Pronatalism – the view that it is desirable or mandatory for society to encourage adults to have children, for example by providing monetary incentives to procreators – is on the rise in public discourse in countries with declining fertility and defended by some demographers who are concerned about demographic ageing. Pronatalism is also viewed benignly by many philosophers, as bringing new people into the world, if they have good enough lives, seems to be valuable; perhaps we even have duties to have children. But is pronatalism compatible with duly respecting children and with acknowledging that procreation imposes unchosen and serious risks on the child we aim to create? If it is not, and if we abandon pronatalism, can we still hold on to the idea that having and raising children is essential for societies’ just institutions and that all citizens, not just parents, should share some of the costs of children for that reason?
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Speaker
Serena Olsaretti is an ICREA Research Professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, where she is also a member of the Law & Philosophy research group and the Barcelona Institute of Analytic Philosophy. Prior to moving to Barcelona in 2010, she was
Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St. John’s College.
She has worked on questions related to the ethics of markets and well-being, theories of justice, and, over the last decade, on the family. She is completing a book on Parental Justice and has published several journal articles and book chapters on the autonomy of children and the case for an equitable distribution of the costs of children in just societies, including in Philosophy & Public Affairs; Political Studies, the Journal of Social Philosophy; the Journal of Applied Philosophy; the Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children and The Oxford Handbook of Population Ethics.
Her published work on other topics includes Liberty, Desert and the Market (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and some volumes she has edited: Desert and Justice (Oxford University Press 2003); Preferences and Well-Being (Cambridge University Press 2006), and The Oxford Handbook of Distributive Justice (2018; Chinese translation 2024). Olsaretti is an elected member of Academia Europaea.