More Co-parents, Fewer Children: Multiparenting and Sustainable Population

Abstract

Some philosophers argue that we should limit procreation—for instance, to one child per person or one child per couple—in order to reduce our aggregate carbon footprint. I provide additional support to the claim that population size is a matter of justice, by explaining that we have a duty of justice towards the current generation of children to pass on to them a sustainable population. But instead of, or, more likely, alongside with, having fewer children in in each family, we could also create families with more than two parents. I explore this possibility by pointing out the ways in which multi-parenting can advance children’s interests: in higher levels of well-being, in non-monopolistic child-rearing, and in a future opportunity to become themselves parents. Anca Gheaus Universitat Pompeu Fabra Essays Philos (2019)20:1 | DOI: 10.7710/1526-0569.1630 Correspondence: [email protected] Essays in Philosophy Volume 20, Issue 1 Essays in Philosophy 2 | eP1630 Essays in Philosophy Introduction Many believe it is imperative to limit population growth worldwide in order to prevent or mitigate the harmful effects of excessive consumption. At the same time, many believe that denying people the opportunity to parent amounts to a grave injustice, at least in cases when the individuals in question would make good (enough) parents and give their children reasonably flourishing lives. This paper is written for the subset of people who subscribe to (some version of) both beliefs—a subset that, I contend, is not small. Usually, the two beliefs above are taken to support different, and incompatible, views concerning procreation and parenthood. On the one hand, there is the view that we ought to drastically limit procreation. Some philosophers argue that procreation is on par with consumption;1 indeed, recent empirical research indicates that procreation is disproportionately related to one’s carbon footprint.2 In this vein, some defend the claim that individuals lack a moral right to parent more than one child,3 while others argue that although individuals don’t have a duty to limit themselves to having small families, there is nevertheless a strong moral presumption in favor of doing so.4 On the other hand, there is the view that there cannot be any legitimate restrictions—not even moral, and even less legal—on procreation. This, I take it, is the view supported by common morality and legislation alike. International legislation codifies an individual right to decide the number of children one has: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims a right, for adults, to marry and found a family—that is, to procreate and raise children. The Proclamation of Teheran states that “parents have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and the spacing of their children.” Similarly, The Cairo Programme of Action recommends that governments prioritize 1 Starting with Thomas Young, “Overconsumption and Procreation: Are They Morally Equivalent?” Journal of Applied Philosophy 18, part 2 (2001): 183–92. 2 See Seth Wynes and Kimberly A. Nicholas, “The Climate Mitigation Gap: Education and Government Recommendations Miss the Most Effective Individual Actions.” Environmental Research Letters 12, no. 7 (2017): 074024. 3 Christine Overall, Why Have Children? The Ethical Debate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Sara Conly, One Child: Do We Have a Right to More? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Tim Meijers, “Climate Change and the Right to One Child,” in Human Rights and Sustainability, ed. Gerhard Bos and Marcus Duwell (Oxford: Routledge, 2016), 181–94. 4 Travis Rieder, Towards a Small Family Ethic: How Overpopulation and Climate Change Are Affecting the Morality of Procreation. (New York: Springer, 2016). Gheaus | More Co-parents, Fewer Children commons.pacificu.edu/eip eP1630 | 3 individuals’ reproductive freedoms over demographic targets.5 Further, to the best of my knowledge, almost no legislation directly limits the number of children one can parent. (As I elaborate below, there are indirect limitations on the moral right to parent, having to do with ensuring a standard of sufficient well-being to children, meaning that, in practice, there is a limit to how many children one can permissibly bring up.) The notorious exception to this is the Chinese state, which for decades has implemented a law limiting the right to rear to one child, but this policy has been justified by appeal to considerations of internal Chinese politics rather than by appeal to the aim of avoiding worldwide overpopulation. My contribution to the debate about procreation in an overpopulated world is to show that both beliefs—that we are near the point where world population is unsustainable and that we ought to respect and protect adults’ interest in parenting—will, when supplemented by a distributive concern, support the same practical conclusion: each generation has a duty of justice to limit its