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Thanks for sharing your experience (and welcome to the Motte!). There were always similar concerns in my household (my children are all adults now)--I would like to have had more children (like you, I come from a large family) but then I talk to people who were lucky to have one kid, or who struggled with infertility for years and never had any, and it makes me feel like an ungrateful whiner.
My main reaction to your post is "you don't owe a baby to the world!" You aren't overstating the magnitude of the risks--even today, though the risks of pregnancy and childbirth are much less than they were even a hundred years ago, they remain real. At the extremes, women still die in the process. Even the temporary stuff, like sciatica and morning sickness, is still genuine suffering.
But pro-natalism has arisen almost exclusively as a reaction to the rise of philosophical anti-natalism. And one of the central arguments in anti-natalism is an incongruency in ethics: there often seem to be morally compelling reasons to not have children (e.g. you know you are unable to care for a child, and know that no one else will), but (outside extreme cases of authoritarianism) essentially no one thinks anyone should be compelled to bear children (even pro-life people who think it is wrong to terminate a pregnancy don't believe it would be right to force a pregnancy on an unwilling woman). Anti-natalists inflate the arguments against childbearing toward an all-encompassing edict: humanity should voluntarily work toward its own orderly extinction.
Because I am not a utilitarian, I do not find such arguments compelling. When I say you don't owe a baby to the world, what I mean is this: it is morally permissible for you to have another child, if that is what you decide to do, despite the risks. Whether the risks are worthy to be undertaken is open to you to decide, but you are not under any utilitarian obligation to have another child even if that child would be of tremendous benefit to the world. Something that I think most ethical systems really miss is the range of permissibility; utiltiarians and deontologists frequently run into the assertion that there is always and only one truly right thing to do (the "best" thing) in any situation. It's very constraining! As a contractualist, I think that there is actually a wide range of things it is morally permissible to do, and that having children is often one of those things.
But if you do, you should do it because you want to, and because the risks are acceptable to you; or, you should not do it, because you don't want to, or on reflection you find the risks too great. Whatever you choose, it's not on you to make the world a better place. It's only on you to do what is reasonable. That's all it means, to live a life of choice and value. It's wonderful that you already have three children, and I wish you luck with that endeavor. Whether or not you continue to grow your family, I thank you for your existing contributions to the rest of the world, which we did not earn, were never owed, and can receive from you only as a welcome gift--never, ever as the fulfillment of a moral obligation.
I am still chewing on this and still not convinced I agree (but I'm also not certain I'm understanding you correctly).
Are you saying that to live a valuable life you need to only do what is "reasonable" as in the bare minimum of not harming others? Or "reasonable" as in "make the world a better place but you can spend moderate/reasonable costs and don't have to spend severe/unreasonable costs"?
More like the latter. Contractualism is the view that we should never violate a principle of action that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced, general agreement. In practice, we want to be able to justify our actions to others within our moral community. A principle like "always act to make the world a better place" seems reasonably rejectable; not only will I rarely have any idea which of my actions will "make the world a better place," even if I have a very good idea that it would actually make the world a better place to torture a certain innocent child, I have compelling reasons to not do that. In particular, innocent children have a weighty interest--a right--to not be tortured, and making the world a little or even a lot better for millions of people is not sufficient to overcome such interests.
Of course most choices are not so stark. There is often value in doing more than is strictly required of you, but even so it's very important to notice the difference between what is optimal and what is obligatory. If morality required us to always do the optimal thing, it would be impossibly demanding. Very likely no one would ever actually do the "right" thing, on such a view--there are simply too many unknowns. It is much more reasonable to expect people to act in ways they can justify to others. Deliberately making the world a worse place is not generally something we can justify to others. But it's not hard to justify to others, say, spending some time chatting about politics on the Internet, provided your other immediate obligations have been met and you find this sort of activity interesting or relaxing or fun. Is it the optimal way to spend your time? Perhaps not! But you are not actually under a moral obligation to spend your time optimally. So long as posting on Internet forums does not violate a principle of action that no one could reasonably reject, it's permissible.
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My interpretation: Suppose my eldest discovers a talent for drumming, and wants to learn to be a really good drummer. Should I be angry that their pursuit of drumming as a hobby means they aren't studying programming as hard, which means they won't be positioned to contribute to AI safety efforts when they're older?
People imagine that there's some Golden Path, and then measure their their current circumstances and choices against some idealized "best possible alternative". But the Golden Path is imaginary, and in fact there is much value to simply doing what one can where one is. Life's value comes from human connections, not from peak performance indicators. We have responsibilities to others and arguably to the world as a whole, but those responsibilities are sharply limited, and ignoring those limits is unreasonable. So, the latter interpretation, I think. It's not your job to save the world. It's your job to build a good life such that your corner of the world doesn't need saving, and it's your job to help others do the same where you can.
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