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The last three texts (1,2,3) addressed a famous ethical paradox regarding harming future individuals called the Non-Identity Problem. Basically, the argument is that despite the intuition that it is wrong, or at least harmful, to create a person in the case of foreseen severe impairments, as long as that person is having a life considered to be worth living overall, that person couldn’t be regarded as a victim of the severe impairments, or to even be harmed by them, since without them, that person wouldn’t exist at all and so wouldn’t have this considered to be an overall worth living life.

The Non-Identity Problem feeds many pro-natalitsts who are asking, how can the act of creating someone be wrong if it is not bad for anyone specific? And in those three texts I’m trying to answer this question.

However, unfortunately, the fact is that meanwhile in the real world, while ethicists deal with theoretical moral dilemmas, many people are still far from considering as ‘wrong’ and as ‘a harm’, not cases of foreseen severe impairments endured by people who have a life worth living overall, but cases of severe impairments resulted from medical negligence or recklessness and endured by people who have a life not worth living according to the very people who are forced to live it, or according to their parents who plea on their behalf.
These cases are referred to as ‘Wrongful Life’ and they are supposed to be much easier and way more obvious than the cases the Non-Identity Problem refers to, yet amazingly they aren’t.

The following text, as well as the next three texts, addresses the case of how humanity regards the case of ‘Wrongful Life’. Or in other words, how human society view cases of people who view their own lives or of parents who view their children’s lives, as wrongful and would rather that they never have existed.

A ‘Wrongful Life’ case is when a child sues for medical negligence a doctor or hospital for failing to diagnose and/or for not informing the child’s parents about a genetic disorder or foetal impairment when abortion was still an option and would have been chosen by the parents had they been informed. The claim in a wrongful-life suit is not that the negligence of the doctor was the cause of the impairment, but that by failing to inform the parents, the doctor is responsible for the birth of an impaired child who otherwise would not have been born and therefore would not have experienced the suffering caused by the impairment. The lawsuit is in respect of the damage caused by the impairment, this would generally include pain, suffering, and ‘disability costs’—the extra financial costs attributable to the disability, such as the cost of nursing care.

The main arguments made by law jurisdictions, politicians and the general public against ‘Wrongful Life’ claims are:
The child suffers no damage due to the negligence, because without the negligence the child would not even exist
That ‘Wrongful Life’ claims disvalue the life of people with disabilities
That ‘Wrongful Life’ claims would put pressure on doctors to advise people to have abortions
That ‘Wrongful Life’ claims would lead to Eugenics
That ‘Wrongful Life’ claims go against the ‘Sanctity Of Life’

The following text addresses the first argument and the next parts would address the rest.

The Non-Existence of an Argument

Most courts don’t accept cases of ‘wrongful life’ mostly by claiming that damages are incalculable in monetary terms because it is impossible to compare life in an impaired state versus non-existence. For someone to claim compensation for being created in an impaired state, that person needs to show the court that s/he had been better off not being created. But non-existence is not a relevant comparative state, therefore it can’t be better off.
This claim can be referred to as the Non-Existence Argument.

Another common claim made by courts regarding ‘wrongful life’ cases is “the very nearly uniform high value which the law and mankind has placed on human life, rather than its absence.” (Becker v. Schwartz, 386 N.E 2d 807, 812 1978) Or in other words, the courts treat life as a blessing, stating that: “Life – whether experienced with or without a major physical handicap – is more precious than non-life”. (Berman v. Allen, 404 A.2d 8 N.J 1979)

Non-existence is indeed not a relevant comparative state, however, this statement must go both ways. The courts can’t argue for key flaws in the wrongful life argument such as that it is incoherent for someone to claim that s/he would rather not to exist because non-existence is not a state anyone can be in, but in the same breath argue that life is a blessing, because if non-existence is not a state anyone can be in, how can existence be a blessing? Compared with what? What else is there other than existence? If non-existence is not a relevant comparative state and therefore non-existence can’t be better off than existence, than it is also the case that existence can’t be better off than non-existence. What is supposed to be derived from this common courts’ statement is that non-existence and existence can’t be compared at all, therefore non-existence can’t be better off and existence in itself can’t be a blessing as again, compared with what other option?

If impaired existence is not a harm because it can’t be worse than non-existence which is not a state that can be attributed to someone, then any existence is not a blessing or a benefit because it can’t be better than non-existence which as aforesaid is not a state that can be attributed to someone.
If existence is a blessing it must be in comparison to non-existence and if so then why can’t a person claim that its existence is worse off than non-existence? If the courts can say that existence is better compared with non-existence, than others can say the opposite.

I think that both claims can’t be made for the simple reason that indeed non-existence is not a comparative state. Nevertheless wrongful life claims are not flawed, as a person can certainly claim that its life is not worth living even if the alternative is not having a life at all. The claim is not that there is a better option that the plaintiff prefers, but that the option that was forced on that person is harmful, and since it is a result of negligence, compensation is required. The person claims that its life is miserable and that had s/he had an option this life would have never been chosen. These people were harmed by their existence because they have one, not because before that they didn’t have one. They don’t necessarily prefer another option but not to be forced with the one that was forced on them, or specifically in the case of a lawsuit, to at least be compensated for it. The claim for compensation is not for a better life that were deprived of someone, but for the particularly miserable life that were forced on someone. It is not that they prefer to have their former state which is non-existence, but to have no state at all. They don’t say YES to non-existence, but NO to their existence.
But when it comes to most courts it is as if these people do say YES to non-existence, and as if there is such a state as non-existence since they are saying to these people; what is preferable to your life, non-existence?!

Since non-existence is not really an option for anybody, and existence is the only possible option for everybody, but it is not necessary or in the interest of anyone, there is no sense in considering procreation as a benevolent state. Procreation is unnecessarily creating an unnecessary and vulnerable person, that would necessarily experience unnecessary harms.

Besides, an action can be harmful and wrong even if it brings about a better situation overall to the person who was harmed.
Intelligence and physical beauty for example are quite consensually considered to have a very high value. Would it be morally justified for a doctor to anaesthetize a person without consent and perform some plastic surgeries and add some IQ points to its brain to benefit that person? Would the same courts who declined wrongful life cases claiming that life is always a benefit, also decline a suit by that person? Highly unlikely. They would probably convict the doctor for harming that person despite that s/he is not worse off, but probably the other way around. That is because it may be permissible for a person to agree to undergo a harm to receive a benefit, but it is definitely not permissible for another person to impose the harm without consent. Had the doctor performed the operation without consent but so to prevent the operated person from suffering a greater harm, even if as a result of the operation the operated person have been harmed or is suffering from pain or physical disability which was inevitable as part of the rescuing procedure, it is extremely unlikely that any court would find that doctor guilty of harm. And that is because when harms are caused to prevent greater harms they are morally permissible, but they are never permissible to bestow benefits.

And obviously, the case of creating a person is utterly different than the case of an existing person. As opposed to bestowing benefits to an existing person which can be better off by the operation (regardless of if the operation should be considered as morally permissible or not), a created person is not better off by its creation, nor the other way around. A created person is not better nor worse off, but rather s/he literally wasn’t and now s/he is. So if courts would rule against harming an existing person to bestow benefits despite that person being better off, they should most definitely rule against harming a person by forcing him/her to exist when that person is not by any means better off.

Even if the creation of the people in ‘wrongful life’ cases was truly a benefit overall, no one would be harmed or be deprived of that alleged overall benefit if they hadn’t been created. However, they are severely harmed by being forced to exist.
Procreation is creating a vulnerable person who can be miserable, and in the case of a foreseen impaired life it is creating an even more vulnerable person than usual, and who is more likely to be miserable once forced into existence.
While there is something awfully wrong about creating a person with impairments, there is nothing wrong with not creating a person at all, let alone not creating one with severe impairments.

Comparing the two scenarios, in one there would be a suffering person, suffering parents, and more burdens on society, and in the other there would be no one who is deprived of a life s/he never had, the parents won’t be harmed by an impaired life of a child they never had, and society won’t be harmed by the creation of another person who needs much more attention and resources than average. This is not supposed be to such a tough moral dilemma.

