My aim in this paper is to reframe, by appeal to specificity, just what we are talking about when we talk of children as public goods: the possibility of some future option set size. This framing highlights a distinction between (a) that which parents produce via their children and (b) that which children produce, which is a distinction critical to any account of justice in which responsibility plays a role. This framing also highlights a crucial truth about liberal theories of justice (or perhaps any theory in which option sets play a role): if a theory remains indifferent about the size of future option sets, that theory has no resources to say parents produce anything of either value or disvalue. What this all entails is vital to any argument about ‘how much’ compensation parents ought to receive (or even, in reverse, non-parents ought to receive) for having and raising children: only when we know the target option set size or range of option set sizes that are permissible within a theory of justice can we derive ‘how much’ compensation is owed.
