Having Children, Happiness and Love

In a posting in practical ethics  David Edmonds suggests that having children might make people less happy. Simply bringing children into the world would seems unlikely to bring about a change someone’s happiness whilst raising children, being an active parent might. In the rest of this posting having children will refer to being a fully engaged parent and this includes non-biological parents. This suggestion seems to conflict with our intuitions about how most parents feel. Edmonds advances four reasons to account for this apparent conflict. In this posting I will examine Edmonds’ second reason. This holds that parents may be deluded as to their own happiness. This reason concurs with the views of Daniel Haybron who believes people are often mistaken as to what makes them happy because they are poor at affective forecasting (1). I will offer two suggestions as to why this apparent delusion might be illusory. Next I will consider Edmonds’ fourth reason in more detail. This reason holds that parents value something more than happiness. Lastly I will examine two reasons people might have for having children which are unconnected to parental happiness. 

Edmonds suggests that parents who think having children will make them happier might be deluding themselves. Haybron provides us with a reason as to why this delusion may be illusory. He suggests there are problems with defining happiness.

 “The trouble with the ordinary concept of happiness appears neither to be well defined nor univocal. Indeed there may be no “the” ordinary, but perhaps several, even many.” (2)

For instance, happiness might be defined either in the psychological sense as either positive affect or wellbeing and in addition to this division both of these senses might be subdivided further. This situation opens up the possibility that parents and researchers are simply using different definitions, talking about different things. It follows parents might not be deluded when they consider themselves as happy having children using their own idea of happiness but this wouldn’t be considered as happiness using the researchers’ definition. Accepting the above means the conflict highlighted by the study might well be illusory. A second possibility is that parents are not deluded and accept the researchers’ definition of happiness and concur with the researchers that having children makes them less happy in the short term. However, parents may believe having children will make them happier in the long term. Once again the conflict seems to be illusory as the researchers are concerned with happiness now whilst parents are concerned with happiness in the longer term.

I now want to turn to the question whether even if parents believe having children might make them happy that there are more important things in life than happiness. I don’t want to deny the importance of happiness in making someone’s life go well but I will argue that there are more important things in someone’s life than being happy. This is by no means a new position for in the nineteenth century Mill famously argued that it is better to be a dissatisfied human than a satisfied pig. Unfortunately, in the absence of an accepted definition of exactly what happiness is there is a problem with even starting my argument. In order for my argument to proceed I must first provide a definition. Haybron defines happiness as the aggregate of all someone’s emotions and moods at any one time and if this aggregate is positive then he is happy and conversely if this aggregate is negative he is unhappy. Clearly not all emotions carry equal weight. For instance someone’s irritation at the buzzing of a fly is not as important as love for his spouse. The most important emotions are one’s we feel attuned to, engaged with and endorse. In the following I will accept Haybron’s definition because it concurs reasonably well with our everyday usage. The question now becomes are some things more valuable in life than just having an aggregate of positive emotions? I will now argue that possibly a sense of achievement and love are more important in life than simply being happy. I will then argue that parenting can give someone a sense of achievement and satisfies her need to love.

According to Gwen Bradford achievements above some minimum threshold are difficult and must be carried out competently (3).

She also suggests that there are certain capacities which are essential to being a human being and that exercising these capacities is of value to human beings. Exercising a capacity strengthens that capacity. Among these essential human capacities is having a will and the ability to reason. I would prefer to use the term person rather than human being because someone in a coma might have neither of the above capacities but nonetheless remains a human being. Let us accept Bradford’s position and agree that achieving has essentialist value to someone irrespective of whether the achievement itself is a valuable. Climbing a mountain for instance. It might then be argued that achievement might be of more value to someone than the happiness children might bring. It is completely plausible that someone might value having a career more than having children. I will now to argue that having children, parenting them, is an achievement. Let us accept that parenting children is sometimes difficult. Let us also accept that if we are to be good parents we need to be competent. For instance good parents ensure that their children eat a balanced diet and get adequate sleep. It follows that for most people being a parent is an achievement and is valuable to them. It further follows that if having children doesn’t make people happy or even makes them unhappy that achievement gives a reason to have children. However this reason like happiness must be balanced with other reasons we have to do things. Someone might value having a career more than having children. Moreover if having children makes people happy then achievement reinforces this reason. It might be pointed out that achieving itself makes us happy and this is one of the reasons we pursue achievements. I won’t pursue this point further here.

