The following is the second part of the text about Rivka Weinberg’s book The Risk of a Lifetime, in which she explores How, When, and Why Procreation May Be Permissible.
If you haven’t read the first part, it is highly essential to do so before reading this one.

In any case, here is a quick recap. Procreation according Weinberg is not a gift, but it’s also not a predicament; it is a risk, a risk of a lifetime that people choose to impose on other people, and necessarily for their own benefit since being created can never be in the interests of a person before being created. And since this is the setting of creating a person, meaning, basically a selfish action that imposes a lifetime risk on another person, it needs to have a very good reason.

Weinberg suggests that procreation is a risk that can be justified by two principles she calls the ‘Principles of Procreative Permissibility’:

Motivation Restriction: Procreation must be motivated by the desire and intention to raise, love, and nurture one’s child once it is born.

Procreative Balance: Procreation is permissible only when the risk you impose as a procreator on your children would not be irrational for you to accept as a condition of your own birth (assuming that you will exist), in exchange for the permission to procreate under these risk conditions.

Weinberg uses a Kantian/Rawlsian framework for constructing these principles, explaining that the Kantian framework is suited to questions of procreative permissibility because it emphasizes the treatment of all persons as ends in themselves and stresses the importance of proper motivation. And the Rawlsian framework is particularly useful for questions of procreative permissibility because it is constructed to yield just principles in cases of distributive conflicts of interests and deliberated about under conditions constructed to reduce bias. She is aware that it is not common to think of procreation as a distributive conflict of interest, but argues that it is one:

“prospective parents have an interest in procreating whenever they please, and future children have an interest in excellent birth conditions. These interests are often in conflict. For example, if parents procreate while they are unemployed, their children will bear some of the costs of their parents’ procreative freedom. If we restrict procreative permissibility only to cases where the future children are likely to have extremely secure economic situations, people who cannot offer this to their children will bear the costs of the security of future children (a category that, in this case, will not include their own children).” (p.7)

In the previous part I have addressed her first principle, and in the following text I’ll address the second one.

Conflict of Interests?

Despite being absolutely aware of the fact that prospective parents may want to create children but their future children have no interest in being created, she addresses procreation as a conflict of interests regarding risk imposition.

“Risk imposers have an interest in doing the act that imposes a risk; those they place at risk have an interest in avoiding any harms resulting from the imposition of the risk. In the procreative case, parents have an interest in procreating, which imposes various risks on their children. To assess when the risk is permissible to impose, we consider the cost to the parents of restricting their risk-imposing activity and the costs children may bear if parental procreative risk imposition ripens into a harm. We are thus engaged in adjudicating a distributive conflict of interests.

Although parents and children have many interests in common, in fundamental ways, procreation involves a conflict of parent/child interests. Prospective parents have an interest in procreating; future people have an interest in optimal birth conditions. The procreative conflict consists in the conflict of interests between existing people with an interest in procreating and future people with an interest in optimal birth conditions.” (p. 155)

People may have an interest in optimal birth conditions when they are being created, but before being created no one has an interest in being created. There is no conflict of interests between prospective parents and their children before they are created. There is only people who are forcing their own interests on others when they are creating them. People have many interests regarding their own creation, but only once they have been created, not a moment before, and since the case in point regards ethical questions about creating people, not about treating existing people, there is no conflict of interests. A conflict of interests was relevant only had people had an interest in being created before it was forced on them. Presenting the issue as a genuine conflict of interests seems like an attempt to disguise the unavoidable coercion element, the intrinsically distinctive and unequal positions, as well as the fact that as explained in the first part it is unavoidably treating others as means to others’ ends.

Yet she suggests Contractualism to handle this seemingly conflict of interests:

 “Contractualism is designed to handle conflicts of interests, as it is fundamentally an account of how to interact with—how to make deals (contracts) with—others who are just as entitled to respect and autonomy as we are. How to balance what we want to pursue and how we wish to be treated with the rights and claims of others is a guiding point of all contractualist theories. The contractualist theory most directly aimed at adjudicating conflicts of interests is Rawlsian contractualism. That speaks in favor of it as a model for formulating our principles of procreative permissibility.” (p.157)

But you can’t sign a contract with someone who doesn’t exist. You can only impose a contract on someone who doesn’t exist and that’s exactly what happens in procreation. You can try to extract the most respectful, most carful contract you can possibly think of, but you can’t avoid it being coercive and it can never neutralize all the risks, which in the case of procreation, didn’t exist prior to the creation. As she herself admits, yet is ready to impose that risk anyway:

