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To sum my view on how human society views cases of ‘Wrongful Life’ I will address a claim which is not only very common in itself, but is also a leitmotif in other claims, and that is the ‘Sanctity of Life’ argument. This argument is echoed in the judicial statements regarding the impossibility to prove that non-existence can be better off than existence, in the argument regarding the disvaluation of life with disability, and of course in the argument that there is danger that Wrongful Life’ suits may pressure medical advisers to suggest abortions, which I have addressed respectively in the former texts regarding the issue of ‘Wrongful Life’. It also leads to the argument regarding the danger of Eugenics and of Genetic Testing, an issue I’ll mainly focus on here. If you haven’t read the former parts yet, it is recommended (though not necessary) to do so before reading this one.

Just a quick reminder, 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 experience 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 ‘Sanctity of Life’ argument is rather self-explanatory, to compensate a child for being born goes against the sanctity of life. It is cheapening the idea of ‘life’, and it is by far the opposite of treating life as sacrosanct.

Generally speaking, I disagree with the use of terms such as sanctity, as I don’t think that any form of saintliness exists, but for the sake of the argument, if anything, it is exactly because of the so to speak ‘sanctity of life’ that each must be treated with extreme caution. And extreme caution is certainly not to create them despite foreseen severe impairments.
To sanctify any life no matter how miserable they are expected to be is to cheapen them. It is the ones who refer to any sentient life with extreme caution, who highly consider sentient life’s vulnerability, who carry the heavy burden of moral responsibility regarding it, that really treat life as if they are sacred. It is not the ones who are trying to avoid any case of misery who are cheapening the idea of life, but rather whom who welcomes any kind of misery with open arms.
It is not whom who considers the theoretical risk of misery as a sufficient reason not to create life who disrespects it, but whom who knows that a miserable life is certain and yet insists on it.

If no person should be compensated no matter how miserable the life forced upon that person is, it means that all life is scared and must never be prevented. According to the ‘sanctity of life’ notion they are never a burden but always a blessing, even when they are experienced as the most unsacred thing imaginable by the actual people who are living it.

Claiming that life must be prevented exactly because of how vulnerable and fragile they are, is, if anything, treating it with more sanctity than forcing any of it, in any case. In a way to claim against ‘wrongful life’ cases, let alone against antinatalism, that it is by far the opposite of treating life as sacrosanct, corresponds with the silly common claim that antinatalists are nihilists despite that the opposite is true. As far as most antinatalists go, everything is morally meaningful and that’s why they want to prevent the creation of life. It is exactly antinatalists who understand more than others that everything in life is meaningful (even though most think that life is absolutely absent of any cosmic meaning, there is no contradiction as cosmic meaning and ethical meaning are different things) and therefore it all must be prevented.
In that sense, antinatalism is actually exactly the opposite of nihilism. According to it everything is morally meaningful, every harm, every frustration, every pain, every moment of loneliness, every moment of boredom, each is meaningful in itself for each subjective individual exactly because there is no cosmic meaning to justify them. They are meaningful because they are meaningful to a subject, and they must be avoided because they have no cosmic meaning or any meaning outside the subject who is forced to experience them and for no other reason but that that subject was forced to exist. There is no reason for anyone to experience any of it. Each and every one of them is experienced without any valid justification or purpose. But that doesn’t nullify them of meaning, but on the contrary, had there been a cosmic or some other external meaning then many negative experiences could have been canceled out in the light of the cosmic meaning, at least to some degree. But the fact that there isn’t one, makes every experience meaningful in itself. When experiences exist for their own sake, they become more meaningful, not less. Every experience matters, as experiences are all that there is and the only thing that counts ethically. There is nothing but experiences that has any ethical meaning. Therefore every moment in life matters, and that is exactly the opposite of Nihilism. Of course there are many kinds of antinatalists who emphasize all kinds of reasons and reasoning, but in my case and I am under the strong impression that this is also the case of most antinatalists, it is the suffering that motives them. As opposed to the ridiculous Nihilism claim and to how pro-natalists prefer to think of us, most are motivated by caring and mercy for others. Not by hating their own lives, or life in general, but by hating suffering. Most antinatalists are not driven by their supposed depression or by their pure logic calculation, but rather by concern and compassion. And so, more relevantly to our point here, is that antinatalists are highly sensitive to everything that happens and can happen in life. And that perspective makes antinatalists way more ‘sanctifiers’ of life than pro-natalists.

