There is something ironic about this argument because those who make it actually agree that the world needs to be changed. So first of all the question arises why force someone to exist in a world that needs to be changed?
If the answer to this question is that the world requires change, why don’t you do it yourself? Why do you need to create someone new to do it? And if you didn’t succeed, why would your child succeed?
Many people make and have made this excuse throughout history and yet the world insists on not changing, isn’t it time to recognize that the world is more likely to shape your child and not the other way around?
Most likely, your child will be just another person in the world, who is much more likely to conform to the world’s unfair norms, than to be the one who will succeed in changing them. The overwhelming majority of people in the world concentrate on their own small lives, and since these are rife with vulnerability and exploitation of others in many forms, the chances are that your children will also increase the amount of suffering in the world and not change it.
Children require a huge investment of resources such as time, money and energy. If the world needs to be changed, doesn’t it make more sense to invest all of this in existing problems than in a child who might (but is very unlikely to) change the world? Isn’t it much more logical and efficient to invest all our resources in existing problems than to create more people who, at least in their first years, and usually much later, will be another person in need? Isn’t it much more logical to invest in convincing people who already exist to invest at least some of their resources in order to change the world and thus increase the number of people trying to change the world? Since recruiting other existing people for purposes worthy of change will certainly require much less resources than raising a person from scratch, there is no doubt that it is much more effective.
And unlike mobilizing existing people to change the world, creating new people in order to change the world is literally treating people as means to the ends of others. And in this case, while placing on their shoulders an impossible task, fixing the world. It is not only legitimate but also required, necessary and urgent to change the world. But it is not legitimate, required, necessary and urgent to create people out of nothing and dump this impossible burden on them. This is a task we who exist have to take upon ourselves. And the first step is not to create more people in a world that it is so urgent to change.