“No one can be absolutely sure that she will be able to fulfill her parental responsibilities since anyone can die anytime, or become incapacitated, homeless, and so on. So we will not set absolute standards of procreative care because that would impose too high a cost on parents. No one would be able to procreate if the ability to fulfill one’s parental responsibilities had to be absolutely guaranteed. But we won’t set very low standards either, for example, allowing impoverished, mentally ill adolescents to procreate, because that would impose too high a cost on the children.” (p. 62)

If she rejects the claim that the ability to fulfill one’s parental responsibilities has to be absolutely guaranteed because then no one would be able to procreate, it means that she wants to permit procreation and not that she had truly taken an ethical journey into the question of procreation. She rejects an absolutely valid conclusion because she finds it undesirable. That claim goes to show that her journey had an initial agenda. Why wouldn’t it be the case that no one should be able to procreate unless the ability to fulfill one’s parental responsibilities is absolutely guaranteed? It makes total sense. The fact that it’s also totally impossible doesn’t mean that we need to forsake this absolutely logical conclusion, but that we need to absolutely forsake procreation.
It looks like she is led by her desirable outcome, because when examining How, When, and Why Procreation May Be Permissible, the option that it may never be permissible can’t simply be ruled out. We mustn’t ignore such an important and self-evident condition as absolutely guaranteeing the ability to fulfill one’s parental responsibilities just because we don’t like what is inferred from that. What is the point of a philosophical inquiry if some conclusions are rejected simply because we don’t like them?

And of course, parents being unable to absolutely guarantee the fulfillment of their responsibilities, is only part of the risks imposed when creating people, there are many others, and she mentions some of them herself:

“Not only are there many ways for life to turn out really badly, there is also the matter of how wildly and incredibly uncertain life is. Adults who have been screened for all screenable genetic diseases may still give birth to a severely deformed, ill, disabled, suffering person; adults well placed to care for a child can drop dead anytime, lose their jobs, blow up their heretofore stable relationships; prosperous, productive societies can degenerate into civil war, anarchy, tyranny, and oppression; anyone can get what we might call a great start in life and come to a horrific end (and middle).” (p. 21)

But still argues that these risks can be justified as long as it fits the Procreative Balance Principle:

“Procreative Balance: Procreation is permissible when the risk you impose as a procreator on your children would not be irrational for you to accept as a condition of your own birth (assuming that you will exist), in exchange for the permission to procreate under these risk conditions.”

One of the fundamental problems involved in this principle is that people usually examine life according to their own lives and if when they are thinking about creating a new person their lives are fine in their view, then they falsely induce that life is fine in general. This observation is wrong not only because it is probably inaccurate and biased regarding their own lives, but also because it is wrong to make a personal life assessment when they are not even half way through (assuming that most people breed before their life is in its middle). But, of course, the worst thing about it is that people also tend to induce that since their life is fine then their children’s life will be fine too, and that is despite that they would be different people, who will live different lives. No one has any guarantee that their children’s lives would be even remotely similar to their own lives.

Furthermore, this procreative principle implies that existing people need to consider their own existence compared with non-existing people or with the option of their own non-existence, and both cases are impossible. A person can’t really remove oneself from its own existence and ignore its interest in continuing to exist (if one has such an interest), therefore, asking people to consider that the risk they are imposing on their own children would not be one that it is irrational for them to accept as a condition of their own birth, is for them, since they exist, like asking if they were willing to give up their own existence considering the risk involved with their creation. But that is obviously not the case and it is definitely not the case when it comes to creating new people. Had existing people never have existed they wouldn’t have to give up anything. And the same goes for people who don’t exist. Whom who never have existed don’t lose anything by not being created.
The person who is asked to reflect over its own creation while considering creating a new person exists and therefore probably balances its own existence with the option of never existing, and since the later seems to most people less desirable or even as a bad option, it seems that they are ready to take huge risks so not to “lose” their existence. That is despite that this is not what would have happened had they never existed. People are afraid of non-existence even though the issue is of them never existing in the first place, not stopping to exist. But people wrongfully imagine themselves giving up everything they have, even though it has no sense, since had they never existed they wouldn’t give up everything they have, nor would they experience giving up everything they have. And since they are making this fundamental mistake it seems rational to them to accept imposing risks, even huge ones, as a condition of their own birth and therefore also as a condition of the creation of their children.

