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.
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.