Newspapers from around the world have reported the Pope’s disapproving comments about couples who decide to remain childless. He describes Europeans as a “society with a greedy generation, that doesn’t want to surround itself with children, that considers them above all worrisome, a weight, a risk... a depressed society... The choice to not have children is selfish”.

These claims provide me with the perfect opportunity to illustrate the benefits of doing philosophy.

One of the topics I have been introducing to students, in fact, is a fallacy known as ‘the appeal to (misplaced) authority’ and I hope to show here how keeping the rules of logic and reasoning in mind can help us clarify our thinking so that we might react in a positive way to such potentially highly-charged emotional stimuli.

Let me make it clear at the outset that I fully recognise the Pope’s authority over what constitutes a virtuous Roman Catholic way of life and I have absolutely no intention of criticising it in any way.

Moreover, I have nothing but admiration for anybody who remains true to what he or she believes in, whether this comes from religious faith or from philosophical inquiry.

As students of philosophy, we learn to appreciate other authorities besides religious figures. In general, there is the overarching authority of reason and, in particular, the authority of those specialised in disciplines like biology, sociology, psychology and all the other offshoots of what was once broadly known as ‘philosophy’.

If we inquired about the current drop in childbirth rates from the perspective of biology, for instance, it is an established fact that levels of dioxins in our bloodstreams have caused fertility levels to fall.

Perhaps the current drop in birthrates is not just due to there being more ‘selfish’ men and women consciously choosing not to have children.

It may also be a result of the fact that fewer women are getting pregnant accidentally – not just because of ‘greediness’ and better contraception but also due to the general toxicity of our environment.

From a sociological and psychological perspective, there is another perfectly rational explanation to be found in the concept of ‘alienation’ alluded to by His Holiness in his reference to “a depressed society”.

People may be having fewer children for the same reasons that pandas refuse to breed in captivity. Alienation and captivity, after all, are similar in that they both involve, first, a sense of being out of one’s natural habitat and, second, a lack of freedom to direct one’s life.

It is understandable that birthrates would plummet in such circumstances.

It is up to each of us to decide whether to follow faith or reason when making ethical decisions

We must make sure we do not make assumptions about cause and effect here, however. It is true that the drop in births could be a result of conscious choice, as the Pope suggests.

However, as well as being a possible outcome of such choice, depression may be another reason (besides selfishness) why some people choose to remain childless, whether they consciously recognise this or not.

Conscious choice has to do with ethics, one of the few branches of study still today subsumed under the term ‘philosophy’.

There is a classic dilemma presented to Utilitarian thought about whether and how we ought to ‘make happy people’.

Given that I have a certain income and given that the happiness of each of my children will be in reverse proportion to the number of his or her siblings, ought I to have many or fewer children?

Such examples have earned Utilitarianism its reputation for crassness, as though happiness depended on nothing other than material well-being. It is this kind of thinking that the Pope seems to want to criticise and I fully agree with His Holiness here.

However, there is still much that is of value in the Utilitarian maxim that we ought to seek ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’. That is, it makes intuitive sense that a world with many happy people is better than a world with the same number of unhappy people.

Today, there are seven billion people, yet, I wonder how many of us could honestly describe ourselves as ‘happy’ overall. Current trends - such as the growing numbers of our own children who need to take psychoactive medication just to be able to cope with their lives - suggest that, on the whole, our success in making happy people has not been that great.

As philosophers, we will question whether, in such circumstances, we really do have a duty to produce more children and why.

Perhaps there is more value in dedicating our lives to finding some semblance of ‘real happiness’ and in passing this on to a few already extant people. Indeed, it would appear that the Pope himself has chosen this path.

To return to our fallacy, reason alone makes it evident that unless the Pope has access to all the deepest thoughts of childless men and women around Europe, he has no grounds to declare them selfish. Unless he is clairvoyant, that is, he cannot possibly know what other people’s motivations are.

Therefore, although it may be proper to take his views on board while we don Catholic hats and assume papal infallibility, in other branches of inquiry, such as secular ethics, it is not and to cite his claims is fallacious. I say this, of course, with all due respect and with my purely philosophical hat on.

It is up to each of us to decide whether to follow faith or reason when making ethical decisions. The freedom and ability to determine which of these hats to put on are among the greatest benefits the study of philosophy can confer.

Colette Sciberras is a teacher of philosophy at Giovanni Curmi Higher Secondary.