From the ethics of procreation to the ethics of parenthood

At one point in the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer asks:"If the act of procreation were neither the outcome of a desire nor accompanied by feelings of pleasure, but a matter to be decided on the basis of purely rational considerations, is it likely the human race would still exist?Would each of us not rather have felt so much pity for the coming generation as to prefer to spare it the burden of existence, or at lest not wish to take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?"Obviously, when Schopenhauer is asking these questions, they are rhetorical ones: knowing what we do about Schopenhauer, and about his philosophical system, it is obvious that the answer he is heavily implying here is "no."Surely, if we really thought about itif we were really able to think about itwe would spare the unconceived the horrors of the existence we have been forced ourselves to endure.Intriguingly, however, early on in her Begetting: What Does It Mean to Create a Child?, Mara van der Lugt argues that, for all this, Schopenhauer was not what we would now call an 'anti-natalist': someone who thinks we are morally required to abstain from procreation.In part this is a consequence of Schopenhauer's curious metaphysics: through human beings the blind, aimless, undifferentiated 'will', which we all suffer as the slaves of, is able to become conscious of itself, which is ultimately the only way it is going to be denied.At least to this extent then, when his parents were conceiving Schopenhauer, they were not by his lights doing anything, strictly speaking, morally wrong: really they were just doing what 'the will' would condemn any of its slaves to do.But it is also because Schopenhauer was writing at a time when procreation was not something we could think 'rationally' about in the way we might now.While religious sects including the Cathars and the Shakers certainly did condemn sex, and procreation, as immoral, our fertility was notin the way that it is nowsomething that could be thought to fall comfortably within the purview of our agency.If previously pregnancy and children might typically have been thought of, especially by women of childbearing age, as, barring a life of celibacy, an inevitablysomething which would invariably befall them at some point, should their lives take the 'normal' course a life doesnowadays we are much more given to conceiving of them as something that might quite easily be avoided.Conversely, our agency has been extended in the other direction as well: while previously infertility might have been a fate certain couples were simply condemned to, nowadays there is a

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