So there is something inherently flawed about this principle as it makes people ask themselves the wrong question, while they actually need to be asking themselves a different one. Something like: I have experienced severe pain at least once during my lifetime, I was severely ill at least once during my lifetime, my heart was broken at least once during my lifetime, I have lost a loved one at least once during my lifetime, and I am working very hard all my life just to support myself; I don’t wish anyone to go through any of that, definitely not my own children. If I’ll create people they probably will experience all of this too, and if I don’t they won’t. They probably would also experience some great things but they will not be deprived of these things if I never create them. So I am actually causing my own children to experience severe pain at least once during their lifetime, severe illness at least once during their lifetime, broken-heartedness at least once during their lifetime, the loss of a loved one at least once during their lifetime, and to work very hard all of their lives, all for me to experience parenthood. What kind of a person wants to do that to others?

Insisting on such a procreative balance implies that not procreating must be a serious harm to people who want to. But isn’t it an indication of how lacking existence is? Of how basically lacking people are? Of how even adults are nonautonomous but are rather dependent and deficient for needing to create others, let alone infant others, to complete them? Had procreation been unforceful, unharmful and risk free, then it could have been permissible. But when the price is so high it is absolutely wrong. In order to fill people’s basically lacking existence they are creating more basically lacking people who will create more basically lacking people to fill their own basically lacking existence and so on. What’s the idea? that without creating new basically lacking people, existing basically lacking people will be harmed by their basically lacking existence so there is no choice but to create more and more basically lacking people?
This is another aspect of procreation being a sort of a Ponzi Scheme, one which I have referred to in the text Autobiographies, Biographies and Ponzi Schemes. And this cruel cycle of unnecessary and totally unbalanced imposition must be ended.

Unbalanced Sacrifice

Even if for the sake of the argument I’ll accept the claim that there’s truly a conflict of interests between people who want to create a person and the person they will create, and that sometimes the harm of not procreating is worth the risk of harm to the person being created, this is not the only implication of these principles. Given that miserable lives are being created all the time – and many of which regardless of the parents treating their children as autonomous people worthy of love and respect – what these principles are actually saying is that some’s misery is justified by the interests of others to procreate.

Weinberg prefers to frame the argument this way: procreation is sometimes ethically justified since many people have a strong interest in procreating and their interest is motivated by the desire and intention to raise, love, and nurture one’s child once it is born, and for most created people life is not at all bad. But the very same idea can be framed differently: procreation is sometimes ethically justified despite that it is always the case that for some created people, life would be miserable. The second formulation implies that procreation is justifying the imposition of miserable lives upon at least some created people, for the sake of people who want to procreate. But ethically we must prioritize the ones who would be imposed with something that they really wouldn’t want – life of misery had they existed, over the ones who would not get something they want, even if they really want it.

On a global level procreation is not a gamble, it is not a risk, because it is absolutely certain that some persons would be forced to live extremely miserable lives. The question is who. Since people tend to feel that bad things only happen to other people, they dismiss the option of misery happening to their children. And even if for the sake of the argument I’ll accept that the chances of each couple to create a person whose life is extremely miserable are low, this is not the case on a global scale. Meaning, somewhere in the world, miserable persons will be created. And that fact turns the argument from a risk that some of the people would have horrible lives, to a decision that some of the people would have horrible lives if procreation is permissible, because cases of misery are certain, and there are no cases of procreation in which there is a certainty of no misery. So people who decide to procreate are not only taking a risk on someone else’s suffering, they also approve and strengthen the claim that the suffering of some is justified because of the interests of others – people who want to procreate. The immorality of these principles stems not only from the decision to take risks on someone else’s life, but also from the decision that some would be sacrificed so that others could have what they want.

Individuals are sacrificed for others’ desires. That is since even if individuals are being created by people who are motivated by the desire and intention to raise, love, and nurture one’s child once it is born, some would still be miserable. And so, on a global scale, procreation is sacrificing individuals for others’ desires.
Once there is an option for creating a miserable life, procreation is ethically undefendable. The way it is nevertheless being defended is actually by a sort of tyranny of the (existing) majority.

One might suggest that what we ought to do is weigh the interests of the people who want to procreate against the suffering of the ones who would lead miserable lives, but that is a false equivalency. Especially since procreation is not only forcing needless and pointless suffering on the created person, but is also, and in fact first and foremost, forcing needless and pointless suffering on thousands of other sentient creatures, since each person created is harming thousands of sentient creatures during a lifetime.

