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
Yes, I tend to think that any one individual’s impact on the world around them probably balances out roughly neutral.
So I don’t use the argument that your own children might do a lot of good for the world and therefore you should raise children. That seems too speculative. And so the more known direct impact of having children on your own happiness and their happiness balances out the very speculative, almost entirely uninformed prior of the indirect effects having children might lead to.
Where you have a clear idea of a high and direct impact career that would be difficult to pursue were you to have children, then yes that might win out. Again, direct impacts are important, indirect impacts I think are so speculative that they probably don’t count for much.
As for earning to give, this is another challenge to my argument. I am sceptical that someone who really wants to have children will be happy in the long term sacrificing that for earning to give and this I’m sceptical that their commitment will be sustained and thus it may not be particularly impactful anyway, vs some compromise between personal desires and earning to give that is sustainable over decades.
That’s pretty speculative on my part but maybe borne out by observations made by 80k on people who enter morally neutral, high impact careers just to earn to give.
why do you believe that? (intuition is a fine answer, but I think it should be made explicit)
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)
why “as a distant second”?
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
Yes, I tend to think that any one individual’s impact on the world around them probably balances out roughly neutral.
So I don’t use the argument that your own children might do a lot of good for the world and therefore you should raise children. That seems too speculative. And so the more known direct impact of having children on your own happiness and their happiness balances out the very speculative, almost entirely uninformed prior of the indirect effects having children might lead to.
Where you have a clear idea of a high and direct impact career that would be difficult to pursue were you to have children, then yes that might win out. Again, direct impacts are important, indirect impacts I think are so speculative that they probably don’t count for much.
As for earning to give, this is another challenge to my argument. I am sceptical that someone who really wants to have children will be happy in the long term sacrificing that for earning to give and this I’m sceptical that their commitment will be sustained and thus it may not be particularly impactful anyway, vs some compromise between personal desires and earning to give that is sustainable over decades.
That’s pretty speculative on my part but maybe borne out by observations made by 80k on people who enter morally neutral, high impact careers just to earn to give.