Attributing something with sanctity means treating it with the highest level of carefulness, respect and responsibility. In that sense, preventing life which are expected to be miserable is to sanctify it much more than not stopping them, let alone using the excuse of protecting the notion of the sanctity of life despite that notion doesn’t have experiences and can’t be harmed by anything, as opposed to actual living creatures who would be forced to experience extreme misery. Sacrificing people in the name of the insentient idea of the ‘sanctity of life’ is not sanctity, it is cruelty.

One of the most dangerous practical implications of the ‘Sanctity of Life’ notion is the opposition to genetic testing.

With techniques such as genetic screening, chorionic villus sampling, amniocentesis, ultrasonography and karyotype analysis, expectant parents come to learn in advance if their conceived child will be born with a congenital disease, deformity and/or disability. Hence, for example, parents-to-be will know beforehand if they are at risk to transmit sickle cell anaemia, and embryos can be detected in utero for Duchene’s muscular dystrophy, Down’s Syndrome or Tay Sachs disease.
Many people oppose genetic testing such as these, which can detect whether there are any inherited disorders, and moreover can predict if any diseases will develop in the future, because that might cause people to decide to terminate the pregnancy.

As antinatalists obviously we think that no person should be created regardless of any congenital impairments, however, it is still better that people who are created would at least have the least congenital impairments possible. One of the most common and strongest antinatalist arguments is that nothing can ever guarantee that someone’s life won’t be miserable, however, genetic tests can at last provide a better starting point by pre-detecting some possible severe congenital impairments. Yet many oppose even that. Even merely providing people with the option of preventing horrible starting points for their children is being opposed.

These claims explicitly say that the less people know the better. These people are afraid that the more expectant parents would know about the expected future of their children the more likely they are to avoid creating it. And what makes it even crazier is that it is not that the people who would choose to terminate the conception in cases of severe congenital impairments would choose not to create a new person at all, I wish that was the case, but unfortunately it is much more probable that these people would terminate that specific conception and try to have another one soon after. These genetic tests are not expected to cause people to create less people, but less severe congenital impairments, and even that is being opposed.

That is, I think, one of the most important conclusions antinatalists should make of the discussion regarding ‘wrongful life’ cases, that there is not even agreement about pre-genetic testing. This is of course extremely disturbing in itself but also particularly for us antinatalists since it indicates how unbridgeable the gap between us and huge parts of the public is.

It is easy to dismiss the notion of the ‘culture of life’ for that matter as being ancient, outdated and anti-scientific, but for example there are about 1.2 billion Catholics, and the Catholic Church preaches that actions such as abortion go against the sanctity of human life and thus the Church disapproves tests such as pre-natal and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis since these tests involve the rejection of several embryos and in certain cases even abortion. Other religions don’t fare much better for that matter.
So this is another issue among many others, that antinatalists must deal with all the time.

Again, I highly oppose the rhetoric of ‘the sanctity of life’, but if anything, it is pre-genetic testing that treats life with sanctity as it expresses respect to the vulnerability, singularity and significance of each individual way more than not even bothering to pre-examine the chances of condemning the to be born with severe congenital impairments. If anything, it is the more tests the higher the value attributed to life and not the other way around. Not to perform every possible test before creating a life is to disrespect it. It is to disrespect the created person, its parents, and society.

Some of its opposers argue that genetic testing might lead to Eugenics.
But obviously there is a huge gap between choosing desirable characteristics and avoiding severe congenital impairments. The genetic testing don’t scan for traits in general and offer people to pick out from an available selection, they scan for potential defects. The issue is not creating children with supposedly better traits but not creating children with surely worse ones. It is not about avoiding traits which are considered as being socially disadvantageous, but about avoiding diseases and traits which are absolutely physically and mentally disadvantageous.
It is a flawed and manipulative comparison aiming at scaring people of designer babies.

We are not even talking here about John Harris and Julian Savulescu’s Principle of Procreative Beneficence (PPB) which claims that couples who decide to create a person have a significant moral obligation to select the child who, given his or her genetic endowment, can be expected to enjoy the most well-being. The issue here is about people having a moral obligation not to create a person who can be expected to endure what is referred to as a wrongful-life.

