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
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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)