[split] Ethics - parental responsibility re: children

[Belacqua]

Then again, the anti-natalist would counter this by rhetorically asking the question why humankind needs to progress at all anyway (which Ahri pretty much argued earlier in this thread). And once again, I find it's difficult to answer in a satisfactory manner. Maybe there isn't any good answer, but we're here anyway and we have kids and like having them, so that's that.

I think we're bumping up against a very common conviction among atheists: that life has no intrinsic meaning, and that we each give our lives the meaning we choose. 

But then if someone chooses not to choose a meaning, I don't see how we can scold that, or say that he's failing in some duty. And if he points out that other people's meanings are just things that they've chosen, and not something objectively real, and that such choices are not mandatory, then consistency demands that we agree. 

ETA: Or maybe there is at least one (I think). If people stopped having kids, then at some point there would be no young people to take care of the elderly in their last years of living. But again, doesn't sound very compelling on its own as a counter.

Periodically the Japanese government gets worried that the population is declining and there aren't enough young people paying social security to support all the old people. Then they try to urge women to have babies, and say it's some kind of national duty.

At the same time, they want women in the work force, and fail to provide sufficient practical incentives, like child care for working people. 

This is the consumerist ideology: society is set up to make us behave one way, but if we behave that way we are bad and it's our own fault.