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

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