Some even go the distance and almost say that suffering is desirable. For example in his book The Worth of a Child, Thomas Murray writes:

“The quest for perfection has been spurred by a desire to escape the limitations and especially the hurts that mark indelibly our existence as finite, embodied, independent beings. The danger in that quest is that we can become so attracted to some superhuman idea or entity that we lose sight of, or even come to have contempt for, the actual flawed and vulnerable human beings with whom we live.” (p. 136)

But preventing suffering should be an aspiration not a danger. Only because it is so obvious that life is full of pain and suffering can it be presented in such a nonchalant, if not favorable manner. Why not prevent as much suffering as possible when we can? What is so good about suffering? If it is because it is very humanlike, so are wars, should we not do everything possible to prevent them? Why perpetuate, let alone almost glorify, impairments? all the more so ones that can easily be avoided?

The fact that there are no perfect babies is not a justification to create ones with severe congenital impairments. In fact it is a justification not to create ones at all. That is because the standard for forcing something on someone should be that there would be no harms at all, in other words that it would be perfect. And perfection is not even theoretically a remotely possible option.

If there is a firm opposition not to eugenics but to genetic testing, despite that it doesn’t aim at prioritizing traits which people find desirable, but at preventing diseases and other congenital horrible conditions that no one finds desirable, then what are the odds of convincing every person that every creation of a new person is wrong?

While we don’t need genetic testing to realize that all life is wrong and that we must avoid all of it, there are many people who think that there is no need for genetic testing because all life is a sacred gift of infinite value so no one must ever avoid any of it. Not even when the children and parents wish that they could, a scenario that causes the life “sanctifiers” not only to find genetic testing unneeded but also very problematic, as according to them no one should have the chance of ending no life.
That’s how deep the gap is. And that’s why we shouldn’t keep trying to fill it but to somehow work around it.

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 RightsCivil 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 former text addresses one of the most common arguments against ‘Wrongful Life’ claims.
If you haven’t read it yet, it is recommended (though not necessary) to do so before reading this one. This text addresses another common argument against ‘Wrongful Life’ claims, that is that they disvalue the life of people with disabilities.

Just a quick reminder, 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.

One of the main and most important arguments against ‘Wrongful Life’ claims is that they disvalue the life of people with disabilities (which their main problem is not the disability but the inaccessibility, meaning their disability is socially constructed according to the claimers), and that it promotes ableism. However, there is no logical reason for ‘Wrongful Life’ claims to promote ableism. There is no causal link between discriminatively denying people with disabilities from any social benefit and thinking that disabilities should be prevented before people who are forced to endure them are created. And the logic behind this argument is that people prefer to be healthy and not to endure disabilities, a claim which doesn’t by any means imply that once people with disabilities are created they should be discriminated against. If anything, it is the other way around, as this stand expresses a very high sensitivity to the plight of living with disabilities, and therefore asserts that it must be prevented beforehand, it doesn’t imply that it should be discriminated against or ignored once it did occur.

There is no contradiction between thinking that it is better that people with severe disabilities will not be created and that once people with severe disabilities are created they must be treated equally to any other person. There is no reason to infer one assertion from the other. As an antinatalist obviously I am against the creation of any person, however I am in favor of providing each person with the best possible life once created. To treat people with disabilities differently is to victimize them twice. Not only had they been forced to endure severe disabilities, they are also forced to endure discrimination?!

It is totally plausible to think that we must do everything we can to avoid something before it happens and at the same time think that once it did happen, we must do everything we can to make it better. In fact, the main reason most of the people who think that the specific situation in the center of this text must be avoided is that the people forced into it are highly vulnerable. And there is no logic in ignoring their vulnerability and need of assistance once they are created, since the whole point is to prevent harms. Denying them assistance by promoting ableism is to increase harm. There is perfect sense in my view that antinatalists, despite thinking that all procreation regardless of any disability is wrong, would think and promote accessibility for all disabilities. And that is because both positions are about minimizing the harms bound with existence. The best thing is to prevent them of course, but to minimize them surly is better than to ignore them.