Even if damages are incalculable in monetary terms because it is impossible to compare life in an impaired state and nonexistence, they are calculable in monetary terms when compared to life not in an impaired state. Why can’t courts compare the costs and burdens of life in an impaired state versus life not in an impaired state and compensate the family for whatever the gap they would find for every specific case relative to people of more or less the same social state? Why not define harm in relation to wrongful life cases as putting someone in a worse off place than what is considered normal? Or putting someone in a severely inferior state compared to the average starting point and welfare? Or define a decent minimum standard for existence, some basic living conditions, and whom whose life is below that threshold is a ‘wrongful life’ case. Obviously, as an antinatalist I don’t think that these options are sufficient or needed, I am only specifying them to show that the point of reference to calculate compensation need not to be non-existence, and that given that it is possible (and quite easy) to find calculable measures in monetary terms for damages, this is not really a serious judiciary problem, but rather a serious ethical failure.

I think that courts can easily avoid philosophical discourses over the metaphysics of non-existence by comparing harms in ‘wrongful life’ cases with other created people, or by referring to the parents’ right to decide, or to “the fundamental right of a child to be born as a whole, functioning human being”, or anything of this sort. But we are still extremely far from any kind of resolution even in cases such as these. We are living in a world in which fetuses are more important than people. You are very much familiar with this from debates over abortions, but here it is not even the case of women’s rights over their own bodies against the so called rights of fetuses, but of children’s rights not to be forced into an impaired existence against the so called rights of fetuses which are actually the very same children before they are born! This is a new level of madness and it is even scarier than the usual scary arguments against abortions.

As opposed to the claims against wrongful life cases, these people are severely harmed by their existence as they are forced to endure numerous severe negative experiences, probably on a daily basis, with no necessary reason, without consent, and with a very high probability of being extremely miserable for their entire life.
But creating a person is always imposing pain, frustration, death, the fear of death, illnesses, boredom, anger, anxiety, regret, disappointment, suffering and etc., on that person. That is sufficient for claiming that regardless of any severe impairments, procreation always harms the person created. That is sufficient to claim that actually, every child has been harmed.

Cases of severe congenital impairments might be viewed as more complicated when it is of whom who view their lives as worth living (which is the heart of the Non-Identity Problem), but in the case of people who view their lives as not worth living, and to such extent that they have decided to sue, meaning to endure the awful experience of a trial, in cases of people who are stating that they rather not to have existed, people who are stating that their existence is so bad that they would rather not to have experienced it, who are saying not only that they are harmed during their existence, but that they are harmed by their existence, where is the dilemma? They need not to argue that non-existence is a better option for them but that existence is harm to them. It is impossible to avoid this by claiming that non-existence is not a state anyone can be in as the claim is not why haven’t you left me in non-existence a state which I would have preferred over my horrible existence, but that you have harmed me by not preventing my horrible existence. The claim is of harming by not preventing harm.

If more or less the same harms would have been caused to an existing person, say when that person is one month old, and it was caused by a negligent doctor who failed to notice a developing disease or a medical condition that is not congenital, probably all courts would decide to compensate the harmed person. But that is not the case when the negligence occurs before a person was created. Despite that the harms in terms of pain, suffering and costs being more or less the same, in the one month old case compensation is unquestionable and in the not yet existing person case being dismissed is very probable. The reasoning behind this gap is that had not for the negligence in the one month old case the person would have “normal” life and in the case of the not yet existing person, s/he wouldn’t have a life at all. In other words the courts view life as a gift irrespective of their quality. Experiencing chronic pain, suffering, disability, paralysis, and what not, as a result of negligence is a very serious crime only when it happens in life and never when it is instead of life. When this is the inevitable price of life, life is still viewed as a blessing. That is even when the ones forced to experience all that feel differently.

This represents a new category of pro-natalism since here it is doctors and later the law system that forces existence, not to mention an impaired one, on people without their consent, and without their parents’ consent, and as opposed to the cases referred to by the Non-Identity Problem, without them being considered worth living by whom who were forced to endure them, or by their parents.
This is how far behind pro-natalists are. Not even ‘wrongful life’ cases are viewed as wrong. So how likely is it that they would view all of them as wrong?

References

Begeal, Brady “Burdened by Life: A Brief Comment on Wrongful Birth and Wrongful Life.” Albany Gov’t Law Review Fireplace Blog. 2011. Accessed Jun 1, 2012. http://aglr.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/burdened-by-life-a-brief-comment-on-wrongfulbirth-and-wrongful-life

Benatar D (2006) Better never to have been: the harm of coming into existence. Clarendon, Oxford

Botkin Jeffrey R., “Ethical Issues and Practical Problems in Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis,” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 26, no. 1 (1998): 17-28.

Ettorre Elizabeth, “Reproductive Genetics, Gender and the Body: ‘Please Doctor, may I have a Normal Baby?’,” Sociology 34 no. 3 (2000): 403-420

Gardner, M. (2016). Beneficence and procreation. Philosophical Studies; 173(2) 321-336

Giesen Ivo, “Of wrongful birth, wrongful life, comparative law and the politics of tort law systems,” Journal of Contemporary Roman-Dutch Law 72 (2009): 257-273.

Harris John, “The Wrong of Wrongful Life,” Journal of Law and Society 17, no. 1 (1990): 90.

Hensel Wendy F., “The Disabling Impact of Wrongful Birth and Wrongful Life Actions,” Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review 40 (2005): 141-195.

Jennifer Ann Rinaldi, “Wrongful Life and Wrongful Birth: The Devaluation of Life With Disability,” Journal of Public Policy, Administration and Law, 1 (2009): 1-7; Liu, “Wrongful life: some of the problems.”

Kumar R (2015) Risking and wronging. Philos Public Aff 43(1):27–51

Liu, Athena N. C. “Wrongful life: some of the problems.” Journal of Medical Ethics 13 (1987): 69-73.

Loth Marc A., Courts in quest for legitimacy; the case of wrongful life (Rotterdam: Erasmus University, 2007).

Mackenzie Robin. From Sanctity To Screening: Genetic Disabilities, Risk And Rhetorical Strategies In Wrongful Birth And Wrongful Conception Cases Feminist Legal Studies 7: 175–191, 1999

Morreim E. Haavi, “The Concept of Harm Reconceived: A Different Look at Wrongful Life,” Law and Philosophy 7, no. 1 (1988): 3-33.

Morris Anne and Saintier Severine, “To Be or Not to Be: Is That The Question? Wrongful Life and Misconceptions,” Medical Law Review 11 (2003): 167-193.

Murtaugh Michael T., “Wrongful Birth: The Courts’ Dilemma in Determining a Remedy for a Blessed Event,” Pace Law Review 27, no. 2 (2007): 243

Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. (Oxford University Press 1986)

Ramos-Ascensão José, “Welcoming the more vulnerable: do parents have a right to selection of a healthy child?” Europeinfos – Christians perspectives on the EU, 2012: 5, accessed Aug 4, 2013, http://www.comece.eu/europeinfos/en/archive/issue153/article/5140.html

Robertson John A., “Extending preimplantation genetic diagnosis: the ethical debate – Ethical issues in new uses of preimplantation genetic diagnosis,” Human Reproduction 18, no. 3 (2003): 465-471

Sàndor Judit, “From Assisted to Selective Reproduction: Through the Lens of the Court,” The Faculty of Law – Norway, 2013: 14, accessed Jan 14, 2014, http://www.jus.uio.no/english/research/news-andevents/events/conferences/2014/wccl-cmdc/wccl/papers/ws7/w7-sandor.pdf

Savulescu J. Procreative Beneficence: why we should select the best children. Bioethics 200115413–426

Seana Valentine Shiffrin. Harm And Its Moral Significance. Legal Theory, Available on CJO 2012 doi:10.1017/S1352325212000080

Sheldon Sally and Wilkinson Stephen. Termination of Pregnancy for reason of foetal disability: Are there grounds for a special exception in Law? Medical Law Review, 9 (2) pp 85-109

Steinbock, Bonnie, Life Before Birth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)

Steinbock Bonnie & McClamrock Bonnie When is Birth Unfair to the Child? University at Albany, SUNY January 1994

Steininger Barbara C., “Wrongful Birth and Wrongful Life: Basic Questions,” Journal of European Tort Law 2 (2010): 125-155

Stretton, Dean. “The Birth Torts: Damages for Wrongful Birth and Wrongful Life.” Deakin Law Review 10, no. 1 (2005): 319-364

Vesta T. Silva (2011) Lost Choices and Eugenic Dreams: Wrongful Birth Lawsuits in Popular News Narratives, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 8:1, 22-40, DOI: 10.1080/14791420.2010.543985

Webber Jay, “Better Off Dead?” First Things, (2002): 10

Weinberg, Rivka. Existence: who needs it? The non-identity problem and merely possible people
2012 Bioethics ISSN 0269-9702

The following is the third and last part of a text about the Non-Identity Problem and its relation to Antinatalism. If you haven’t read the first and second parts please do so before reading this one.

