Paper by Heiko Puls, published on February 1, 2016 in Kantian Review
In his applied moral philosophy, Kant formulates the parents’ duty to make their child happy. I argue that, for Kant, this duty is an ad hoc attempt at compensating for the parental guilt of having brought a person into the condition of existence – and hence also having created her need for happiness – on their own initiative. I argue that Kant’s considerations regarding parental duties and human reproduction in general imply arguments for an ethically justified anti-natalism, but that this position is abolished in his teleology for meta-ethical reasons.
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415415000308
Kantian Review 21/1 (2016), 53–75