Obviously discrimination against persons with disabilities is always wrong, but associating disability with harm and rendering disability a problem, isn’t. It is not that disabilities shouldn’t be associated with harm and rendered a problem, but that they are harms and a problem, and one that at least in ‘Wrongful Life’ cases could have been easily avoided, and avoiding it is desirable when possible.

If there is a situation that no one would have freely chosen, then it means that it is undesirable. If no one would have chosen a disability over not having one, then it means that a disability is not preferable, but something that people need to learn to live with. Disabilities might be cope-able but they are not desirable. People are forced to cope with them, and they wouldn’t have, had they never existed. That is the claim, not that every existing person with disabilities must stop exiting.
No one is claiming that people with disabilities shouldn’t be assisted once they exist, but that it is better to avoid problems instead of struggling with them when there is no harm in that avoidance. And no one is harmed by a life that no one had lived.

Being forced to live with disabilities is an undesired situation which can be very painful, limiting and frustrating, how is that not a harm? And actually, once disabilities are associated with harm, it’s much more reasonable to enhance accessibility, not to promote ableism. It makes more sense that if there is no harm or a problem with disabilities then the world shouldn’t be made more accessible. It must be made more accessible, exactly because disabilities are a problem.

Obviously there is a lot of truth in the claim that the problem is social, economic, physical, and of attitudinal barriers. However, even if the whole world would become highly accessible, it won’t solve many of the structural problems of people with severe disabilities. No elevator, ramp or accessible pedestrian signals can solve chronic pain and all pendency.

Some of the opposers to ‘Wrongful Life’ suites do accept that some cases of people with disabilities can be considered as ‘Wrongful Life’, however, they refuse to argue on their behalf and remain opposers of all cases, so not to run the risk of drawing lines in the sand regarding the status of the various disabilities. But by refusing to explicitly accept at least some cases of disability so there would be no precedent, these people are sacrificing some of the most miserable people in the world. To not offend people with disabilities (an offense that shouldn’t be taken as it is not really an offense in the first place), some people insist that even in cases of medical negligence in which had the parents been informed about the expected impairment they would have chosen to have an abortion, no one should be compensated.

It is very frustrating, cruel, and highly alarming in relation to antinatalism, that humanity is still not almost unanimous regarding conditions such as TaySachs disease, spina bifida, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease, hemophilia, Down’s syndrome, muscular dystrophy, severe mental retardation, severe neurological diseases, severe paralyzation, and many other conditions which breaking barriers could never save.

I agree that once people with disabilities exist, making their lives as tolerable as possible despite their disabilities is necessary, but that doesn’t mean that living with disabilities is necessary.
And it is definitely not necessary or justified to keep creating people with disabilities claiming that the problem is not with them but with the world. If the world is wrong, it is wrong to force someone into it. And that goes for all people, because the world is not only wrong for people with disabilities, but for all of them.
If anything, ‘the problem is the world’ argument should cause people to try and fix it first and only afterwards add more people into it. How can a fucked up world serve as a justification for status quo?!

There are numerous problems that need fixing before breeding, any breeding, not only of those expected to be forced with ‘wrongful lives’. For example, curing every known disease, certainly the hard ones, preventing all the pains, all the wars, all the rapes, all the accidents, all racism, all misogyny, all humiliations, all frustrations, all the boredom, all the loneliness, all the despair, all the deaths and etc.
Another problem that must be fixed beforehand is the pointlessness. What exactly is the purpose of life? What would parents answer to their child if they are asked that question? How are they supposed to answer a child who understands that life is purposeless? These cases are still rare but they are more frequent nowadays. More and more people understand that life has no cosmic meaning or purpose and that they must invent one for themselves. But doesn’t it make more sense to figure out the purpose of an action before performing it? Let alone for someone else?! Isn’t it extremely unfair to throw people into a purposeless life for them to figure it out?

According to the logic of the claim that the problem is with the world and that is where ‘wrongful life’ cases should aim their blame, given that death is a problem for most of the living, shouldn’t this unsolvable problem be solved before creating more life?

