Try to arrive at your premises through logic and reason, applied to the evidence gathered by your senses: Please show how you thus derive:
“we are morally required to be the means to our children’s ends”
Think you better think this one through a little more.
Hank
BS, Hank. You're not really going to try to argue that parents have no moral imperative to care for their children, are you? Are you perhaps suggesting that "real" babies can take care of themselves?
“we are morally required to be the means to our children’s ends”
Hank, you are missing the point, which is that one CANNOT justify the sacrifice and effort required to raise a family from reason alone, or reason supplemented by empirical evidence. Yet family life is the sine qua non of life on this planet.
Thus Rand's philosophy, which is based on the requirements of a free life (assumption: 'Life is a supreme good, an end in itself.') cannot even justify the requirements of reproduction. As noted in my post #28, Rand's novels contain no CHILDREN! And no mention of family life. It's as if the leading characters were all dropped out of the sky in some Twilight Zone episode. This is NOT reality. Her heros are often orphans who taught themselves life skills with no help from anyone.
Rand never raised a family, and avoids that reality like the plague it is - plague to her individualism, that is. She also did nothing for her relatives back in Russia, even though they sacrificed to send her to the USA to begin a life of freedom while they suffered under Communism and the Nazi invasion.
Since Rand's Objectivism is based largely on the requirements for a free life, and since everyone who lives and breathes until they are old enough and smart enough to care for themselves owes it to a loving parent(s), the burden is on YOU and other followers of Rand to show how this kind of irrational love and sacrifice can be derived from the body of Objectivist literature. Or were you raised by wolves?