I find your strong response here a bit puzzling. Putting aside whether one does have an obligation to society, when deciding to have children the two chocies being offered here — there may be more — are:

1) Choosing to have children because you believe it is good for society if you do.

2) Choosing to have children because you believe it is good for you personally if you do.

Put this way, it seems that 1) is the nobler reason, and yet that’s the one that you consider “disgusting”.

Once you have children, it’s clear that no matter what reason you had for entering into it, an obligation is incurred and so you need to live up to that obligation. Now, treating children like a burden is not likely to be a good thing, so I can see an argument here that once you have children you should treat and raise them well out of love and out of a genuine desire to promote their well-being, not simply out of obligation. But that’s not relevant to the reason you decided to have children in the first place, as you can love them even if your reason for having children was a social obligation, or not love them even if you chose to have children because you thought it benefitted you. The former case, in fact, brings you into it already being prepared for the direct benefits to you personally not being outweighed by the obligations, while the latter doesn’t.

So I am quite puzzled about what in this disgusts you.

My post concedes that in multiple places. It is, however, selfish to either make that decision or refuse to consider whether you have an obligation to do so based strictly on how much it would benefit you. Recall from the quotes that Schwartz is reacting to a very strongly selfish account of single life, one where the solo or single life is chosen specifically to avoid having any obligations to anyone else. Thus, the argument is starting from a conception that IS selfish, and yet is being held up as virtuous. Add in Brayton’s reply that really is about not considering any obligations to society or beyond himself, and it is not in any way disingenuous to say that in the cases listed it is a selfish decision or determination. Which should have been made clear by my pointing out my own singleness that isn’t selfish; mine is not a matter of not wanting to have any obligations that are to others than myself, or even society, but is in fact mostly over circumstances. In another post, I plan to examine whether I should answer Schwartz’s question with “Yes”.

Did you actually read what I said there?

Yes, they do. Absolutely. But the primary source are, in fact, still close family and friends.

Statements have a context, and in the context of the article Schwartz is clearly using that statement to refer to the primary source … and also to an extreme individualism that doesn’t necessarily even allow for that. So your disagreement is not, in fact, a disagreement with what I said, but your comment still misses the point.

“If you go solo, remain alone, remain single, then you either are not having children at all — and quite possibly aren’t interacting with other people in any meaningful way to pass values.”

Citations please.

I need a citation to show that if you are living alone you might not be having children or might not be interacting with anyone? And you misquoted me here by making it look like that was all I said, but I gave two options:

If you go solo, remain alone, remain single, then you either are not having children at all — and quite possibly aren’t interacting with other people in any meaningful way to pass values — or you are passing over your responsibility to your children to these other groups, which is indeed selfish.

Which demonstrates my actual point, repeated in the article. Yes, they can transmit values to children, but if you live alone as per the people in this article you either do not have children — by choice, presumably — or since you aren’t raising them your primary responsibility is being passed on to those people who, again, I concede can pass values, but I argue are not the ones primarily responsible for doing so.

“If you go solo, remain alone, remain single, then you either are not having children at all — and quite possibly aren’t interacting with other people in any meaningful way to pass values.”

Citations please.

DingoJack.