Producing A Child

With the decision to have children largely celebrated blindly in some communities (ideological or geographical) or condemned as morally heinous by anti-natalists, producing a child is something that there can be very irrational beliefs about.  Quiverfull evangelicals are another group with irrational stances on the issue: whereas anti-natalists are completely against having children and the majority of people who have children seem to only be doing so because socially expects it of them, quiverfull adherents think it is a moral obligation to have as many children as the can, as if the Bible ever so much as implies that is true!  None of these three kinds of incompetent thinkers are anywhere near to understand the real nature and weight of having children.  Philosophically apathetic or unthinking people are of course more likely to have children without proving any grand truths about children to themselves, quiverfull evangelicals are too enslaved to random traditions to distinguish between Christian theology and personal preference or church norms, and anti-natalists think that the mere presence of suffering by necessity means having children is morally wrong.

There is nothing but non-sequiturs for them to hold to, with the conclusion never logically following from the starting premise or the starting premise itself being false or unprovable, or at the very least only believed because of assumptions.  For instance, not only is anti-natalism impossible to believe except on an emotionalistic or assumption-based worldview, but there is the genuine logical possibility that the child's life will have far more happiness in it than suffering, not that emotional or otherwise consequence-based outcomes make something morally good or bad in the first place.  If something is obligatory or morally permissible, then it has that nature no matter how inconvenient or unwanted it is.  At the same time, in a life like this, anyone willing to produce a child who has not seriously thought about the economic conditions into which the child would be brought up, whether the child will become a rationalist, or whether the child will suffer--and made no assumptions along the way while coming to at least some provable truths about the matter--cannot deserve to have children no matter how much it would please them.

Anyone who has or plans to have a child just to appease their own personal desire to have descendants, moreover, is a goddamn fool who wants to bring a separate, seemingly conscious being into existence on a personal whim with no more weight than that.  It is not just people who do not have the resources to raise a child and yet intentionally have one are fools, or people who do not fully desire that their child would become a rationalist one day, and not just to fit in with family worldview (not that many parents are even close to being rationalistic anyway).  It is people who think that something as major as purposefully bringing another person into existence should be done because the parent(s) experience some sort of loneliness, desire to conform to blind social pressures to have children, or just a longing to have a child for the sake of having a child who are irrational as well.  Unless at a minimum humanity was literally about to go extinct and humans have moral value, rushing to produce another conscious (or seemingly conscious) person is absolutely irrational no matter what the motivation is.

No one can know if other minds exist because they perceive other people to act in ways that suggest they too are conscious.  They can, still, know their own consciousness, and when it comes to having children, it would be very easy for many people to suddenly forget about all of the many obstacles to flourishing that can be found in this world or the existential and moral aspects to creating another conscious being, especially in light of the fact that human preferences do not in any way morally legitimize something or make it evil.  Anti-natalists could not possibly know if they are correct in their central conclusion, but people like "quiverfull" evangelicals and those who would have children just because other people do are no less stupid in their assumptions, contradictions, and egoism.  Producing a child is either way a far more serious and nuanced matter than this trio of fools is intelligent enough to see.  It is something to be done, if done intentionally, with great rationalistic awareness, care, and stability.