It is very hard to accurately assess the harms caused by each person since it depends on various factors such as location, socioeconomic status, consumption habits, life expectancy, livelihood, diet and etc., however, regardless of any circumstances, harming numerous others is inevitable.
And the most immediate and prominent harm is caused by what people eat.
Every person has to eat, and every food has a price. Unfortunately, most people are choosing the ones with the highest price – animal based foods.
Since most humans, more than 95% of them actually, are not even vegans – the most basic and primal ethical decision one must make – procreation is practically accepting the murder of thousands of creatures.
And all this is the harms involved with direct consumption of animal based food and clothing. Each human harms many more animals in plenty of other ways by consuming various other products, including vegan ones, and by participating in various other activities. Everything has a price, nothing comes for free, everything is somehow harmful to someone.

Procreation is not only creating a subject of harms, but also a small unit of exploitation and pollution. Therefore, the question is not is it justified that people would impose a risk of a lifetime on another person so they can fulfil their desire to procreate, but is it justified that people would impose immense harm on many others so that they would fulfil their desire to procreate.
The question in point is not is it ethical to take the risk of creating miserable lives, but is it ethical to impose miserable lives on many others so that a truly tiny minority would experience parenthood. How can it be acceptable to force lives full of suffering on thousands of sentient creatures, just so that one unethical preference of would-be parents won’t be frustrated?

But it goes even further than that. What should be weighed against the interests of people who want to procreate is not only the people who would be born into miserable lives, and not only the animals who would be harmed by the newborns of the current people who want to procreate, but all the harms, and all the misery, and all the suffering that would ever be caused by humans. So the true balancing is even crueler considering that the harm to whom who will not get what they want, can be summed up with one generation only, compared with harm to infinite number of generations, theoretically until the sun burns. Eventually we are talking about sacrificing the interests of only the people who currently exist and want to procreate, and only for the “right” reasons, and only if they meet the criterion of the procreative balance. How can the deprivation of one desire, of only a part of only one generation, be seriously compared with the continuance and systematical deprivation of whomever would exist if that part of that one generation will procreate?

Wasn’t it worth it to sacrifice people’s desire to procreate 150 years ago was it possible, so to prevent the horrors of Auschwitz? Is the harm of preventing something desirable from someone, greater than the harms of the Second World War? Wasn’t it worth it to prevent all the people who lived 150 years ago from expressing their desire to procreate so all the horrors of the 20th century could be avoided, not to mention all the horrors that occurred since then and will occur in the future?

Sentient creatures who would exist in the future are not less important than sentient creatures who live right now. And sentient creatures who would live in the future infinitely outnumber the ones who are alive today, let alone merely the humans who want to procreate and meet the criterion of the principles of procreative permissibility. So giving these people the same moral weight as all the creatures that would ever be forced to suffer is a serious case of myopia, speciesism and cruelty.

One needs to be extremely speciesist to ignore that there is more than one species, and be extremely biased to ignore that there is more than one timeframe. The harm to people from the present is extremely marginal compared with the harm to other species and to people who will exist in the future.

Once realizing that procreation is not good in itself but is only good for the ones who want it, and that it has a tremendous price, clearly it is better to prevent it as soon as possible, as stopping it will hurt only some of the existing people, and not stopping it will endlessly harm more and more sentient creatures. The harm to part of the existing people, by preventing them from procreating, can’t even come close to seriously countervail the harms to generations upon generations of sentient creatures.

Objecting to harm the current generation by preventing it from procreating is forcing endless harms on an endless number of individuals.

And since people don’t even take seriously the possibility that their own children might suffer extremely, there is no chance they would ever take seriously the certainty that numerous generations of sentient creatures would suffer extremely because of their procreation. That’s why we mustn’t wait until people would understand that it is ethically impossible to justify procreation, but do everything we can to make it impossible to procreate.


References

Rawls, John. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press 2001)

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

Weinberg Rivka The Moral Complexity Of Sperm Donation
Bioethics ISSN 0269-9702 (print); 1467-8519 (online) doi:10.1111/j.1467-8519.2007.00624.x
Volume 22 Number 3 2008 pp 166–178

Weinberg Rivka. The Risk Of A Lifetime (Oxford University Press, 2006)