However even if we accept the above most children would be unhappy if they thought the only reason they made their parents happy was that they achieved something by parenting them. I would agree that their unhappiness was fully justified. Moreover most children would also be unhappy with the thought that they only existed because their parents thought that they would make them happy. Children aren’t commodities. Children want to be loved. Indeed I would suggest that most parents would be unhappy with the idea that the only value they gain from parenting is due to achieving. What is achieved by good parenting matters because parents love their children. What is achieved matter more than the achieving. I have argued elsewhere that not only do we want to be loved we have a need to love, see love me for a reason . The love I’m referring to isn’t romantic love but simply ‘caring about’ as defined by Harry Frankfurt. (4) I now want to argue that someone without the capacity to love isn’t really a person at all meaning a capacity to love is an essentialist capacity of persons in the same way as having a will and the capacity to reason. According to Frankfurt having ideals, “caring about” or loving is essential to being a person.

 “He can make whatever decision he likes and shape his will as he pleases. This does not mean that his will is free. It only means that his will is anarchic, moved by mere impulse and inclination. For a person without ideals, there are no volitional laws he has bound himself to respect and to which he unconditionally submits. He has no inviolable boundaries. Thus he is amorphous with no fixed shape or identity.” (5) 

Let us accept that capacity to love is essential to being a person and what someone loves helps define him, loving is tied to identity. I argued above that the exercise of an essentialist capacity has value because it strengthens that capacity. Loving has value both to the loved one and lover, loving children has value both to children and parents. Love gives us a reason to have children irrespective of whether they will make us happy or not. In cases when children make us happy love enhances this happiness. Sometimes our children make us unhappy. Some children might become seriously ill causing us distress to their parent but this doesn’t mean that they regret having them.  Some children might commit terrible crimes but their parents might still love them. I would argue that in such cases our unhappiness is due to our love. Love makes us vulnerable and ties us to the fate of our loved ones. If our loved ones flourishes we are happy and if our loved ones are harmed or causes harm we become unhappy. In cases in which our children make us unhappy love means that we retain a reason for having children. In cases in which our children make us happy love enhances our happiness. It follows irrespective of whether having children makes us happy we have reasons due to love to have children. Finally some people say that when a childless couple keep a dog that the dog is a substitute child. This is clearly false but the underlying reasons might share a common basis. Both parent and some pet owners have a need to love and a lesser need to be loved.

1. Daniel Haybron, 2008, The Pursuit of Unhappiness, Oxford, page 231.
2. Haybron, page 43
3. Gwen Bradford, 2015, Achievement, Oxford University Press. . (
4. Harry Frankfurt, 1988, The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge University Press.
5. Frankfurt. 1999, Necessity, Volition, and Love. Cambridge University Press. Page 114

Achievement and the Value of Sport

In a previous posting I have argued that participating in sport has instrumental value because it fosters certain virtues, see Nietzsche sport and suffering . It fosters these virtues because competition makes sport difficult to some degree. In this posting I want to do two things. I want to examine Gwen Bradford’s ideas about achievement (1). In conjunction with this examination I will argue that because sport is difficult it also has intrinsic value.

How does Bradford define achievement? Bradford is only concerned with achievements that require some minimal amount of effort. For instance for most people the tying of their shoelaces wouldn’t be an achievement. According to Bradford achievements have two elements. They consist of a process and a product. For instance winning an Olympic medal would be a product. Running in the race to win the medal would be the process. In some cases the product might be part of the process. For instance for an amateur marathon runner running the race would be the process and the product of his achievement. Whether the product is an achievement depends on how it was caused. First the process must be difficult and the level of difficulty must be above some threshold. Secondly the achiever must cause his achievement.  However it isn’t enough that the agent causes the achievement. Someone can cause something due to being lucky but this wouldn’t be an achievement. An achiever must competently cause his achievement by being responsible for it. For someone to win a race because he competently causes his victory by training correctly would be an achievement, for someone to win a race because his competitors are disqualified for taking the wrong course wouldn’t be. Let us accept Bradford’s definition and that for something to be an achievement that it must have a product and a process with the process being difficult and competently caused by the achiever.