For those who have read the previous parts here is a very short reminder of the non-identity problem.
The Non-Identity Problem points at a paradox regarding harming future individuals.
Derek Parfit, the philosopher behind this claim, argues that despite the intuition that it is wrong to create a person in the case of what is considered to be severe congenital impairments, or in the case of what is considered to be an impaired environmental starting point, actually, as long as that person would have a life considered to be worth living overall, that person couldn’t be regarded as a victim of the impairments, or to even be harmed by them, since preventing them necessarily means that that person wouldn’t exist at all and so wouldn’t have what is considered as an overall worth living life.

In this post I’ll address the third main notion implied by the non-identity problem.

Every Imaginable Abuse

The third notion implied by the Non-Identity Problem undermines the intuition that the referred lives are indeed always wrong and harmful. As even in the cases of extreme impairments, as long as the person created is having a life considered to be overall worth living, there is no one we can point at as being wronged or harmed.

If this notion is right it means that as long as the children don’t prefer never to have existed, their parents can enslave them, abuse them, neglect them, molest them, and etc., and not only that the parents don’t harm their children according to the non-identity logic, but their children were actually benefited (since otherwise these children wouldn’t have existed, the only way these specific children could exist is as salves or as abused children).

It means that any case of negligence by the parents, the gynecologist who performed the tests to examine whether there are expected disease or health issues, all the doctors who were involved in the pregnancy, the ultrasound technicians and etc., don’t harm a person no matter what their contribution to its impairments is, as long as the created person has a life considered to be worth living overall.

This approach can be taken to absurd examples like a sadistic scientist who deliberately creates a person with every possible disease and impairment possible, just for his sick sake of watching people suffer. According to the Non-Identity Problem approach, as long as that person has nevertheless a life worth living (please ignore, for the sake of the argument, how implausible this option is), the sadistic scientist has not harmed that person.

To suggest that procreation is harmful if and only if the created person would prefer not to exist, is an unacceptable criterion in any other aspect of life. In workplaces for example, the criterion for unethical working environment can’t be based on what would make people quit their jobs. It can’t be that the ethical criterion would be that as long as someone puts up with any harm forced on it, then it is not wrong. Sexual harassments are always wrong and harmful, they don’t become harmless if the harassed person prefers to endure it over losing a job. It reminds me of the notorious pro-natalist claim ‘well if you don’t like life you can always commit suicide’. Most people can’t always carry out suicide, it is never simple and easy, and it always has a tremendous cost. But the point here is that this logic permits any harm as long as it is below the threshold, and the threshold is what would make the harmed person prefer never to have existed.

The claim that no matter how horrible a person’s impairments are, as long as overall that person’s life is considered worth living that person is not harmed – is cruel and exploitative. It is cruel because it forces horrible lives on people who don’t have alternatives, and it is exploitative since the parents are actually getting a moral license to take advantage of the addictive aspect of life and treat their children as they wish. They know that their children would probably adapt to their shitty lives, or at least, as explained in the second part, won’t think that they better never to have existed since they are afraid of the alternative, and since they are biologically and socially structured to favor life, it is ok to force them into a miserable life.

As mentioned in the second part, to argue that it is not wrong to create an impaired person as long as its life is above the threshold, requires thinking that existence is good in itself. According to this logic, people should create as many people as possible, no matter how awful their lives would be as long as they are above the threshold. If existence is a benefit, why are we not compelled to create as many people as possible? Why are people not obligated to create as many people as they can, and by that I don’t mean to the point that they can no longer support them (as according to the non-identity reasoning it is not wrong to sell them or financially exploit them as long as their lives are worth living), but as many as their biological limit is?

In a way, despite that seemingly the non-identity problem weakens the claim against creating people with severe impairments, it actually strengthens the claim against all procreations. The difficulty that the non-identity problem creates is with opposing causing someone harms when that someone has a life considered to be worth living overall. Allegedly, we are supposed to accept the harm and allow the parents to cause it and exempt them from taking responsibility. And this problem is even greater since it is supposed to apply to other cases as well in which someone is forced into a harmful and unnecessary situation without consent but that person prefers the overall outcome, cases which are intuitively unethical, but are ethical according to the logic of the non-identity problem, as who is the victim?
Rejecting this claim and accepting any harm forced on someone as long as s/he prefers its existence, and as long as its existence is depended upon that harm, can result in very harmful scenarios that few would be ready to accept.
One of them is of abusing or negligent parents. The children of abusive or negligent parents might prefer their existence over never existing, but does it make their abuse and neglect not at all a harm?!
Another example often given in that context is slavery. Is creating a person with the intent of enslavement, not harming that person if that person prefers its existence over non-existence?

If we think that it is harmful despite that allegedly there is no victim in these cases, then clearly every procreation is morally wrong as breeding is always harming with no consent, it is always putting another person at risk such as that the created person would be abused or neglected, or enslaved, and since breeding is never necessary.
Isn’t objecting cases such as domestic abuse, neglect, or slavery, but not others, mostly a case of volume and rhetoric? An ethical argument should be based on a principle not on volume and rhetoric. I am not comparing abusive parents or slavery to any case of procreation of course. Despite that I think that every procreation is morally wrong I don’t think that all are equally wrong. But the principle must apply to all cases. They are all wrong, and abuse and slavery are simply worse cases. My point here in the context of the non-identity problem is that it reveals how the opposition to cases such as abuse and slavery when there is seemingly no person to point at as their victim rests on shaky ground. It can’t be that the claim is ‘that is way over the line!’ An extreme harm makes an ethical problem an extreme ethical problem but it doesn’t constitute the immorality of the case. If the criterion is life worth living, especially if it is in the eyes of the person living it, then every case, even the most extreme, is not unethical as long as it is preferable by its victim. To be consistent with the conclusions derived from the non-identity problem pro-natalists should accept cases such as abuse and slavery. But most are not ready to make that step, and on the other hand they refuse to infer from their opposition to such cases (an opposition which obviously is based on the fact that they view these lives as harmful regardless of if they are preferable by their victims) the self-evident conclusion that since every procreation involves forcing harms on others (most may not be as horrible as the mentioned cases, but all are definitely harmful) none of them can be morally justified.

Most of the discussions regarding the non-identity problem are about where to set the threshold instead of internalizing the inherent structured problem with procreation which is that there is always harm, there is never consent, there is always a chance of life unworthy in the eyes of the person created, there is no point in time when it can be determined that the created person’s life is worth living as it can always change, there is always harm to others, and of course that the only way to guarantee that there would truly be no harms and no victims is that there would be no subjects of harm and of harming.

References

Benatar David (2006) Better never to have been: the harm of coming into existence. Clarendon, Oxford

Finneron-Burns E (2015) What we owe to future people: a contractualist account of intergenerational ethics.

Gardner Molly (2015) A harm-based solution to the non-identity problem. Ergo; 2(17) pp. 427-444

Gardner Molly (2016). Beneficence and procreation. Philosophical Studies; 173(2) 321-336

Kumar R (2015) Risking and wronging. Philos Public Aff 43(1):27–51

McMahan Jeff (2009) Asymmetries in the morality of causing people to exist. In: Roberts MA, Wasserman DT(eds) Harming future persons: ethics, genetics and the nonidentity problem. Springer, New York

Parfit Derek Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press 1986)

Seana Valentine Shiffrin Harm And Its Moral Significance. Legal Theory, Available on CJO 2012 doi:10.1017/S1352325212000080

Steinbock, Bonnie Life Before Birth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)

Steinbock Bonnie & McClamrock Bonnie When is Birth Unfair to the Child? University at Albany, SUNY January 1994

Weinberg Rivka Existence: who needs it? The non-identity problem and merely possible people
2012 Bioethics ISSN 0269-9702

Weinberg Rivka Identifying and dissolving the non-identity problem. Philos Stud (2008) (137):3–18

Wolf, C. Intergenerational justice. In Blackwell companion to applied ethics, eds. (2003)

The following post is the second part of a text about the Non-Identity Problem and its relation to Antinatalism. If you haven’t read the first part yet, please do so before reading this one.

