In this post, Elizabeth Cripps (University of Edinburgh) discusses her new article published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, in which she explores whether it is justifiable to have children despite the carbon footprint it creates.

In the US, having a child has a carbon price tag of 7 tonnes a year. In France, it’s 1.4 tonnes. Going vegan saves only 0.4 tonnes yearly, living car free 2.4 tonnes, and avoiding a Transatlantic flight 1.6 tonnes.

For those of us who have or want kids, this is an uncomfortable fact. We know we should pursue climate justice, including by cutting our own carbon impact. Does it follow that someone living an affluent life in a country like the UK or the US should stay childless?

Not necessarily. What’s more, by putting this argument under pressure, we learn some important lessons for moral philosophers. We need to talk more about individual sacrifice in the face of global emergencies. In so doing, we must engage carefully with sociological and psychological scholarship and attend to the insights of demographic groups who have experienced injustice.

We need to talk about demandingness

Here’s an apparently plausible argument: you must not cause serious harm, climate change is serious harm, having kids contributes to climate change, so having kids is morally wrong. However, this combines two distinct actions: doing something that contributes to serious harm, and doing such harm, directly, oneself. My carbon impact (or yours) doesn’t cause climate harm on its own.

That’s not to say it doesn’t matter. In flying to another continent, eating a steak (or, yes, having a baby) you help to harm, or fail to ‘do your bit’ in preventing it. Put another way, you run the risk of making climate harm much worse because at some point of increased emissions, things will get devastatingly worse, and your action just might trigger that. But while this is a good moral reason not to increase your carbon impact, it needn’t be a deal-breaking one, requiring you to refrain whatever the personal cost.

Why? Because what any individual must give up in fulfilling a moral duty depends on how stringent, or demanding, that duty is – and this changes when their action is a contribution to combined harm rather than a serious individual harm.

Think about it like this. You must not bash innocent people’s heads against the wall, even if doing so would save your own head from being bashed. But if morality absolutely ruled out all actions that contribute to combined harm, or run a small risk of causing devastation, then we could do barely anything. I couldn’t cycle to work, or drive if it were the only way to keep my job.

Moreover, climate change is a collective crisis: the onus must be on the corporations and governments responsible. There’s a lot we can – and must – do to get them to act, but that doesn’t necessarily mean making maximal sacrifices to change our own lives.

The cost of not having kids

So let’s agree that individuals aren’t required to cut their own carbon impact to the point of extreme sacrifice, in the face of government failure on climate change. In that case, it’s permissible to have a child in the climate emergency if not doing so would be an extreme sacrifice. But would it?

Parenting is amazing. Philosophers recognise this. It can be a bond like non-other, an instance of genuine unconditional love, a relationship unique in its combination of the fiduciary and the intimate. But is there so fundamental an interest in being able to be a biological parent that it would be an extreme sacrifice to give it up? (Such an interest, incidentally, is perfectly plausible with the equally plausible fundamental interest in being free not to have kids, if you don’t want to.)

We can’t rule this out. Moreover, when we examine the arguments used to do so, we highlight a familiar problem: as philosophers, we need to check our privilege.

Argument 1: Plenty of people lead great lives without having kids

But even if some people don’t choose to exercise central opportunities (for example, if they choose to live in isolation), it can be an extreme sacrifice for others not to do so.

Argument 2: There’s sociological evidence that parenting doesn’t increase happiness

Again, going without kids can still be an extreme sacrifice for some – even many – persons. Perceived happiness, day to day, isn’t the same as living a full human life. Moreover, the sociological research tends to compare random samples of parents and non-parents. What about those who want to have kids, and don’t? Abundant research, as well as first-person accounts, documents the searing personal cost of involuntary infertility: serious mental health and emotional difficulties, including psychological distress, grief and loss of hope, depression, anxiety, and poorer quality of life.

Argument 3: Even if parenting is important, you don’t need biological children

There’s something importantly right here. Parents can have that incredible, loving relationship with adopted children. But, contrary to the intuitions of the philosophers making this argument (who are often from more privileged demographic groups), biological parenting can matter deeply in its own right.

Ingrid Robeyns describes us as ‘a procreative species’. Moreover, many women value experiencing pregnancy and childbirth. These involve the unique work of growing a new human being but, as Amy Mullin points out, are also deeply significant in themselves.

It can be particularly important to have and raise one’s own biological children because of past gender, race and intersectional injustices. As Jade Sasser explains, the legacy of reproductive rights violations, from the abominations of slavery to the eugenics of the past century, gives women of colour special reason to value biological parenting.

Whose intuitions?

And here lies, for me, a fundamental concern. If many of those who value procreative parenting do so because of injustice and misrecognition, their lived experience should do more work in determining what counts as an extreme sacrifice – and the intuitions of privileged academics should do rather less.