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November 30, 2024 - January 28, 2025
Increasing one's value by having children might be like increasing one's value by taking hostages. We might find it unfair and decide not to reward it. That may make children's lives worse, but must the cost of preventing that outcome be placed on the shoulders of those who do not have children?
It has generally been thought that those cases where the impairment, although severe, is not so bad as to make life not worth living are more difficult than cases where the impairment is so great as to make life not worth living. It has been said that because the former, by definition, are cases of lives worth living, one cannot judge never existing to be preferable to existing with such a life. The force of this argument, however, rests on a crucial ambiguity in the expression 'a life worth living'-an ambiguity I shall now probe.
Lives worth starting and lives worth continuing
The expression
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while most people think that living life without a limb does not make life so bad that it is worth ending, most (of the same) people also think that it is better not to bring into existence somebody who will lack a limb. We require stronger justification for ending a life than for not starting one.
My argument so far rests on the view that there is a morally important distinction between future-life and present-life cases.
(3) the absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone,
whereas (4) the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation.
Claim (3) says that this absence is good when judged in terms of the interests of the person who would otherwise have existed. We may not know who that person would have been, but we can still say that whoever that person would have been, the avoidance of his or her pains is good when judged in terms of his or her potential interests. If there is any (obviously loose) sense in which the absent pain is good for the person who could have existed but does not exist, this is it. Clearly (3) does not entail the absurd literal claim that there is some actual person for whom the absent pain is
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There is a second support for my claim about the asymmetry between (3) and (4). Whereas it is strange (if not incoherent) to give as a reason for having a child that the child one has will thereby be benefited,27 it is not strange to cite a potential child's interests as a basis for avoiding bringing a child into existence.
We can regret, for the sake of an indeterminate but existent person that a benefit was not bestowed on him or her, but we cannot regret, for the sake of somebody who never exists and thus cannot thereby be deprived, a good that this never existent person never experiences.
Questionable. If we can be glad that a hypothetical person didn't suffer, why couldn't we regret that a hypothetical person didn't experience benefits? Is the asymmetry then rather between existence and nonexistence? Is it at least conceptually coherent to be glad that someone, perhaps oneself, exists?
Whereas, at least when we think of them, we rightly are sad for inhabitants of a foreign land whose lives are characterized by suffering, when we hear that some island is unpopulated, we are not similarly sad for the happy people who, had they existed, would have populated this island. Similarly, nobody really mourns for those who do not exist on Mars, feeling sorry for potential such beings that they cannot enjoy life.28
But their lives are *purely* hypothetical, i.e. not in the cards until one brings them up as a thought experiment. One might judge other cases differently where the hypothetical people were the people that would exist were one to reproduce: because this is a live possibility, their existence is not merely logically possible.
Positive utilitarians who are sympathetic to the asymmetry could draw a distinction between (i) promoting the happiness of people (that exist, or will exist independently of one's choices) and (ii) increasing happiness by making people. This is the now famous distinction between (i) making people happy and (ii) making happy people. Positive utilitarians who draw this distinction could then,
consistent with positive utilitarianism, judge only (i) to be a requirement of morality. This is the preferable version of positive utilitarianism. Taking (ii) also to be a requirement of morality
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Judging the absence of pleasure to be 'not good' is also too weak in that it does not say enough. Of course the absence of pleasure is
not what we would call good. However, the important question, when the absence of pleasure involves no deprivation for anybody, is whether it is also `not bad' or whether it is `bad'. The answer, I suggest, is that it is `not good, but not bad either' rather than `not good, but bad'. Because `not bad' is a more informative evaluation than `not good', that is the one I prefer. However, even those who wish to stick with `not good' will not thereby succeed in
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Should the last "not good" be "not bad"?
the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation. The implication here is that where an absent pleasure is a deprivation it is bad. Now, obviously, when I say that it is bad, I do not mean that it is bad in the same way that the presence of pain is bad.31
fn: "The only time it would be bad in that sense is where the absence of pleasure is actually painful."
So is THAT the locus of the asymmetry?
To value quadrants (3) and (4) at zero is to attach no positive value to (3) and this is incompatible with the asymmetry for which I have argued.
But doesn't the asymmetry *rely* on it?
The fact that one enjoys one's life does not make one's existence better than non-existence, because if one had not come into existence there would have been nobody to have missed the joy of leading that life and thus the absence of joy would not be bad. Notice, by contrast, that it makes sense to regret having come into existence if one does not enjoy one's life. In this case, if one had not come into existence then no being would have suffered the life one leads. That is good, even though there would be nobody who would have enjoyed that good.
On the Schopenhauerian view, suffering is all that exists independently.37 Happiness, for him, is but a temporary absence of suffering. Satisfaction is the ephemeral fulfilment of desire. In hedonistic terms, there are no intrinsic pleasures. All pleasures are simply passing relief from negative mental states.
Fulfilled desires, like pleasures (even of the intrinsic kind), are states of achievement rather than default states. For instance, one has to work at satiating oneself, while hunger comes naturally. After one has eaten or taken liquid, bowel and bladder discomfort ensues quite naturally and we have to seek relief. One has to seek out pleasurable sensations, in the absence of which blandness comes naturally. The upshot of this is that we must continually work at keeping suffering (including tedium) at bay, and we can do so only imperfectly. Dissatisfaction does and must pervade life. There are
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'objective lists' of goods are not constructed sub specie aeternitatis -from a truly objective perspective. Instead they are constructed sub specie humanitatis-from a human perspective. Unlike desires, which can vary from individual to individual, objective lists tend to apply to all people, or at least to whole classes or groups of people. They are taken to be objective only in the sense that they do not vary from
person to person.
Conscious life, although but a blip on the radar of cosmic time, is laden with suffering-suffering that is directed to no end other than its own perpetuation.
Some argue that it does not matter that our lives are meaningless from the perspective of the universe. Even if that were true, it would surely be much better if our lives had meaning independently of our own human perspective-if they mattered from the perspective of the universe.
But that perspective is necessarily unoccupied. There's no such thing to be had.
The best solution to the problem of modesty is to say that although the modest person has an accurate perception of his strengths, he also recognizes that there is a higher standard by which he falls short.43
Modesty has nothing to do with knowledge. It's how one comports oneself, not lording one's superiority over others.
I could accept that non-procreation should only be required when the children produced would lead very poor quality lives. This is because I have argued that all lives fall into this category. Those who think that a few lives do not fall into this category are not (much) better equipped to defend the objection that non-procreation is too demanding. This is because they must surely be moved by the fact that we cannot tell, when we deliberate about whether to bring somebody into existence, whether that life will be one of the few lives that is not of a very poor quality. It seems, then, that
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Although our potential offspring may not regret coming into existence, they certainly would not regret not coming into existence.
Is the asymmetry really about existence/nonexistence?
if one thinks that coming into existence is always a great harm, then the presumption in favour of a right to procreate is always defeated. But a right that is always defeated is not really a right. Although it might still be argued that it is a right in principle-a presumption that has to be defeated, even though it always is defeated-such rights are not suitably enshrined in law. To make the case that people ought to have a legal right to have children, one must surely demonstrate that there should be a presumption in practice, and not merely in principle, to choose whether to have children.
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