Abstract
The ethics of biological procreation has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Yet, as I show in this paper, much of what has come to be called procreative ethics is conducted in a strangely abstract, impersonal mode, one which stands little chance of speaking to the practical perspectives of any prospective parent. In short, the field appears to be flirting with a strange sort of practical irrelevance, wherein its verdicts are answers to questions that no-one is asking. I go on to articulate a theory of what I call existential grounding, a notion which explains the role that prospective children play in the lives of many would-be parents. Procreative ethicists who want their work to have real practical relevance must, I claim, start to engage with this markedly first-personal kind of practical consideration.
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Notes
I owe this more general idea to R.G. Collingwood, who believed that propositions are not fully understood unless seen in light of the questions they are meant to answer. See (Collingwood 1939, pp. 25–43).
The question of how reflection on ethical propositions can issue in intentions was most influentially articulated by Aristotle. In recent meta-ethics, it has come to be known as “the normative question”. (Aristotle 2009, p. 1147a; Dreier 2015; Korsgaard 1996) I add the qualifier “rational” in my description because it is not clear that a moral philosopher has to explain how moral considerations can motivate any agent; most philosophers in this area will concede that this explanatory burden only exists for agents who meet certain minimal standards. Even the fairly skeptical Williams granted that an agent may be totally unmoved by their own overriding reasons if they lack certain cognitive or imaginative capacities. (Williams 1981) I am grateful to Mona Simion for discussion of this point.
A principal exception is Christine Overall. The final chapter in her Why Have Children? has the virtue of not automatically treating the moral and the practical questions as though they were identical, and openly discusses meaningfulness, authenticity and identity. (Overall 2012)
See (McMahan 2009).
In saying this, I am not asserting that the badness of a possible-future person’s life should never weigh in our deliberations. My argument here merely concerns the form of the comparative question that is being asked: if we are to include such possible-future persons in our deliberation about whether to make them actual, we necessarily compare worlds and not lives.
Of course, many parents have children to ensure their own well-being as they enter old age. But this is not the kind of consideration that Gheaus cites. Rather, she focuses solely on the well-being of humanity in general.
For example, The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy published an entire issue on methodology in applied ethics in 2000. While the authors differed in many respects, the editor noted that every contributor to the issue shared the assumptions that “bioethics is about resolving cases, not about moral theory, and that the best method of bioethical decision-making is that which produces useful answers.” (Smith Iltis 2000)
Perhaps more charitably, these philosophers may be offering arguments in favor of certain state policies, such as China’s well-known one-child policy. If this is so, then they should be far more explicit about this, and drop any references to moral censure and blame, to rightness, wrongness, permissibility or impermissibility. If, for example, MacIver’s point is simply that governments have strong reasons to discourage reproduction, reasons grounded in resource-scarcity, then he should simply say so, and not insist that procreators are subject to “moral censure”.
This is roughly the tension to which Williams was referring when he said: “We can dream of a philosophy that would be thoroughly truthful and honestly helpful. This, of course, implies an impossible combination of characteristics.” (Williams 2000, 212).
Once again, I wish to explicitly exempt Christine Overall from this criticism.
According to Galen Strawson, narratival continuity is not a universally shared human experience, and I am perfectly willing to grant that these descriptions won’t resonate with everyone (Strawson 2004). However, this is dialectically irrelevant here. Procreative ethicists argue over whether procreation is right or wrong as such, and these positions are rendered problematic even by the existence of some people whose lives are such that they have strong practical reasons to procreate.
I use the terms “resonant” and “wholehearted” in roughly the sense given to them by Harry Frankfurt in his important work on identity and autonomy. See (Frankfurt 1987).
I am thus in agreement with Nomy Arpaly’s critique of Susan Wolf’s account of life’s meaningfulness. Wolf includes an “objective” component in her account, which is meant to rule out the meaningfulness of lives which, for example, entirely revolve around the love for a goldfish. Arpaly simply asks: why isn’t such a life meaningful for the person who is living it? Here, we may simply distinguish two questions. Is this a life we would wish to lead, or that we would wish for our loved ones to lead? The answer is probably ‘no’. But is this a life that is existentially grounding for the goldfish-lover? The answer is ‘yes’ (Wolf et al. 2010).
Curiously, in his most recent work, Benatar recognizes that something like this is true. He writes: “Many
people have meaningful lives from this perspective. They are loved and cherished by their family, and in turn they play important, meaningful roles in the lives of those family members. They provide love, support, company, and deep personal connections.”(Benatar 2017, p. 28) He does not seem to recognize that this complicates his anti-natalist position.
It appears, for example, in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, which is often read as the story of Gilgamesh coming to terms with human mortality. And of course, a great deal of religious belief is very often motivated by consciousness of earthly mortality. One famous hymn, written during the Irish Famine, reads “Change and decay in all around I see; O Thou who changest not: abide with me.”
For a systematic treatment of the distinction between reasons for me and reasons for all, see (Hodder 2014).
(Wittgenstein 1958)
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Smyth, N. What Is the Question to which Anti-Natalism Is the Answer?. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 23, 71–87 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10070-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10070-7