birth rates such that all those who wish to parent—and who would be able to do so adequately—can do so without restricting the same ability for those in generations to come. Depending on particular circumstances, this will entail a more or less drastic reduction in procreation. The focus of my discussion will be on how it is possible to satisfy the interest in parenting in cases in which justice requires a steep downsizing of the population. I argue that multiparenting—that is, three, four, or possibly more adults co-raising the same child or children—is a desirable solution. Moreover, in cases where each individual or couple parenting one child would not result in sufficiently steep downsizing, multiparenting may be morally required. In such circumstances, the moral duty to transition to multiparenting is owed to children qua future adults, because it protects their own interest in legitimate parenting; it is also one (possibly the best) way to discharge a duty to rear children in ways that minimize monopolies of care over them. Therefore, a legal reform would also be, in principle and under particular circumstances that I shall specify, justified. But such a reform faces serious implementation issues. The legal status of multiparenting ought to depend on whether there are permissible ways to enforce such a policy. This turns on answers to other questions, which I will flag at the end of the paper without aiming to answer them. 5 See United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, available at: http://www.un.org/en/ universal-declaration-human-rights/; United Nations, The Proclamation of Teheran, 1968, available at: http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/instree/l2ptichr.htm; United Nations, Programme of Action, adopted at The International Conference on Population and Development, Cairo, 1994, available at: https://www.unfpa. org/sites/default/files/pub-pdf/programme_of_action_Web%20ENGLISH.pdf. Volume 20, Issue 1 Essays in Philosophy 4 | eP1630 Essays in Philosophy A few further clarifications: I reserve the term parenting to talk about child-rearing. Most parenting is procreative parenting—that is, procreators rearing their children—but, as we shall see, procreation and parenting have different normative standing. Unqualified, “right” refers to moral rights. Drawing on previous work, I explain in the next section why people who would make adequate parents have a morally weighty interest in an opportunity to parent and why this entails principled limits to how many children it is permissible to bring into existence during any period of time—I refer, by stipulation, to “generations.” The third section explains how multiparenting can be good for children relative to the status quo in which children have at most two parents. In addition, multiparenting is one way to dismantle a monopoly of care over children which, as I have argued elsewhere, is morally objectionable in itself. Further, multiparenting distributes fairly opportunities to fulfill the interest in close, long-lasting, and protected relationships with children. In the fourth section I elaborate on the circumstances in which multiparenting is morally required, and in the fifth section I address a few worries concerning multiparenting as a possible default way of raising children, including implementation difficulties. Parenting and Overpopulation As noted already, legislations and common-sense morality grant a right to unlimited procreation. Yet the right cannot be unqualified: to permissibly bring someone into existence, procreators must at least give their offspring lives worth living.6 But, more likely, procreators are to be held to higher moral standards, requiring them to provide at least adequate lives for the children they bring into the world7—at least, assuming that nobody else capable of adequate parenting is willing to raise these children. Here I don’t commit to a particular standard of permissible procreation. But why are adults who can meet the relevant standard free to beget and raise children? On a traditional view, this is by virtue of other generally recognized rights. As a human right proclaimed by international documents, the right to parent—conflating reproduction and child-rearing—is justifiable by appeal to the right to bodily autonomy and rights 6 Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). 7 See Onora O’Neill, “Begetting, Bearing, and Rearing,” in Having Children: Philosophical and Legal Reflections on Parenthood, ed. Onora O’Neill and William Ruddick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 25–38; and David Archard, “The Obligations and Responsibilities of Parenthood,” in Procreation and Parenthood, ed. David Archard and David Benatar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 103–27. Gheaus | More Co-parents, Fewer Children commons.pacificu.edu/eip eP1630 | 5 that protect individuals’ freedom to form and maintain intimate relationships. The likely normative story behind this understanding of the right to parent goes like this: adul