I have one child and do not want more, so I am not seeking for personal advice here. But I am interested in the general ethical question: From an effective utilitarian viewpoint, what are the arguments for and against having children? And if we do chooose to have children, what are the arguments for having few vs. many?
I am restricting the question to rich countries. People in poor countries might face a very different set of problems.
I am not talking about generalized pro-natalism or anti-natalism. I am talking about the cost-benefit analysis. Creating more humans has a certain obvious utility in itself (if we reject generalized anti-natalism), in that it means more humans will be able to enjoy being alive. But it has drawbacks as well. Each citizen in a rich country causes an awful lot of pollution, which may accelerate all sorts of environmental disasters.
There is the concern that an aging population will put more pressure on those people of working age. It is unclear to me how this trend will interact with growing automation, and whether this problem can be fixed or merely postponed.
Furthermore, it obviously makes a huge difference whether we expect an impending singularity, an impending environmental collapse, or both.
In your opinion, is it—as a guideline—good to have many children, or is it better to have few? Why?
Certainly a strong argument against having a child is it makes it easier for society to deal with climate change. Halving the global population has the same effect on climate as doubling the size of the Earth’s atmosphere, allowing it to absorb twice as much CO2 for the same effect on climate. But if people who care enough about society to respond to an argument like this actually do respond to this argument, then the next generation will not include their children, so it will be more selfish than the current generation.
Some people believe that the main impediment to drastically reducing or stopping society’s use of fossil fuels is stubborn refusal to see the light by consumers, voters and people in power. Obviously if that is the actual situation we are in, then reducing the human population will not be needed to deal with climate change. But there’s a good chance that that is not the situation we are in and that the only way we can stop burning fossil fuels is to suffer a severe drop in the global standard of living if we maintain current global population levels.
assuming economics (CO2 emission) scales linearly with population.
(alt idea) I think a large contributor to greenhouse gases is transport to remote areas, so solving problems with housing prices in local areas could somewhat concentrate people and help with ecology.