For those who have read the first part here is a very short reminder of the non-identity problem.
The Non-Identity Problem points at a paradox regarding harming future individuals.
Derek Parfit, the philosopher behind this claim, argues that despite the intuition that it is wrong to create a person in the case of what is considered to be severe congenital impairments, or in the case of what is considered to be an impaired environmental starting point, actually, as long as that person would have a life considered to be worth living overall, that person couldn’t be regarded as a victim of the impairments, or to even be harmed by them, since preventing them necessarily means that that person wouldn’t exist at all and so wouldn’t have what is considered as an overall worth living life.

In this post I’ll address the second main notion implied by the non-identity problem.

No One is Harmed by Not Existing

The second notion implied by the Non-Identity Problem is that an act that creates an impaired yet still worth living life, in a case that that same person could never have existed at all in the absence of that act, does not make things worse for, or harms, and is not “bad for”, that person.

Rivka Weinberg who I referred to in former posts (here and Hazardous Materials) describes it as follows:

“Because sperm are short-lived, our identities seem to depend on when we were conceived. And since it seems that almost anything we do affects the timeline of conceptions, almost anything we do also affects future identities: each person’s set of conception circumstances are virtually the only ones possible for her; her existence depends on them. The non-identity problem is thus the problem of identifying the person who is harmed by procreative decisions which seem to set back her life interests, given that her existence is worthwhile and dependent on that very same decision.” (Weinberg 2012, p.2)

And presents one of Parfit’s most famous examples for that matter:

“For example, if a 14-year-old girl deliberately creates a child who must suffer the disadvantages that having a child for a mother involves, who has the 14-year-old harmed? Intuitively, she has harmed her child, but because that child could not have been conceived at any other time and has a worthwhile life, we seem unable to say that.” (Weinberg 2012, p.3)

In other words, the claim is that given that the child’s life is considered worth living and it would not have been better for the child that s/he never have existed at all, then the child has not been harmed, or made worse off by its mother, and so her act is not bad for the child.

Before addressing this claim, an important note must be made regarding the term ‘life worth living’. Obviously this term, which is highly controversial, with many antinatalists thinking that the option doesn’t even exist, requires and deserves a separate and broader discussion. But I will address it here shortly and only in the context of the non-identity problem, arguing that even if, for the sake of the argument, I’ll accept the legitimacy of the term, ‘life worth living’ is not objective and permeant but by definition is subjective and temporary. A life worth living for one isn’t necessarily so for someone else, and even for the same person this status doesn’t necessarily stay the same throughout its entire life.
Lives are constantly changing, one can’t argue that s/he is benefiting someone by creating it since evidently that person feels that its life is worth living, partly because that feeling might change over time. At any given moment the created person may think that its life is not worth living depending on its life experiences. Does it make sense that the general moral status of procreation would change according to the child’s contingent and changeable perspective? Does it make sense that the general moral status of procreation would be depended upon what others do to a specific person all along its life? How does it make sense that the decision to procreate depends on whether someone would break that person’s heart? Or on whether that person would suffer bullying at school? Or on whether that person would be involved in a terrible accident?
Moral decisions mustn’t be based upon a criterion which might change at any given moment. But that is life and therefore another main reason why it is always morally wrong to procreate. Life worth living can extremely easily become not worth living, and in many cases it is completely independent of the actions of the original agents. Numerous factors can affect the outcome, numerous factors that are not at all depended on the parents. The fact that parents have so little control over the outcome doesn’t mean they are exempted from any responsibility but on the contrary, it places an even greater one on their shoulders since they have absolutely no way to guarantee that their children would have a life worth living.

Furthermore, since lives are changing all the time, and since all lives have the potential to change dramatically at any given moment, whether someone’s life is worth living or not can only be decided definitively when they end. Absurdly, it can only be determined whether one’s life is worth living when it is too late, and it is too late not when a person’s life is about to end, but when it begins, since once someone’s life has started there is no way back. It is possible for a person to prevent its future harms by ending its own not worth living life, but there is no way to undo all the harms that a person had experienced.

However, the core of the issue regarding the second notion implied by the Non-Identity Problem is claims such as – ‘it would not have been better for the child that s/he never have existed at all, therefore the child has not been made worse off by its mother’, and ‘the child has not been harmed at all’, so I’ll focus on them in this text.

It would not have been better for the child that s/he never have existed at all, therefore the child has not been made worse off by its mother

The only reason why it would not have been better for the created person that s/he never have existed at all, is because non-existence is not a state someone can be in. Non-existence is not worse or better than existence because there is no one there for whom it would be better or worse compared with existence.
The logic behind the claim that it would not have been better for the child that s/he never have existed at all, implies that there is such a state as non-existence where people can be sorry that they don’t exist, and their parents can decide whether to bring them into existence with their impairments or to leave them miserable in non-existence. Only that this is not the case. A person created is literally created. It comes out of nothing, not from a better or worse place. That person wasn’t and now it is. So if anything, the created person has not been made better or worse off by its parents, but not because it’s life is or isn’t worth living, but because before its parents created that person there was no one to benefit or to be worse off by its creation. Prior to a person’s creation, there is no one to compare the state of the created person to, so it can’t be better or worse off.

Since existence is the precondition for any harm or benefit, non-existence – the state in which no person can experience anything and therefore is by definition not harmful or beneficial to anyone – can’t be worse or better than existence. Not only that non-existence cannot be worse than existence, it cannot at all be harmful.

Procreation, even of a life worth living (if we accept that term for the sake of the argument), is not putting someone in a better place, but creating someone who wasn’t there prior to that decision. It is creating a vulnerable person who can be miserable, and in the case of a foreseen flawed life it is creating an even more vulnerable person than usual, and who is more likely to be miserable once forced into existence.

The claim that it would not have been better for the created person that s/he never have existed at all, is often framed as that it is better to live with impairments than having no life at all, as if there is such a state as having no life at all. People who don’t exist are not having no-life at all, they don’t live in nonexistence, but simply don’t exist. Framing the issue as if to never exist is to have no life at all sounds to many people like a bad option compared with having a life with some impairments, but that is wrong and misleading. The options are not either having no life at all, or having a life with impairments, but having life with impairments, and never existing, meaning never needing to overcome any impairments or needing anything whatsoever. It is not life with impairments or having nothing, but just life with impairments. And while there is something awfully wrong about creating a person with impairments, there is nothing wrong with not creating a person at all, let alone not creating one with severe impairments.

Even if the created person would have a life worth living it would not be better for that person than had s/he never existed since non-existence is not an option for an existing person.
The claim that creating a person is a benefit because it is supposedly taking that person to a better place than it was before its creation, is false since everyone were nothing before they were created. Questions of creation are not comparative. And following the same logic, since non-existence is not a state anyone can be in, and therefore is not comparable to existence, the created impaired person is harmed but not because it was forced into a worse off place, but simply because it was forced into a bad place. The harm caused to the created impaired person doesn’t stem from comparativeness with not existing, but simply from being forced to endure negative experiences in existence.
It is not that it is always better never to have been, but that it is always wrong to cause someone to be.

Non-existence is not comparable to existence, but the decision to create a person can be compared to the decision not to create a person, since there is an option not to create anyone. The parents’ reply that ‘had we acted in your benefit you wouldn’t even exist, so be satisfied with your misery’ is not sufficient. Foreseeing that an act will result in harming another person is a good reason not to perform it. The fact that in the case of procreation avoiding that act will result in that person never existing doesn’t nullify that ethical reason. In fact it strengthens it, since all harms necessarily happen in existence, but no person can be harmed by not being created.
Non-existence is by all means not worse, bad, harmful, depriving, frustrating, or anything negative. All negative things occur in existence only. There are no harms or deprivations in non-existence. There is literally nothing and no one. No one is missing anything or is harmed by anything. There is no one to be deprived of the life that no one had lived.

The claim that had we acted differently (for example had the 14 year old girl waited for when she is older to create a person), the created person would have not existed despite that s/he prefers its existence over never exiting, is manipulative. Given that only existence is a state someone can be in, and given that people are addicted to life, and given that when people are asked if their life is worth living or whether they rather never to have been most if not all automatically reflect on their current existence (despite that had they never existed, nothing of what they have experienced would have ever happened, and not that everything that they have ever experienced would be lost), and most people, no matter how hard their lives are, say that they rather exist.

