If you find out that your parents created you in order for you to take care of them when they are old, do you find this decision acceptable? Have you given your consent to taking on this task? Were you offered a contract before you existed by which you agree to take care of your parents when they get old in exchange for a life? Of course not. This arrangement is imposed on you. Even if it is completely acceptable to you in principle, and even if you want to help your parents when they get old (despite our principled opposition to people creating new people, including our parents who created us, we want to help our parents if and when they need us), creating someone, a whole human being with all that is implied, with all the difficulties, disappointments, pains, illnesses, exhaustion, challenges, and inevitable death, so that one day they can take care of their parents, is very selfish.
Even if parents take care of their children until maturity and beyond, still, the details of the deal that was signed behind the back of everyone who was ever created, are instrumental in their essence. It is fundamentally wrong to create someone for something. This excuse exposes the selfishness and instrumentality of reproduction. It reveals the fact that behind the romanticization there is functionality.
The idea of creating someone to serve a certain function is not morally acceptable. But because it is so common, in the case of reproduction it is acceptable. But it shouldn’t be acceptable to create someone new out of nothing in order to benefit those who exist. And if it is OK then why only for taking care of people when they get old? Why not create people so that blood, bone marrow, or kidneys can be taken from them if needed? Why not create people to work for other people before they get old? If it is acceptable to create someone to benefit someone else, then what we consider acceptable is a slippery slope. In the past it was perfectly acceptable to breed so as to help support the household. Today it sounds completely morally wrong to us. But this has changed mainly for technological reasons. Otherwise maybe it would have continued and people would have continued to justify this injustice to this day. Perhaps the same will happen with creating people for the purpose of taking care of their parents when they are old? Perhaps in this case too, technological changes that will eliminate some tasks, will make us realize how morally wrong it was when it was still supposedly necessary. Maybe if robots are developed that can provide adequate assistance to old people instead of their children doing it (if they even bother since it’s not obvious and many old people are neglected and lonely in old people’s homes until they die), maybe then we will think that creating someone to take care of their parents is a moral injustice just like today we think that creating someone to help support the household is a moral injustice.
Having said that, from a practical perspective it is indeed a problem that older people will not receive support when they get old. But does this justify creating people to take care of their parents when they get old, because the parents were also created to take care of their parents when they get old and so on? Is it justified that each generation will pass this problem on to the next generation?
Besides, someday there will be a last generation because this planet will not be able to contain people forever. Someday there will be a last generation whose end of life will probably be harder on average than previous generations because there will be no younger generation to help them. Therefore, since this scenario is inevitable, and since it is inevitable that all the way to the last generation, masses of people whose lives will be miserable will be created, this “solution” is actually very cruel. If the suffering of the last generation is inevitable, why sacrifice generations upon generations in the name of a last generation that will come anyway? How can one justify a situation in which masses of people in every generation will be forced to live a miserable life that they did not choose, so that their generation can help the generation that created them? The suffering of the last generation cannot justify this ongoing injustice. Given that a final generation is inevitable, this pyramid is not even postponing the end but creating misery on a colossal scale and not to ever solve the problem but only to pass it on each time to the next generation. And all this just so that in the last generation it will be understood that this transfer from generation to generation did not solve anything, but only increased the number of miserable people along the way. There will be a last generation anyway, so why not prevent all the misery until it comes by deciding to stop reproducing?
It is not only that the problem of the last generation needs to be solved differently because reproduction is a wrong way since it is morally wrong to create people as means to the ends of others, but also because reproduction does not solve the problem at all but only copies it to the next generation.
Still, the problem is real and important, and therefore human society needs to concentrate efforts on caring for the elderly, for example by developing appropriate technological means, increasing mutual assistance between people, building homes and public spaces suitable for people with difficulties of old age (and of course also regardless of old age), but certainty not by continuing to fuel this pyramid scheme.