Let us now consider the value of achievement. Achievements as defined above are difficult and as I have previously argued doing difficult things has instrumental value because it fosters certain virtues. However achievements also seem to foster another type of value and I now want to consider this value. Bradford introduces the idea of an essentialist value. If some capacity is essential to human beings then the exercise of this capacity is of value to human beings. It is tempting to equate essentialist value with intrinsic value. In what follows I will regard essentialist value as intrinsic value. Bradford suggests that the exercise of the will is an essential capacity of human beings. Indeed if someone never exercised his will it would be difficult to see him as a person and he might be regarded as a wanton. Let us accept that doing something difficult requires effort and that effort involves someone exercising his will. It follows that if achievements must be difficult to some degree that achievements have intrinsic value for persons. In what follows I will restrict my discussion to persons rather than human beings. Some human beings might lack a will but this can’t be true of persons. Any person must have a will to some degree. This difference will matter later. Bradford also suggests that a capacity for practical rationality is an essential capacity for human beings. Once again some human beings might be unable to act rationally and I will restrict my discussion to persons. Someone who cannot use practical rationality cannot govern himself and so cannot be regarded as autonomous. It follows if someone who isn’t autonomous for at least some of the time that he cannot be regarded as person because practical rationality is an essential capacity for a person. It further follows if achievement must include the exercise of practical rationality that achievement has intrinsic value. Let us accept that achievements have intrinsic value because they involve the exercise of the will and practical rationality. Bradford further argues that combining the exercise of the will and rationality further increases this value, I will not pursue this further here. In what follows ‘value’ will refer to intrinsic value unless it is specified otherwise.

I now want to question whether using Bradford’s account sport can be considered as an achievement. This question matters because intuitively sporting achievements seem to be real achievements but Bradford’s account might make it appear that they aren’t. If they aren’t then perhaps we need to reject her account. There is no problem with the first element in Bradford’s account. Achievements must be difficult and sporting achievements are difficult so it follows that the first element in her account is satisfied. The second element is more problematic. In Bradford’s account for some outcome to be an achievement the achievement must be competently caused. According to Bradford an achiever competently causes an outcome if he has enough justified, true beliefs (JTBs) about his actions which cause the outcome. However Bradford herself admits that competence causation creates a problem if we are to regard some things as achievements.

“In fact, for some activities, their success may depend on not consciously entertaining any beliefs. I have in mind here in particular athletic activities, or other physical activities such as music performance or dance.” (2)

It would appear that because an athlete might not have JTBs about his activity during the process part of a ‘sporting achievement’ that ‘sporting achievements are aren’t genuine achievement.

Before accepting the above we should examine two questions. First might an athlete have had JTBs which competently caused his performance at some time? Secondly does the fact that an athlete isn’t consciously aware of any JTBs during his performance mean he doesn’t have any JTBs?

Let us consider the first question. Consider an author who had enough JTB’s to write a book who dies prior to its publication. Few would deny that his book was an achievement and this example seems to suggest that it isn’t necessary for some outcome to be considered as an achievement is that the achiever had enough JTBs at the time of the outcome. All that is necessary is that the achiever had enough JTBs at some time which caused the outcome. However caution is needed. In this example the time when the author’s achievement was recognised and when the achievement was accomplished needn’t be the same. Perhaps the achievement was accomplished during the writing or on the completion of the book rather than at the date of publication. If we accept the above then perhaps as achiever must have some JTBs which caused the achievement at the same time as it was achieved. However if we consider athletes and musicians it would seem that the time when an achievement is accomplished and recognised are the same.

Let us turn to my second question. Must an athlete consciously be aware of any JTBs during his performance? Let us accept that an athlete must have some JTBs which cause his achievement. For instance he must have JTBs about his training and diet. But is he consciously aware of them whilst accomplishing his achievement? I would suggest not. If an athlete is aware of enough JTBs prior to accomplishing his ‘sporting achievement’ and aware of them afterwards then I would suggest that he unconsciously has them during the process. I would further suggest that if an athlete has enough unconscious JTBs whilst accomplishing his ‘sporting achievement’ that his achievement is competently caused and provides it is also sufficiently difficult that it is a genuine achievement. If we accept the above then we can accept ‘sporting achievements’ as real achievements and have no need to reject Bradford’s account.