More than it exposes a philosophical complication, the non-identity problem illuminates a psychological one. Since non-existence is not an option for an existing person, but is still mistakenly considered as one (since people automatically switch between never existing and stopping their existence right now), and all the more so as a worse one, even miserable lives are viewed as preferable to it. That doesn’t mean that life is worth living but that there is nothing else but life, no matter how horrible it is. The fact that even miserable people prefer existence is not comforting but exactly the opposite. The fact that life’s addiction mechanism is trapping people in misery makes life even more miserable.
The answer to the question is life worth living, is not yes, but actually what other options do I have? I already exist, suicide is a very hard and problematic option which would also harm loved ones, I am biologically built to survive, I am psychologically built to believe everything would be better no matter how objectively unlikely it is, so I am sticking to the only option I have. Existence is the only existing option, so most people prefer it despite that it is terrible. That’s not a reason to cherish it but to prevent it.

Since people are biological machines built to survive, who are living in a life worshiping culture, clinging on to life is natural and the default state. That doesn’t make life better but the exact opposite. It means that people would prefer to go on living despite living horrible lives with no logical reason to believe it would ever get better for them. They are addicted to life. People are afraid of non-existence even though the issue is of them never existing in the first place, not stopping to exist.

The non-identity problem should have made people realize that life is addicting. The fact that people prefer their existence, no matter how horrible it is, should be alarming. The fact that people are suffering so much and have no reason to believe that their condition would ever change for the better and still they think that their lives are worth living indicates how wrongfully they perceive non-existence. It indicates how the option of never to have been is immediately being translated to losing everything they have and being deprived of everything they had, despite that it is not at all so.

There is no sense in asking an existing person if s/he prefers to exist since there is no option never to have existed once someone exists. There is no such state as non-existence so it cannot be preferred. There is only existence and there are always harms in existence.
If we’ll ask someone why do you think that your life is worth living as clearly you don’t do what you want most of the time, you are not happy, you don’t live up to your dreams, you don’t enjoy yourself most of the time, you spend most of the time doing things you have no option but doing, so what is so worthwhile about it? The answer is probably ‘to enjoy what I have’, ‘to enjoy it while I can’, because ‘there are no other options’, ‘we must take the bad with the good’ and etc. These are actually admissions that life is not good by itself but that we must make the best out of it. Meaning we have no choice or other options so we better make the most of the one we have. That is not an explanation why life is good. At most, it can maybe serve as an explanation why one doesn’t necessarily need to end its life immediately, but it is definitely a very good reason not to create more lives.
The never born don’t miss anything, are not harmed by anything, and don’t harm anyone else. That’s why it is so obvious that abstaining from creating people is the right thing to do.

The child has not been harmed at all

As opposed to the claim derived from the non-identity problem, there is a victim in the case of procreation when there are foreseen severe impairments and it is the person who would be forced to endure negative experiences with no necessary reason, without consent, and with a very high probability of being extremely miserable, especially due to its bad starting point.
But creating a person is always imposing pain, frustration, death, the fear of death, illnesses, boredom, anger, anxiety, regret, disappointment, suffering and etc., on that person. That is sufficient for claiming that regardless of any foreseen severe impairments, procreation always harms the person created. That is sufficient to claim that actually, every child has been harmed.

Creating someone is always forcing into existence a person who now must constantly struggle to fulfill its needs and desires. Once someone is forced into existence with a very bad starting point it is even worse since that person would probably want and need as much as anyone else but would get less or would have to struggle much harder only to get the same as anyone else. The chances of a person with a bad starting point to fulfill some of its needless and pointless desires are even worse than others’ chances. No one can ever fulfill all of them or anything close, but that person is way behind. From that perspective, the harm done to that person is even greater than the one imposed on other persons, but it is not different on principle.

Every procreation is imposing an unnecessary harm on someone else, the case of a flawed life is just much worse. The foreseen impairments don’t constitute the moral wrongness of procreation, but they do intensify it because of the expected added suffering of the created person.

Except for cases of rapes in places where abortions are not an option, all procreations are preventable and unnecessary. All people are impaired in one way or another and so it is impossible to create a person with no impairments. It is just a matter of degree and of socially conditioned intuitions, not of a firm solid ethical principle which we can rationally base. Impairments are defined by what is socially acceptable. And it is not very profound to define what is ethical by what is normative. People are not rational ethicists but irrational self-interested inconsistent creatures, so they arbitrarily determine the threshold for what they think is too much unnecessary impairments, while actually they are all unnecessary.

And that fact reveals the partiality in one of the most common ways people try to solve the non-identity problem.
Some counter the non-identity problem’s conclusion that the child has not been harmed, by claiming that to be born with impairments is to be born in a harmed state and parents who choose to bring to birth a disabled child are responsible for harming that child and causing that child to suffer from this harm.
This claim is one of the reasons I think that the non-identity problem should actually reveal some moral flaws inherent in every procreation, as it is always the case that the created person is born with some level of impairment (only because everyone feels pain and everyone must die we tend not to view these imperatives as impairments but they are, and no life includes “only” these as impairments), and so it is always the case that people are born in a harmed state, and therefore parents are always harming their children by creating them. Obviously, and as argued above, I certainly agree that it is wrong to create a person with more foreseen impairments since it is knowingly putting a person in a position of more harm, but the point is that every procreation is putting a person in a position of harm. Therefore, claiming that the particular creation of a person with foreseen severe impairments is an unnecessary harm, implies that creating a person without foreseen severe impairments is a necessary harm. But creating new persons is not necessary and creating new persons with no impairments whatsoever is not possible. Therefore creating a person is always imposing an unnecessary harm.

Since anything bad that happens to someone necessarily happens to that someone in existence, and since nothing bad can ever happen to anyone who doesn’t exist, to force existence on someone might not be bad had nothing bad ever happened to that person, but once something bad does happen to that person, the parents have harmed the created person. Since it is impossible that nothing bad would ever happen to someone, forcing existence is always necessarily harming someone else.

Most of the examples that the Non-Identity Problem refers to are of impairments such as severe diseases, or severe retardation, or severe physical disability, but what about cases of people who feel that their lives are not worth living with none of these impairments?
If, according to the non-identity problem, when the created person’s life is considered to be worth living despite its severe impairments that person has not been harmed, then people who feel the opposite about their lives, meaning that they are not worth living, are harmed and are wronged and it is unethical to create them regardless of any foreseen impairments.
If the parents don’t harm their child by creating it with severe impairments as long as the child’s life is considered worth living, why aren’t they considered as harming their child in case s/he doesn’t feel that its life is worth living despite that s/he has no severe “objective” impairments? If the criterion isn’t objective impairments but subjective ones, then it should apply in cases when there are no severe “objective” impairments. And since it is always an option that the created person would feel that its life is not worth living, it is always wrong to create a new person.
If the 14 year old mother didn’t harm her child since despite everything the child prefers to exist, then parents that their child doesn’t prefer to exist did harm their child no matter how seemingly good that persons’ life is. The point is that even if it is debatable whether to create a person with a horrible but still worth living life is harming that person, it mustn’t be debatable that creating a person whose life is not worth living according to the person living it, is a very serious harm.
Life not worth living is always an option, and any life can turn not worth living at any given moment. Something terrible that makes life not worth living can always happen. And then according to the logic of the argument, the parents did wrong the child.

The case of procreation by the 14-year-old girl is even worse since had she waited, she would have probably caused at least a lesser harm. But the more important point for that matter is that she doesn’t have only two options. The case isn’t should she wait until she is 28 since the person she would create then is expected to have a better life than the person she would create at the age of 14, but should she create a person at all? Why is it a choice between a horrible option and a more normative option but still a horrible one?
The claim is usually framed as had she waited the life of the person created is expected to be better. But expected and better are not enough. It must be guaranteed not expected, and that it would be great not better, and that can never be the case.

The fact that misery would be created is sufficient not to create a person at all. The fact that the 14 year old mother could have waited and created a less miserable person, and the fact that in any case there would be harm to others, and that it is putting the created person at a huge risk, without its consent, makes the case of procreation of an impaired person particularly cruel. Language tricks are merely a smokescreen. There is harm, there is a victim, and many more who would be victimized by the victim, and there is an appalling decision by the parents.

