V’s ideal is not only practical–and practiced–but is probably more ancient than our marriage-centered cultures.
In southwest China there exist several matrilineal cultures (the Mosuo being the most famous) in which “marriage” is a foreign concept. Women stay with their birth families their whole lives. Men visit them in the night and get them pregnant, then go home in the morning. Male authority figures in children’s lives are not their fathers but their maternal uncles.
The major disadvantage of such a system is that it is not well-suited for military organization. Which explains why the Mosuo etc. got overran by the (patriarchal) Han rather than the other way around. It is plausible that at in archaic times, a similar shift occurred which had the effect of enslaving our maternal ancestors into a patriarchal system–i.e. matriarchal or matrilineal cultures got conquered by primitive armies.
An interesting question is, Given current social and technological trends, might a return to earlier patterns prove beneficial in some way? For example, as marriage becomes less reliable, does it make sense for mothers to receive support from their birth families?
On the same toke, do you think that it’s selfish to eat more than what’s needed to cover your needs when we hae people starving in the world? Note that there’s more than enough food globally to cover everybody’s need, and that most starvation epiddemics are caused by poor politics or wars causing economic breakdowns.
Well, maybe, however the reason to that many people get kids are that they like having them. Procreating is programmed into our genes, actually. Also, an overabundance of orphans in Africa or the poorer parts of Asia does not mean that there’ll be enough to go around in Europe and the US.
Then we have the more unpalatable reasons to that say well educated people in stable relationships to more good than harm to the globe by procreating. First of all, a child who’s been malnourished through the first years of his or hers wife will suffer brain damage, have stunted growth etc, therefore where I would not mind donating money to such a child, I would only take responsibility for it if it was my own. (In the not too distant past, you could tell peoples background by their body shape, the rich looked normal, whereas poor people tended to have lasting body changes caused by food deficiency.)
It’s not entirely clear if intelligence is learned or it’s genetic, however a mixture of factors are likely to be at play. Therefore, a well educated person in the west would equally likely do the world a favor by passing on their genes as compared to taking in a newborn, where the genetic heritage was unknown. At least, statistical odds would be that the child of a nobel prize winner would be smarter than everage. (I am not advocating eugenics, just that smart people try to pass on their brains.)
Secondly, we humans like to think that our offspring are ours, I would have an issue with raising a child which was say Indian or black, if I were capable of providing genes to my own.