I now want to examine two consequences connected to the value of sporting achievement that seem to follow from accepting Bradford’s account.  First I will suggest that sporting achievements are generally less valuable than some other achievements. Secondly I will suggest any enhancement diminishes the value of sporting achievements. Intuitively my first suggestion seems correct. For whilst finding a cure for some disease and winning an Olympic medal are both achievements it seems natural to think that finding a cure for the disease is of the greater value. However caution is needed as much of the value of curing a disease is due to benefits it confers to others rather than the value of the achievement itself. In this posting I’m only interested in the latter. The question is whether finding a cure for a disease has greater achievement value than winning an Olympic medal. I will now argue that it has. Let us assume for the sake of argument that both achievements are equally difficult. I will now argue that the value resulting from competent causation is less in the case of winning the medal. Let us assume that more JTBs are needed to find a cure for a disease than to win an Olympic medal. This alone is not sufficient to guarantee greater value due to competent causation when discovering a cure for a disease. Whether something is competently caused might depend on the percentage of possible JTBs the agent has. Let us assume that the number of possible JTBs is much greater in finding a cure for a disease that the researcher has a lower percentage of JTBs than the athlete has about how to win his medal. It might be concluded that competent causation generates more intrinsic value for the athlete than the researcher. This conclusion would be mistaken. The value due to competent causation depends on how much rationality the achiever employs in exercising his JTBs and not on how many JTBs he possesses or the percentage of possible JTBs he possesses. Let us accept that sporting achievements usually require less JTBs and that less rationality is used in exercising them than is the case in many other achievements. It follows provided the degree of difficulty remains the same that sporting achievements tend to have less essentialist value than other achievements. This conclusion depends on the modifications I have made to Bradford’s account. I have substituted essential properties for persons instead of for human beings. Bradford suggests that the exercise of our physical abilities might be an essential property of human beings and as a result have intrinsic value in the same way as the exercise of the will and rationality. Sporting achievements might gain intrinsic value this additional way and as a result sporting achievements would not tend to have less value than other achievements. Nonetheless if we restrict essential properties to persons rather than human beings sporting achievement tend to have less achievement value than some other forms of achievement. Secondly let us consider whether enhancement lowers the value of sporting achievements. Using Bradford’s account doing something difficult increases the exercise of will. If someone uses enhancing drugs then he makes achievements less difficult. Making something less difficult means less need for the exercise of the will. It follows because the exercise of the will is one thing that contributes to the value of achievement that enhancement lowers the intrinsic value of sporting achievements. More generally sportspersons who cheat in order to win deprive themselves of some of the intrinsic value of sport. Much the same conclusions can be reached when considering cognitive enhancement. Cognitive enhancement, either by pharmacological or other means, makes the exercise of rationality easier even if the amount of rationality required remains the same. As I have argued above easier achievements require less exercise of the will and as a result are less difficult and possess less less intrinsic value. I would suggest that it also lowers the instrumental value but I won’t pursue this suggestion further here.

As we age what we can achieve becomes more modest. It might be suggested that as we age we should accept that achievement has less value in our lives. I am reluctant to accept this suggestion. In positive psychology the Perma model developed by Martin Seligman (3) includes accomplishment or achievement as an important element of our happiness. I now want to suggest that Bradford offers an incomplete account of the value of achievement because it doesn’t account for the long term value of achievements. According to her account achievements gain their intrinsic value because they fosters the exercise of the will and rationality. The value of this exercise persists after being exercised according to her account but this value would appear to be short term. Let us return to our researcher who found a cure for some dreadful disease. Years later he takes pleasure in his achievement because it prevents harm. He also takes pride in it because he achieved it. The fact he achieved something appears to have long lasting non-instrumental value. Pride means it matters to him that he achieved it and not someone else. If we accept Bradford’s account then his achievement no longer has any intrinsic value to the achiever because it no longer fosters the exercise of his will or rationality. However if someone takes pride in some past achievement he values it because it was his achievement in addition to valuing because of its benefits. It would seem that because Bradford’s account seems unable to account fully for pride in past achievements that it is an incomplete account. In the above I’ve slightly amended Braford’s account by substituting persons for human beings when considering essential or intrinsic value. I now want to argue that if we accept this amendment that we can account for the intrinsic value of past achievements. Let us accept that not all human beings are persons. Let us also accept that a person must care about something or else he has no real shape and is a defective sort of person. What he cares about define his values. Someone’s most important values are defined by what he is proud or ashamed of. Let us return to our researcher. As he ages he is pleased with his past achievement but he is also proud of having been an achiever. The fact he was an achiever is part of what defines him as a person and so is an essential part of him. It follows that past achievements can have essentialist or intrinsic value for persons.

What conclusions can be drawn from the above? It is generally acknowledged that playing sport has value because of its health benefits and I have argued it also has instrumental value by fostering some virtues. However if we accept the above it also has intrinsic value. In addition it would seem that the intrinsic value of sporting achievements is generally less than that from other achievements. The above also suggests that the use of enhancing drugs lowers the value of sporting achievements. Lastly even if our capacity for achievements becomes more modest as we age our past achievements retain some intrinsic value to us as long as we remain as a person.

1. Gwen Bradford, 2015, Achievement, Oxford University Press.
2. Bradford, Kindle location 1360.
3. Martin Seligman, 2011, Flourish. Nicolas Brealey Publishing