Against anti-natalism; or: why climate change should not be a significant factor in your decision to have children

You might also be interested in John Halstead's and Johannes Ackva's recent Climate & Lifestyle Report for Founders Pledge. They point out that taking into account policy effects can dramatically change the estimated climate impact of lifestyle choices, and on children specifically they say that:

The biggest discrepancy here concerns the climate effect of having children. For the reasons given, we think our estimate of the effect of having children is more accurate for people living in the EU or US states with strong climate policy, such as California, New York, as well as other states in the Northeast. Indeed, even outside the US states with strong climate policy, we think the estimate accounting for policy is much closer to the truth, since emissions per head are also declining at the national level, and climate policy is likely to strengthen across the US in the next few decades.

After taking into account policy effects, they find that the climate impact of having children is comparable to some other lifestyle choices such as living car-free. (I.e. it's not the case that the climate impact of having children is orders of magnitude larger, as one might naively think w/o considering policy effects.)

For more detail, see their section 3.

I agree that blanket endorsements of anti-natalism (whether for climate or other reasons) in EA social media spaces are concerning, and I appreciate you taking the time to write down why you think they are misguided.

FWIW, my reaction to this post is: you present a valid argument (i.e. if I believed all your factual premises, then I'd think your conclusion follows), but this post by itself doesn't convince me that the following factual premise is true:

The magnitude of [your kids'] impact on the climate is likely to be much, much smaller than any of the three other factors I have raised.

At first glance, this seems highly non-obvious to me. I'd probably at least want to see a back-of-the-envelope calculation before believing this is right.

(And I'm not sure it is: I agree that your kids' impact on the climate would be more causally distant than their impact on your own well-being, your career, etc. However, conversely, there is a massive scale difference: impacts on climate affect the well-being of many people in many generations, not just your own. Notably, this is also true for impacts on your career, in particular if you try to improve the long-term future. So my first-pass guess is that the expected impact will be dominated by the non-obvious comparison of these two "distant" effects.)

I actually think that a true measure of the climate impact of having a child should not just factor in the extra carbon they will be responsible for over their lives, but also the very small probability that they will be responsible for doing something awesome (e.g. "solving climate change"), which may be enough to offset the expected carbon footprint.

(Of course, this only makes sense if you think that the tail positive risk of them doing something amazingly positive outweighs the tiny probability that they will do something stunningly negative!)

Here's my own view:

1. I think the impact on your own career and donations should plausibly go first. Here, your wellbeing still matters, but only instrumentally. You are one person, and if you're impartial, your interests shouldn't outweigh the interests of all of those you could help, who are also probably much worse off than you. The average cost of raising a child seems to be over $200K USD, and through the Against Malaria Foundation or Malaria Consortium, that could save the lives of several people. However, you may be able to raise a child much more cheaply, and if you think you can't be happy without having children, not having children could plausibly be bad for your career impact and donations.

2. If your children donate to EA charities or otherwise contribute to EA (and it doesn't have to be a lot), then they can make up for any negative impacts they would have, and I think this would come second. Maybe they can make up for losses in 1, too.

3. If you're nonspeciesist and your children aren't concerned with their impacts on nonhuman animals, then their effects on nonhuman animals would also come before the wellbeing in their own lives or your life, since they could be responsible for the suffering and deaths of many animals per person at any moment in time, on average/in expectation, mostly through their diets.

Then it's your wellbeing, their wellbeing, and greenhouse gas emissions towards climate change, but I'm not sure in what order.

Here's a half-baked argument for natalism vis-à-vis climate change:

Carbon emissions in the highly developed countries most EAs live in are generally trending in the right direction (i.e. there seems to be at least relative decoupling between emissions and consumption). The bulk of emissions growth over the next several decades will be in other large, rapidly developing countries like India and China. Green technology transfer is a way that highly developed countries can positively influence emissions in the critical rapidly developing countries (see e.g. this). Economic models generally propose that a larger population generates more ideas and a higher rate of technological change (e.g. Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990). Therefore, the (smallish?) direct impact of increased emissions from greater population in highly developed countries might be outweighed by more green technology and technology transfer to the crucial rapidly developing countries like China and India.

your primary concern should be yourself and your potential co-parent's happiness because that will be massively influenced by your decision - potentially either way, depending on your preferences

why do you believe that? (intuition is a fine answer, but I think it should be made explicit)

Managing own happiness and well-being is an important part of maximizing total aggregate well-being

do you mean because being more happy will directly increase the total amount of happiness, or do you mean being happy will make you more effective at work? (I think it's important to disentangle both of those)

Then, as a distant second you should consider the net positive impact your children would experience through living their own lives.

why "as a distant second"?