Separation anxiety is a very serious problem that is rarely treated proportionally only because it is so common and almost unavoidable, let alone in the western world. So doesn’t it make more sense to solve the problem of maternity leave before deciding to force separation anxiety on another person? As, if children start suing their parents for the harm of separation anxiety, the opposers to ‘wrongful life’ cases are supposed to argue that the problem is social and that society must be altered in a way that at least one parent, would be with the child all the time, at least until the age of three. Obviously that is practically delusional.
The logic behind the claim that all the problems are social is that everything must change, except people’s desire to procreate of course. That is despite that even the things that are changeable are not very likely to change, and many are not changeable. Pain, frustration, regret, boredom, weariness, worthlessness, disappointment, death and etc., are unavoidable problems of life. They also must be solved before creating more of it, only that they are unsolvable.

Everyone is either born with disabilities (physical, social, mental or emotional) or would personally experience them at least to some extent later in life, therefore everyone is harmed by being created. People who are born with severe disabilities are, at least statistically, in a worse and more vulnerable position. Life of misery in their case is much more probable. But life of misery is always probable, regardless of severe congenital impairments. So the argument against procreation is stronger in their case for that matter, but it ain’t fundamentally different.

And the argument against procreation is not only about the probability of misery for the person created, but also, and in my view mostly, about the certainty of misery for the ones whom the created person would harm during its life. Every created person is not only in risk of being miserable but is first and foremost in certitude of making others miserable. Every created person is responsible for the creation of many wrongful lives and therefore every life is wrong.

For us antinatalists, this argument is supposedly marginal as we don’t exclude ‘wrongful life’ cases from others. However, it shouldn’t be marginal, as it is a very strong indication of how far we are from the general public who don’t yet agree to prevent even cases of people with severe impairments who claim that their own lives are wrongful. So clearly, there is no chance that the general public would ever be convinced about all of them.

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 RightsCivil 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

Shakespeare, T. and Hull R. Termination of Pregnancy After Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT): Ethical Considerations  Journal of Practical Ethics Volume 6, Issue 2 2018

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

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

One last quick comment regarding the Non-Identity Problem.
Probably the most familiar and common example being used to explain the platform which the non-identity problem emerges from, is Parfit’s case of a fourteen-year-old girl who decides to create a person, an example I have specified in the second part. But there is another common example, one from the environmental domain, which I find important to shortly address.

The common intuition is that polluting the environment and lavishly consuming “natural resources” is harmful towards future people. But according to the logical inferences derived from the non-identity problem, since the people who would be harmed in the future by existing people polluting and wasting the environment in the present, wouldn’t exist if present people decide to stop polluting the environment and lavishly consume “natural resources” (because environmental policies have effects on people’s behaviors, habits, location, workplaces and etc., which would also affect when and with whom they procreate and as a consequence affect the identity of the procreated), as long as the future people in the trashed environment would have a life worth living, supposedly no one is harmed by currently existing people polluting the environment and lavishly consuming “natural resources”.
In other words, the non-identity problem raises the question: considering that different environmental policies affect the identity of future people, as long as the lives of the future people who would exist as a consequence of any level of environmental policy, including the most negligent one, are worth living, who is harmed by environmental negligence? Its logical inference is that none of it is harming anyone. According to the logic of the non-identity problem as long as the environmental policies performed today don’t result in future people having lives not worth living, all environmental policies are unharmful, and not wrong, as who are their victims?

To not repeat the arguments regarding harms and harming (including harming future people in spite of the non-identity problem), which I have broadly discussed in the three previous parts about the non-identity problem, as well as in the text about Seana Shiffrin’s prominent and outstanding article Wrongful Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Significance of Harm, I’ll just point out that there certainly are identified specific victims of polluting the environment and lavishly consuming “natural resources”, and these are of course each and every currently existing sentient creature on earth. There is everything wrong with environmental negligence, it is extremely harmful, and its victims are trillions of identified specific sentient creatures living in and off the environment. These are the main victims of pollution and “resources” depletion as it is, and if the non-identity problem would be taken seriously in an environmental context (which practically gives permission to pollute even more), it would make their lives even worse. Only an extremely super-speciesist perspective can ignore all the harms done to all these individuals, undoubtedly the vast majority of sentient creatures on earth.

The answer to the question who is harmed by polluting the environment and lavishly consuming “natural resources”, is as always, first and foremost, the most vulnerable and defenseless creatures on the planet. These are the ones who are highly affected by every human action and are constantly harmed by each and every human activity. They are always the most numerous victims, and always the ones who are harmed most severely. Therefore they are the ones who must be in the center of every ethical thought, and yet they are rarely considered at all.
Currently, reasoning, even in the ethical sphere, is so speciesist that a pseudo sophisticated problem such as who is harmed by pollution and resources depletion given that the ones who would exist as a consequence of it would actually benefit from that, can be seriously discussed while totally ignoring the trillions of sentient creatures who as a consequence would be even more severely harmed than they already are.