Sometimes lives that start out with relatively good starting point turn out to be worse than lives with a much worse starting point. There is no guarantee for anything except that there is always a harm, it is always purposeless, it is always without consent, it is never necessary, there is always a risk of extremely miserable life, and there is always a guarantee of extreme harm to others.

References

Benatar David (2006) Better never to have been: the harm of coming into existence. Clarendon, Oxford

Finneron-Burns E (2015) What we owe to future people: a contractualist account of intergenerational ethics.

Gardner Molly (2015) A harm-based solution to the non-identity problem. Ergo; 2(17) pp. 427-444

Gardner Molly (2016). Beneficence and procreation. Philosophical Studies; 173(2) 321-336

Kumar R (2015) Risking and wronging. Philos Public Aff 43(1):27–51

McMahan Jeff (2009) Asymmetries in the morality of causing people to exist. In: Roberts MA, Wasserman DT(eds) Harming future persons: ethics, genetics and the nonidentity problem. Springer, New York

Parfit Derek Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press 1986)

Seana Valentine Shiffrin Harm And Its Moral Significance. Legal Theory, Available on CJO 2012 doi:10.1017/S1352325212000080

Steinbock, Bonnie Life Before Birth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)

Steinbock Bonnie & McClamrock Bonnie When is Birth Unfair to the Child? University at Albany, SUNY January 1994

Weinberg Rivka Existence: who needs it? The non-identity problem and merely possible people
2012 Bioethics ISSN 0269-9702

Weinberg Rivka Identifying and dissolving the non-identity problem. Philos Stud (2008) (137):3–18

Wolf, C. Intergenerational justice. In Blackwell companion to applied ethics, eds. (2003)

Liberal societies seemingly highly value liberty and individualism but there is something oxymoronic about it when the general approach is actually – stay out of my plate, stay out of my closet, don’t tell me how to raise my kids, how to treat my dog, where to throw my trash, and certainly stay out of my ovaries, despite that all of the above and a lot more, are usually if not always, harmful to other individuals. Ordinarily, the attitude of most is demanding people to butt out of their lives no matter how wrong and harmful they are to others, because it is their life, and they are free to do as they please.
This is not individualism but more like every individual for him/her self. This is not liberalism but egoism. There is no respect to others’ liberties and individualism, or identifying ‘the other’ as an independent autonomic being. If that was the case then all people would have been vegans (so not to violate the liberty of the individuals they consume), environmentalists (so not to violate the liberty of the individuals that they pollute and destruct their habitats), and would have realized that they should not procreate as it is definitely a case of imposing one’s desires on another individual. It is imposing on another individual the most important element in one’s life – its existence.

Liberalism allegedly highly values liberty and freedom of choice, but giving people the choice and liberty to create other people is imposing on the created people the structured oppressiveness bound in existence, and it is disregarding their lack of choice and liberty in being created. No one was ever created by its own choice. No one is ever truly free. Everyone is stuck in their own mind and body. Some hate one of them, others hate both, and all are trapped within them and within a given reality, which many hate very much. This is a very important point but even if this wasn’t the case, meaning even if most people had been satisfied with the mind, body and the set of living conditions which were forced on them, although the wrongness of breeding was less severe and the problem was less urgent, it still was anti-liberty and anti-individualistic. And for all the ones who are regularly and systematically harmed by people, obviously it would have still been as wrong and as urgent as it is in the case of the created people hating their lives. As far as the victims are concerned, there is no difference whether their victimizers are happy or miserable or anything in between, they are miserable always and regardless.

Life always involves severe structured restrictions and significant intrinsic limitations. A person can’t escape who s/he is, or the reality it was forced into and that shaped that person in so many ways. Even if you are certain that the most crucial factor in shaping a person is its environment and not its genetics (there are studies supporting each side so it is hard to tell whether it is more nature or more nurture, but there is no doubt that both are critical), it is not always possible to get out of a bad environment, and it is definitely impossible to absolutely null its effect. And even in cases of “good genetics” and amazing environment, something bad can always happen to someone, independently of any biological and environmental factor. Procreation is always an imposition, even when everything is great. And, supposedly great lives, can always reverse.

An important point which should be clarified is that obviously liberalism has brought many good and important notions into people’s lives such as freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of association, civil rights and civil liberties, and that’s only a partial list. Liberalism also had a very positive effect in terms of procreation since placing the individual in the center of attention as opposed to the nation, society, god and etc., made people realize they don’t have to procreate if they don’t want to, because it is their desires that count most. But that effect, as I argue in a different text is mostly indirect, and it goes both ways (it is great that some people can choose not to create a new person if they don’t want to, but on the same line of thought many feel that they are entitled to, if they do want to).
A more direct effect, which is also on a larger ethical scale, is that placing the liberty of the individual in the center of attention resulted not only in people starting to place their own interests before their supposed gods’ supposed interests, and their supposed nation’s and society’s interests, but also the interests of others. Obviously I am not saying here that it is liberalism which initiated moralism (clearly moralism came way before it), but that it had a crucial and indispensable part in more and more ethical traditions focusing on the interests of others as the basic, if not the only, relevant criterion in ethics.
So this text is not about putting the blame on liberalism. The point is not to criticize the philosophical and political aspects of liberalism (although there are certainly good reasons to do so as it is hard to separate liberalism and capitalism, including its more aggressive versions for example), but to point at the hypocrisy and double standard among liberal societies when it comes to procreation. Freedom of choice, autonomy and consent are of the most basic and elementary aspects of liberalism, yet they are totally overlooked even in the most liberal societies in the world, when it comes to creating new people. The created individual is an appliance, a commodity that existing people are free to choose whether to create or not, without even considering if they should ask the person they are about to create whether it wants to be created. And since obviously it is impossible to ask that person, they should infer that they mustn’t impose their own choice on another autonomic individual who neither gave its consent nor was free to choose its own existence.

The following post is dedicated to a book called Debating Procreation. The book is divided into two parts. The first one is written by David Benatar, in which he presents 3 arguments for antinatalism. The second part is written by David Wasserman who criticizes Benatar’s arguments and presents a pronatalism argument.

The name of the book is a bit misleading since it is not really a debate but rather two independent monologues. There is no Q&A section or even methodical replies by each side to the other’s arguments. However, Benatar’s half is highly recommended. Obviously it is hard to overcome the primacy of Better Never To Have Been, but in my view this text is much better and for several reasons: the problematic Asymmetry Argument gets less attention (but is still the first argument he displays), the Quality of Life Argument is presented here in an improved form (mostly since there is a greater emphasis on the risk aspect), and most importantly, after being totally absent in Benatar’s previous works, he finally included the harm to others as part of his antinatalism argument. The harm to others, in my view, is the most important antinatalism argument, so I was very pleased to see Benatar successfully and thoroughly construct it.

Unfortunately, he decided to title the harm to others argument as the misanthropic argument, and by that in a way, continue the anthropocentric tradition of focusing on the human race. Surely this part of the text is very unflattering for humanity, but it still focuses on humanity, instead of on its victims, who are supposed to be, at least in the harm to others argument, the center of attention. He calls the first two arguments of his part of the book the philanthropic arguments since they focus on humans as victims of procreation, and he calls the third one the misanthropic argument since it focuses on how destructive and harmful the human race is and so it better not exist. So all three arguments focus on humanity, while it could have easily been framed as antinatalist arguments for the sake of the one who does not yet exit, and antinatalist arguments for the ones who already exist and would be harmed by the ones who will be created, without even mentioning any biological species.

Yet, leaving the title issue aside, the misanthropic argument is in my opinion by far Benatar’s best argument.

Basically it goes as follows:

“The strongest misanthropic argument for anti-natalism is, I said, a moral one. It can be presented in various ways, but here is one:

1. We have a (presumptive) duty to desist from bringing into existence new members of species that cause (and will likely continue to cause) vast amounts of pain, suffering, and death.
2. Humans cause vast amounts of pain, suffering, and death.
3. Therefore, we have a (presumptive) duty to desist from bringing new humans into existence.” (p.79)

Benatar devotes a considerable part of the misanthropic argument section to base the second premise of his argument. Based on some famous social psychology experiments, as well as other evidences from other fields, he details about humans’ violent tendencies, scary conformism and etc. This sub-section is called Human Nature—The Dark Side.
Then he mentions some notorious historical atrocities humans have inflicted on each other, writing: “Humans have killed many millions of other humans in war and in other mass atrocities, such as slavery, purges, and genocides.”

