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In many studies the value also includes the quality of life, the expected life time remaining, as well as the earning potential of a given person especially for an after-the-fact payment in a wrongful death claim lawsuit. |
Today, having children has become the kind of thing that you need to justify to yourself and to others. And when you think of kids in terms of the possible benefits to our well-being, or to our level of happiness, or the cost that we will incur when we have children, it’s not a surprise that people are increasingly coming up short.
But I’d like to invite the people who are thinking today about whether or not to have children, or how to view having children, to remember that — before the personal concerns of how to fit children into your own life and your own ambitions, and before we try to reconcile having children with this or that political goal — we have to be able to answer a deep ethical philosophical question. It’s one that human beings have been asking ever since we started asking philosophical questions at all, and that’s the question of the worth of human life.
Is it worth the trouble, the pain, the loss and grief that we encounter? Is it justifiable and is it maybe even good to usher more human beings into existence?
It can be helpful to remember some of the greatest critics of our way of life coming from the left, like Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, who highlighted how motherhood and the raising of children was one of the greatest sources of oppression for women — even she said she could not deny that raising children and shaping the intellect and character of another human being is one of the most delicate and serious undertakings of all.
Confronting the philosophical and ethical question of the worth of human life writ large liberates us to recognize the order of the concerns at stake here. There has to be priority to this question of whether or not we have faith in the possibility of a better human future.
We also have to realize that the possibility of a better future is conditioned on the possibility of having a future at all. That means, some people have to be having children. And if you want those children to share in the values that you yourself hold, you probably want some of those people to be the kind of people that you yourself are.
But I’d like to invite the people who are thinking today about whether or not to have children, or how to view having children, to remember that — before the personal concerns of how to fit children into your own life and your own ambitions, and before we try to reconcile having children with this or that political goal — we have to be able to answer a deep ethical philosophical question. It’s one that human beings have been asking ever since we started asking philosophical questions at all, and that’s the question of the worth of human life.
Is it worth the trouble, the pain, the loss and grief that we encounter? Is it justifiable and is it maybe even good to usher more human beings into existence?
It can be helpful to remember some of the greatest critics of our way of life coming from the left, like Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, who highlighted how motherhood and the raising of children was one of the greatest sources of oppression for women — even she said she could not deny that raising children and shaping the intellect and character of another human being is one of the most delicate and serious undertakings of all.
Confronting the philosophical and ethical question of the worth of human life writ large liberates us to recognize the order of the concerns at stake here. There has to be priority to this question of whether or not we have faith in the possibility of a better human future.
We also have to realize that the possibility of a better future is conditioned on the possibility of having a future at all. That means, some people have to be having children. And if you want those children to share in the values that you yourself hold, you probably want some of those people to be the kind of people that you yourself are.
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