Why it is not strongly irrational to have children.

I n his interesting paper Matti Häyry identifies a new disease ‘‘prereproductive stress syndrome’’ as well as a cure for the condition in the form of philosophically based counselling that the desire for having a child is irrational. Few now hold the belief that an engagement with philosophy has strong therapeutic effects (even fewer when they have met real life philosophers), but this in itself is not enough to reject Häyry’s plea for a more directive form of counselling before reproduction. Let us therefore briefly look at the first of his main arguments for the conclusion that having children is irrational, since it relies on no explicitly moral premises. This argument has the form: