Does climate change make it immoral to have kids? Dave Bry Dave Bry

[sue4e3]

The decision whether or not to have a child is one of the bigger ones a person will make in life – often the biggest.

I needed some strong convincing from my wife when it came time for us to make it. Most of my reluctance was self-interested: I liked my life well enough, and I didn’t want to change it. My wife talked about feeling a biological imperative, which I had no answer for. Who was I to stand in the way of something like that? I signed on.

But there is a whole other potential person to consider, too – the new life that you are bringing into the world without asking first.

It’s not really fair. For while the world is a wonderful place, one we humans have made nicer for ourselves with wonderful inventions like books and record players, penicillin and pizza, it’s also a really awful place, one we’ve ravaged with deforestation and smog, nuclear weapons and mountains of pizza delivery boxes and other garbage.

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The awfulness seems to be getting worse, especially now that climate chan
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/02/does-climate-change-make-it-immoral-to-have-kids

[angstlessk]

1. Back in the day (my generation) it was just...get married and have kids

then it was get married and wait till we can afford kids...now it is

Should we even have kids because our past generations trashed the planet so horribly, it might not be worth living in!

[Nihil]

3. Sadly, it is the children of the people who think like that ...

> Should we even have kids because our past generations trashed the planet
> so horribly, it might not be worth living in!

... that we need and the ones who simply spawn like salmon (without a thought
for their offspring) that should be prevented from doing so.

Still, it just goes to show that intelligence & morality are not survival traits.

[safeinOhio]

2. I'm 66 and never had children.

Decided when I was a teen and stuck to it. No regrets at all. I borrow others grand kids to take fishing. Even though I don't have kids, I feel responsible for doing my part for the environment. You don't have to have children to worry about the future of the world.

[enough]

4. So this writer decides it's OK to have kids because it's more mind-blowing than any drug trip.

snip>

The moment is wordless, and as mind-blowing as any drug trip I ever took. But my friend Dave, who had kids before me, came closest to capturing its essence while we were talking later that day: it was like having a door open in your brain and stepping through it and realizing that there’s this whole other part of your brain that you never knew was there before. A room, roughly the same size as the part of your brain that you’ve been using all your life, it was vast and mostly empty (like your old brain) but in it I found stuff, inside myself, that I had never known was in there before.

This creature, this tiny newborn person, was half me. I felt a primordial bond that I’d never felt before, a connection different from anything I’d ever known. And I realized a deep, heavy responsibility: protecting him was instantly the most important job of all my jobs – to keep this thing alive, healthy, happy, thriving.

snip>

This goes nowhere in answering the question he's asking. It's simply another case of humans putting their instinctive drives and desires ahead of planetary reality, just as we have all being doing since time immemorial. I doubt this will change.

Then he concludes that it's a good idea to reproduce because that child you have may be the genius who discovers the idea that can "save the planet." If this any kind of logic, everybody should be having more and more children in order to raise the odds that mythical super-genius will get born.

People should accept the fact that they have children because they want them, just the same reason we do just about everything we do. And people will keep doing this even though it's the fundamental reason our planet will become inhospitable to all of us.

[stuntcat]

5. 2090 or 2099 is what they're being given now

All the mind-blowing awesomeness (the response we're evolved to fell) he gets out of raising his carbon copy isn't for the baby's benefit, it's the parents'. No reason anyone has ever given is in the actual child's interest.

[sylvanus]

6. Leave morality to philosophers, it's just lazy and uninspired.

I'm 48, I decided not to have kids and my wife agreed. For a variety of reasons, the environment being one.
But, now that I've moved on from the selfish ideas, that know ones going to look out for me when I'm old, or
my name and beliefs won't be carried on, I realize the real reason people have kids, "purpose". Once you decide not
to procreate, what is your purpose. It's truly the hardest thing to answer, unless you cop-out and have kids. Then
you don't have to answer that question. For me, having kids is lazy, and cruel, cause when I see kids today, I just
see starving people fighting, always fighting for less and less.

[CrispyQ]

7. The Zeroth Law

You have to save humanity before you can save individuals.

That's kind of the gist of the zeroth law from the three laws of robotics by Issac Asimov.

We can never discuss human population. Even on DU it is a hot topic. Who gets to make the decision as to who gets to have children or not? But by not addressing it, we are headed for a situation where our planet will not sustain our numbers. Not the way we currently live, for sure. So at some point we will have to consider the collective over the individual. Personally, I feel we are near the end of the age of the individual & while I'm glad, I'm not sure we will survive it. The US is the rugged individualist mentality on steroids. We are resentful at having to contribute to a community pot. We tout the rights of the individual at all costs. I saw Michael Moore's movie Where to Invade Next last week. I highly recommend it! One of the women he interviewed in Iceland said that she would never live in America. "You couldn't pay me," she said. She said that we don't care for each other, we don't take care of each other. And she's right. Our sense of community has become more & more inclusive. The internet hasn't helped. People walk through their here-and-now lives detached from reality while tethered to their virtual world. People's manners haven't gotten any better having access to all that internet knowledge. Some scientists are starting to mention the E word - extinction. Most people laugh, our big brains will get us out of this mess! But it's our big brains that got us in this mess. Climate change will change everything & we aren't doing squat to address that. Oh yes, we have silly little conferences where we will do some small thing by 2020. I leave you with this. Is that a whale at 1:54? I think so, but you decide.