THE ETHICIST TAP : ANSWER

A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, you would have been bringing a child into a country where perhaps a majority of people lived around or below the poverty line, where as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1926 :

'' We continually have have mobs fighting and doing unutterable things because at bottom, men are afraid of being unable to earn a respectable living,'' where snapping on a tack could prove fatal, where environmental regulation as we understand it hardly existed, where segregation was widely entrenched and reproductive rights were scarcely to be found.

In the meantime, Stalin was consolidating his power in the U.S.S.R, Mussolini was eliminating forces of opposition in Italy and Hitler was rebuilding the Nazi Party in Germany. Still, people had kids, and so here you are, able to look back in horror at the way things used to be.

You cannot, of course, guarantee that any children of yours will have a brilliantly successful life.

For all the challenges we face, however, I'm not convinced that raising a happy and a flourishing child in this country is bound to be so hard that it would be unfair to bring a new person into the world here.

Many people will disagree with you about what the next four or 40 or, indeed, 400 years are likely to hold. [ If you remain confident in your predictions, you could certainly join the estimated one to two million families waiting to adopt - a large multiple, in any case, of the number of children available for adoption.]

As the saying goes, the future hasn't yet been written. The question is how you feel about your progeny playing any role in writing it.

If having a child is always a form of hope, not having one because you're sure what lies ahead can, I fear, be a form of hubris.

The World Students Society thanks Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah.