brainwashed by their captors.”