Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

One question in the ethics seminar was how to weigh the benefit of a slight improvement in the present quality of life for millions of people, against a risk of great harm to millions of people who hadn’t been born yet. It was complicated because, if you improved the present quality of life, then more people would have children—meaning that the people you were potentially harming in the future were people who might not otherwise have been born, so maybe you had still done them a favor. A lot of ethical questions were related to failing to cause people to be born. Was it morally wrong to not have a child, if you knew she would be happy? Was it morally wrong to have a child when you were fourteen, instead of later, if you knew that the later child would be happier? What if you knew that most of her life would be happy, but the last five years would be extremely unhappy?