After specifying some of the violence humans inflict on other humans, he goes on specifying violence humans inflict on animals. In this sub-section he reviews the major animal exploitation industries, briefly describing the horrible life in each.

The last part of his foundation of the second premise is the harm that humans cause to other humans and to animals by the destructive effect they have on the environment.
He writes:

“For much of human history, the damage was local. Groups of humans fouled their immediate environment. In recent centuries the human impact has increased exponentially and the threat is now to the global environment. The increased threat is a product of two interacting factors—the exponential growth of the human population combined with significant increases in negative effects per capita. The latter is the result of industrialization and increased consumption.
The consequences include unprecedented levels of pollution. Filth is spewed in massive quantities into the air, the rivers, lakes, and seas, with obvious effects on those humans and animals who breath the air; live in or near the rivers, lakes and seas; or get their water from those sources.” (p.99)

Benatar is aware that most people would reply to his misanthropic argument saying that instead of preventing humans’ procreation we should reduce their destructiveness. But he disagrees:

“we cannot expect that human destructiveness will ever be reduced to such levels. Human nature is too frail and the circumstances that bring out the worst in humans are too pervasive and likely to remain so. Even where institutions can be built to curb the worst human excesses, these institutions are always vulnerable to moral entropy. It is naïve utopianism to think that a species as destructive as ours will cease, or all but cease, to be destructive.” (p.104)

And adds:

“Given the current size of the human population and the current levels of human consumption, each new human or cohort of humans adds incrementally to the amount of animal suffering and death and, via the environmental impact, to the amount of harm to humans (and animals).” (p.109)

And concludes:

Humans would never voluntarily cease to procreate, and would never cease to be destructive. That’s why we must aim at human extinction by forced sterilization.

Pro-Natalism

The second part of the book is written by David Wasserman who argues for the defense of procreation. He begins with a brief critique of Benatar’s asymmetry, mainly by mentioning the familiar aspects which were specified in the post dedicated to it, so there is no point repeating it here. He also criticizes Benatar’s quality-of-life argument, again mainly by mentioning the familiar aspects such as that Benatar offers unduly pessimistic assessments and inappropriately perfectionist standards.
A more interesting claim he makes is regarding the dynamics between Benatar’s asymmetry and his quality-of-life argument, a point which was mentioned in the post regarding extinction and pro-mortalism. Wasserman wonders why Benatar even needs the asymmetry argument (which he calls the comparative argument) and is not sufficed with the quality-of-life argument (which he calls the philanthropic argument), as Benatar:

“does not regard his comparative argument by itself as making the case that all procreation is wrongful. That case also requires his philanthropic argument, which is designed to show just how bad our lives really are. But if it is the magnitude of the harm that gives rise to a complaint, not the conclusion that life is always a harm, then it is not clear what role the comparative argument plays in reaching that conclusion. If careful scrutiny and critical assessment could show that life was very harmful overall for everyone, or almost everyone, then why would it matter for purposes of a moral complaint that it was also disadvantageous in comparison with nonexistence? The extremely high odds of a very bad existence would make procreation wrongful on any reasonable decision rule for risk or uncertainty.” (p.151)

So Wasserman thinks that Benatar should make do with his quality-of-life argument and doesn’t need the asymmetry, but he doesn’t agree with it for reasons which were mentioned above, and since he thinks that not only the risks must be considered but also their probability (which he claims are very low). To that he adds criticism of the attempt to use principles taken from Rawls’s Theory of Justice to constitute an antinatalist argument. Both arguments, the risk and Rawls’s Maximin, are worthy of a separate discussion. The one about risk can be found here, and the one about Rawls’s theory of justice can be found here. Therefore, I’ll not detail them here.

Intuitively, it would make sense to mainly focus here on Wasserman’s counter arguments to the misanthropic argument, given that this is Benatar’s novel argument in this book, and since I think that the harm to others is the most important antinatalist argument. However, Wasserman cowardly, poorly, and extremely speciesistly, evades the argument of the harm to others. His evasiveness is another proof that there is no way to seriously confront this claim. Wasserman’s response to the harm to others argument, as unbelievable as it is two decades into the third millennium, is almost Cartesian, meaning he simply denies the moral validity of animals’ suffering, this is what he wrote:
“I can only respond briefly, in part because I strongly disagree with Benatar’s weighing of the suffering of minimally-sentient animals, a disagreement we cannot resolve here.” (p.166)
Benatar details some of the common horrors done to animals on daily basis in factory farms, laboratories, the entertainment business, and the clothing industry, claiming that: “Humans inflict untold suffering and death on many billions of animals every year, and the overwhelming majority of humans are heavily complicit.” (p. 93) and Wasserman’s reply is that animals don’t really matter. That’s it. His “reply” is simply disgraceful.

Regarding the harms to other humans that Benatar details about as part of the misanthropic argument, Wasserman’s reply is that he disagrees most sharply with Benatar on the implications of human destructiveness and cruelty for individual procreative decisions. And surprisingly, the argument he uses to justify this claim, in my view, undermines moral philosophy:

“I do no think prospective parents must “universalize” about the likely consequences if everyone judged or acted as they do. I think the concerns about the consequences “if everyone did it” have far more relevance for policymakers than prospective parents. Although the latter must be cautious in their predictions about their children and may reasonably have concerns about the fairness and cumulative impact of similar decisions, I believe that they do not need to give this the same weight in their decisions as policymakers or other impartial third parties should in theirs.” (p.167)

Universalizing decisions and acting as policymakers is exactly how ethics should work. That doesn’t imply using Kant’s categorical imperative for any possible case, but Wasserman doesn’t even suggest exceptional cases or anything of this sort. He practically permits people to act as they wish as long as they are not official policymakers, as if only the actions of the latter have consequences. Obviously all actions have consequences, and all consequences must be considered ethically, especially when it comes to actions that everyone can do, like creating a new person.
What’s the point in morality if it is subjective? What exactly is the validation of ethics if every couple can be their own personal policymakers?

I wanted to seriously confront a serious opposition to the misanthropic argument, but Wasserman didn’t provide one. So I’ll focus in the rest of this text on three other points that he makes which I have found worth addressing.

The Good Of The Children

The first point is Wasserman’s claim, and the example allegedly proving that claim, that people can have a child for the child’s sake:

“Here is an example to give some flesh, and plausibility, to the idea that prospective parents can create children for reasons that concern the good of the children, or at least their shared good. Consider a couple who very much want children and decide to adopt. They are normally fertile, but are moved by the need to find homes for the many orphaned children in their country now housed in institutions. This, however, is not their primary reason for adopting; it merely tips the balance. Their reasons include wanting the fulfillment of raising a child from a young age, seeking the uniquely intimate relationship that a child develops with its parents, and giving the child a good home—among the reasons given in surveys of prospective parents. They regard these as reasons that could be served equally well by adoption or conception. Just as they are going to start visiting orphanages, their government prohibits adoption—orphans and abandoned children will be wards of the state, with temporary foster parents in special cases. The couple is very disappointed but quickly decides to go with “Plan B”—they conceive a child for the same reasons.
The point of this example is not just to illustrate that adoption and procreation may be done for similar reasons. As important for my purposes, it suggests the limited role that the actual vs. contingent existence of the child may play in the sorts of reasons prospective parents have. The couple in my example starts by seeking to find a child of their own who already exists, or whose existence is not contingent on their actions. Barred from doing so, they shift to creating a child. But their reasons for doing the latter are largely the same as their reasons for having sought the former. The desire to help existing needy children was just a tiebreaker.” (p.190)

I fail to see the reasoning behind this argument or the explanatory power of this example.
If anything this example proves the opposite. It goes to show that these people want a child of their own, not to help someone in need. If they find no difference in that sense between adopting a child and creating one, then clearly the interests of the child weren’t their motive, as in one option there is an existing child who is orphan and so in need, and in the other option there is no one who needs anything.
It is the parents who wanted the fulfillment of raising a child from a young age. Before they have procreated, that child didn’t exist and so didn’t share their want. It wasn’t in the interests of that child to be raised from a young age. Non-existing persons don’t have interests and no wants, so it can’t be for the good of the child. An existing child on the other hand, does have an interest to be raised from a young age. That’s a very important difference between the two cases.

