What Are Children For?

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.6 • 907 Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Yascha Mounk and Anastasia Berg discuss the case for having—or not having—kids. Anastasia Berg is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine and an editor of The Point magazine. Berg is the co-author, with Rachel Wiseman, of What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Anastasia Berg discuss why many couples delay having children and the affirmative case for valuing human life; the moral and ethical implications of the decline in global fertility; and whether a world with fewer humans will be morally worse. This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone. Email: [email protected] Website: http://www.persuasion.community Podcast production by Jack Shields, and Brendan Ruberry Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | Google Twitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @joinpersuasion Youtube: Yascha Mounk LinkedIn: Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey Harry. Hello mate. Got any tips for the football?
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0:30.8	There's also a big humanistic universal question at stake here, which is the question of the value of human life in the present and in the future.
0:39.0	And so as we're seeing a turning away from a way of thinking about what we are and what we're
0:45.0	here for that acknowledges the significance of a future, I think we are also seeing this
0:49.5	implicit negative judgment on the value of a future for human life, which is a very radical
0:56.4	kind of refusal.
0:59.1	And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
1:07.3	My guest today is Anastasia Burke.
1:10.1	Anastasia is a philosopher who teaches at the University of California, Irvine,
1:16.0	and is the co-author with Rachel Wiseman of What Are Children for on Ambivalence and Choice?
1:22.3	We had a conversation there was at once very personal and very philosophical,
1:26.8	trying to think through why it is so hard
1:29.2	to think about whether one wants to have children, what kind of confusions and considerations
1:35.4	people take into account when they are trying to make this choice. Why it is that our society
1:42.8	struggles with formulating the positive case for the value of
1:46.7	human life, for the value of having children as a project, but also for the value of having humans
	...

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