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)

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.

Parfit himself doesn’t necessarily support the conclusions coming from this reasoning, but suggests that ethicists must develop a new ethical theory to resolve the paradox that stems from the fact that on the one hand we have a very strong intuition that creating a person with foreseen severe impairments is harming that person, and on the other hand, that as long as that person’s life is considered worth living overall, it is hard to point at a specific person who is harmed by the severe impairments, which without them that person could not exit at all. This new theory Parfit is referring to (which he calls theory X) must resolve the problem that we feel that an act is wrong despite that it is not wrong for anyone specific, or in other words, it needs to answer the question – how can an act be considered a harm if no one was harmed by it?

So despite that Parfit himself originally wished to resolve a paradox, his argument fed and still feeds many pro-natalitsts who are asking, how can the act of creating someone be wrong if it is not bad for anyone specific?

In this post, as well as the next two, I’ll address the three main notions implied by the non-identity problem.

Thousands of Identified Victims

The first notion implied by the non-identity problem, involves the narrow person-affecting ethical theory, according to which – an act is wrong only if it makes things worse for a particular, identified person. In Parfit’s words, “the “bad” act must be “bad for” someone” (Parfit 1987, p.363), and in the case of creating a person with what is considered to be foreseen severe impairments (be them biological or environmental), yet whose life is considered to be worth living overall, it is hard to point at a specific person who is harmed by that action.

In the second and third parts I argue that the person created is harmed even if that person would have a life considered to be worth living overall. But even if, for the sake of the argument, I’ll accept the claim that as long as the created person has a life considered to be worth living that person wasn’t harmed, that doesn’t make its creation ethical, even according to the narrow person-affecting ethical theory alone, because each procreation is always bad for a particular identified someone. There is always a specific person who is harmed by the creation of each person, a specific person with a specific identity. In fact there are thousands, and these are the thousands of persons who will be harmed as part of supporting the existence of the created person. Every person has to eat, and every food has a price. Unfortunately, most people are choosing the most harmful option – animal based foods. Each person directly consumes thousands of animals. More accurate average figures are varied according to each person’s location. An average American meat eater for example consumes more than 2,020 chickens, about 1,700 fish, more than 70 turkeys, more than 30 pigs and sheep, about 11 cows, and tens of thousands of aquatic animals.
Since most humans, more than 95% of them actually, are not even vegans – the most basic and primal ethical decision every person must make – the creation of each human person forces the creation of thousands of persons whose lives are of the most miserable lives imaginable.
Besides the harm inflicted directly by eating animals, each person also harms many others by eating plant based food, as well as by buying clothes, shoes, cosmetics, detergents, plastic, paper, metals, using electricity, transportation, and practically every possible action. Every action is at others’ expense. Procreation is always bad since it is always bad for someone. Even if one insists it is not bad for the one created, it is still bad for someone. Extremely bad, and for many someones.

Everyone who decides to procreate harms someone even if the created person would live a life considered to be worth living, since that creation comes at the cost of a life not worth living for many others. Even if the created person isn’t miserable, it would definitely make others miserable.
It is not moral to create lives not worth living even by the premises of the non-identity problem, and the creation of new people is definitely causing the creation of many lives not worth living – the lives of those who would be created to support the lives of the new created people. That is mainly the lives of animals in factory farms meaning more than 160 billion animals per year which would live lives not worth living. The more people created, and no matter if their own lives would be considered worth living or not, the more lives not worth living are created in general.
So even if we’ll accept, for the sake of the argument, the criterion of a life worth living, still, since creating people is necessarily creating lives not worth living, if not theirs then definitely the lives of the ones they would harm – sentient creatures who feel nothing but suffering for their entire lives – it is never ethical to procreate.

So we don’t need to explain how acts that make things worse for no one, such as creating a person whose life is considered worth living, can be wrong, since procreation is never an act that makes things worse for no one. In fact, it makes things horrendous for thousands.

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)