The magnitude of their impact on the climate is likely to be much, much smaller than any of the three other factors I have raised.

how do you know that?

it seems to me like that's a lot of claims that aren't backed by anything

might also be worth considering the other indirect impact of having children

From a total view, I think this does outline a potentially compelling case against the climate change argument, but I don't think it's compelling from an average point of view. Even from an in-between perspective (which I think roughly represents my feelings) which evaluates overall welfare as the product of average quality of life times the square root of population, it seems that marginal hits to the climate may outweigh marginal gains in quality of life.

Even from a totalist POV, it's important to consider lives with negative value. It matters where the line is drawn- some people may feel all lives have positive valence, others may set a high standard, and say that a life with positive valence must have very little suffering, even an absence of suffering that may be fairly unheard of in modern life. By having children, you might increase the value that your life contributes to overall welfare, and contribute the lives of your children, but have an impact on many people which changes their lives from making a positive contribution to a negative contribution, or greatly increases the suffering of a person who already has a negative-valence life.

This certainly isn't to say that I think you're wrong - I think the structure of your argument may be usable to make a compelling case which addresses my concerns, and in general I do feel (though am not certain) that on net, the average person will contribute more to other's well-being than they take away.

"Assuming your potential children live average lives, they'll probably experience a lot more happiness than suffering and their lives will be well worth living."

I think this is assuming a lot. The point of not having progeny in the climate change argument, is to preserve the possibility for other humans to have such happy lives. Having progeny, in that argument, is what actually challenges this assumption. It is problematic to argue that average happiness within rampant climate change will be higher or lower than average suffering. But what it is plainly wrong is to argue that they won't be substantially worse than today.

For me, your argument reads very similar to something like: it is fine that you cut more trees than your share (share being calculated so that new trees can replenish the forest) if the happiness gained is large enough. Well, this is fine until there are no trees left. In other words, it very much seems like an example of tragedy-of-the-commons-thinking.

A different issue is whether or not having progeny exacerbates climate change, but this is not what you challenge.

I find the ethics of procreation to be incredibly complicated. While I am skeptical of some of the particular arguments of this post, I agree that there are reasons to suspect that procreation is either morally good or morally neutral. Although I have substantial uncertainty about the moral goodness of procreation, I do strongly believe that many talented and altruistic people will be driven away from the EA community if anti-natalism becomes a big part of the cultural attitude. Many if not most people react to anti-natalism extremely negatively. They take it as an affront to their most personal choices, an insult to the people they most care about, and sometimes even a dangerous ideology that they inexorably associate with horrific human rights abuses. If there were real reason to believe with confidence that one of the best ways we can do good is lower the birth rate of people who actively want children, then that would be one thing. However, that seems so so so far from the current reality, that focusing on anti-natalist efforts just makes EA (or whatever other cause/group) look bad.

Great to put the climate externality of a child explicitly in relation to other positive and negative values that come with having a child. Thanks for doing this and doing it so well.

A question: where else in the population ethics debate can I find the kind of reasoning that you employ? More specifically, where else can I find (1) lists of the bazillion positive and negative externalities of an additional child and (2) some argument -- however weak -- that takes us beyond agnosticism on the question whether an additional child is overall a *net* positive or negative externality (and, in case it is a net negative externality, where can I find some argument -- however weak -- whether it is *sufficiently* net negative so as to outweigh the value that the life has to the child itself)?

PS: I've laid out 9 further reasons (plus a version of the point that you make) why the initially appealing case for less children here is surprisingly unclear at closer inspection: https://twitter.com/dominicroser/status/1228295710740766721 I've grown convinced that the climate case for less children is much more difficult than people think and think it's important to highlight this fact.