And same goes for the second reason – no non-existing person is seeking the uniquely intimate relationship that a child develops with its parents. But existing persons – prospective parents, and even more so orphans – probably do. In the case of procreation, seeking the uniquely intimate relationship is the parents’ want imposed on the child they have created.
The last reason is no different. While orphans desperately need a good home, because they already exist but don’t have one, non-existing persons don’t need a home, or anything else for that matter. The need for a good home was created correspondingly with their creation.

There are many ways to really act for reasons that concern the good of the children, but none of them includes creating ones. There are many children who have parents but don’t have other things that would make their lives better, why not focus on them? Why not help children with their homework? Why not volunteer to babysit them every once in a while? Why not starting a children class for free? Why not choose professions that focus on care for the good of the children like being teachers, doctors, social workers, kindergartners, Clown Cares, and etc.?
If it was really benefiting children that was on their mind they would invest most of their time, energy and resources on existing children who are in need, instead of on someone who they have created its need by procreation. It doesn’t make any sense. Anyone who wants to provide a good home for someone in need, who feel they have so much love to give, who want to do good for others, can adopt a homeless dog from a shelter.

Wasserman argues that “For both adoptive and biological parents, the child’s “bare existence” is a necessary condition for fulfilling their primary end but is not, or need not be, a primary end in itself.” (p. 193) But that doesn’t explain choosing the most senseless option. And even if there wasn’t any other option for giving and the only option was truly to create a need, it is still treating someone as a means to an end. The child had neither interest nor any say in being created into existence. The child is a mean to the parents’ ends.

Unfortunately there is no shortage in philanthropist aims in this world, why choose to create a new one and focus on it? With so much misery in the world why create a new need? Doesn’t it make much more sense to focus on an existing need?

If this world lacks love and meaning, what is the point of increasing the number of creatures who need love and meaning? This is the stupidest form of giving.
Or, of course, that it is not really the reason why people procreate. The real reasons are that people feel powerful when someone is totally depended on them, they feel needed and important, it fills the empty and pointless lives of people with meaning, they believe it would save their relationships, it eases loneliness, it soothes their fear of getting old with no one to take care of them, biological impulse, genetical vanity, immortality illusion, continuity illusion, it makes them feel normal, it makes them look normal to others, conformism, stupidity, accident.

Tantrum in the Mall as a Sip of Lifelong Frustration

The second point I want to address is Wasserman’s argument regrading parents’ duty towards their children: “Even the most spoiled child should recognize that his parents do not have a duty to maximally satisfy his interests; that their own interests, as well as those of a myriad of others, appropriately limit their duty to satisfy his.” (p.154)

This claim might be true when that child would grow up but in real time that child suffers. As an adult that child might regret being so spoiled, but that doesn’t serve as compensation for the frustration at not getting maximum satisfaction. The fact that the child is wrong doesn’t make that child less wanting and less frustrated. Many children tend to keep crying and screaming when they don’t get what they want even after they are explained that what they want is exaggerated or that there is no option to provide them everything they want, any time they want it. And that, in my view, holds much more than might seem. Only because it is obvious that children don’t get everything they want, and also because the crying and screaming scene is so common, people don’t stop and think about the fact that they are creating someone who would want everything possible, and would have to compromise on very little of that. They don’t stop and think about the fact that they are creating someone who would be constantly frustrated.
And it doesn’t end at childhood, it continues throughout their whole life. It is only refined along the years, when children learn to suppress some of their desires (which might come out in different ways that are not necessarily more positive), or control their urges and desires (which again, doesn’t always turn out to be better), but this is forever. Frustration is forever.

The crying and screaming scene on the shopping mall floor because the child got a little bit smaller toy than wanted, which have become so familiar that it turned into a parenthood cliché, is much deeper than children being extremely spoiled. There are so many advices for how to deal with these scenes. Most blame the parents. And they are right, but not because they don’t know how to set boundaries for their children, but because they don’t know how to set boundaries for themselves. It is the parents who are too spoiled and selfish and careless about the effects on others. It is them who acted to promote their own interests and so created a toy for themselves. They don’t know how to postpone gratifications and therefore have created a new small unit of exploitation and pollution which doesn’t know how to postpone gratifications.

This scene, which is considered as parents’ initiation, and which some go through several times during a lifetime, has been so normalized, that rarely do people realize that this wanting being they have chosen to create, didn’t have to exist, and now that it does, it constantly wants things and is being constantly limited. Frustration, even when is the product of being spoiled, is still frustration. People must realize they are creating a wanting being which would be constantly unsatisfied. Quieter children who don’t cry and scream when not getting something, are viewed as more mature and better educated children, and less spoiled. That might be true, and they might internalize that being spoiled is not good, but looking at the screaming children getting their toys, makes them frustrated. Some of them want that toy just as much, but they have internalized the expectation of them to suppress their wants.

You can look at the mall scene as merely children being too spoiled, or as lack of parental authority, or the consequences of the snowflake attitude, or the effects of the consumerist society, or a little bit of each. But it is also a window of opportunity to comprehend that creating a child is creating a bottomless pit of wants which can’t be satisfied. Of course this example is totally marginal but it is not trivial just because it is so common. It is a window of opportunity because when children are in a state of tantrum there are almost no emotional impediments. Obviously, these scenes are in many cases very manipulative (children are not yet equipped with many tools to help them get what they want so they use what they have which is crying and screaming and kicking as hard as possible), however, they nevertheless express true helplessness. These incidents often occur when children feel they have no control over the circumstances. They want things but are helpless in getting them. Helplessness can often produce fear as the children are depended on other people’s wishes. These scenes are also much more raw than the customary desires of adults, as they are highly socialized to navigate their desires in more subtle ways.

In light of the horrors Benatar specified in the first part, obviously the mall scene doesn’t only pale but seems absolutely ridiculous. But I am not bringing it up as an example of human frustration, but as an example of the greatest trivialization of human’s most trivial frustration. What makes it interesting is the glimpse it offers for everybody to publicly see how much of a lump of wants a person is, and how much frustration even the most trivial scene contains, and how trivial frustration is in people’s lives. The scene is so trivial that everybody accepts it. The child would learn that we don’t get everything we want in life. Unfortunately the adults don’t learn that they shouldn’t create frustration, even if it is very very marginal.
Parents are forcing their children to give up the toy they want, because they have refused to give up the toys they wanted to create.

Russian Roulette

As mentioned earlier, I have addressed the risk argument in a separate text, so here I’ll make do with a quick note on Wasserman’s remark regarding Benatar’s risk imposition metaphor which according to him:

“gains spurious strength, I suspect, from the Russian roulette simile he employs, which has prospective parents pointing a gun at the head of their future child; a gun with a high proportion of chambers loaded. This simile is misleading. As the literature on the ethics of risk imposition and distribution points out, it matters a great deal if the threatened harm will be imposed intentionally. Shooting someone with a loaded gun is intentionally harming him, even if the discharge of a bullet had been far from certain.” (p.165)

One might argue that the parents are not always the ones who pull the trigger. However, they are definitely the ones who set the target, and they are the ones who load at least some of the bullets.
Parents who know that their children would experience suffering, and every parent knows that suffering is inevitable at least at some point in life, are setting the target. Had that child not been created by them, there would have been no one to shoot at.
They are loading some of the bullets by passing physical and mental traits which their children would suffer from. Other starting points might also affect the life of that child. If the environmental conditions are bad, then the gun is loaded with even more bullets. And if it is quite certain that the child is prone to a serious disease, or that the parents are prone to a serious disease, or have a violent history, for example, then the parents are also pulling the trigger, at least in some rounds, and the other rounds are being completed by other factors.
Since parents are creating persons out of their own will and for their own benefit, they are imposing an intended risk on someone else’s life. They don’t intend to harm their own children, but they intendedly ignore the fact that their children would surely be harmed.

When considering the harm to others, since the parents are the ones who provide their children food, clothes, energy and every other harmful aspect involved with supporting their life, they are definitely held responsible in every possible way. They have created this consuming being which wasn’t there and wasn’t deprived of anything before they have decided to create it, and now it exists, and it is hurting many sentient creatures in many different ways for no justified reason at all.
Considering the enormous harm every person inflicts on others, and the loaded weapon is not a gun, but an aircraft carrier.

References

Benatar David and Wasserman David, Debating Procreation: Is It Wrong to Reproduce?
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)

Benatar, D. Better Never to Have Been (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)