As soon we consider the notion of bringing a person into existence, we have already made a logical mistake. In this essay I will argue that ‘person’ refers to human beings who already exist, and by talking about person before they come into existence we are assigning judgements to an empty and undefined subject. Procreative decisions must be limited to considerations about future human beings, even though we (the living) find this unintuitive. I conclude that we should aim for genethical maximisation, because to make value judgements between non-existence and existence requires a framework which is unobtainable, and considerations which are beyond foresight.
Physical existence is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for personhood (Kavka, 1982, p. 94). To be a person there must also be, I think, a mental faculty conducive to behavioural characteristics, that is recognisable by the self and others across an extended period of time (Locke 1975, p.335). This is what I consider a sufficient condition for personhood. Therefore to speak of persons before they exist satisfies neither the sufficient nor the necessary conditions of personhood, and it is a mistake to identify a person before they exist. I make this distinction early, because my point is that we cannot make statements persons that have yet to come into existence. We can only make retrospective statements about benefit and harm to concrete persons who already exist.
Take Parfit’s (1984, p.358) consideration of a 14-year-old-girl who has a baby. His argument is that having the baby so young means it is given it a sub-par start in life, but had the girl conceived years later instead and provided the child with a better life, it would actually be a different child (different eggs and sperm). Therefore, the original child has not benefited and a different one has in its place. Now if you spoke to the 14-year-old-girl later, she might say she regrets that having the child so young made both their lives hard. But I think she’d also say that she wouldn’t change a thing because then she wouldn’t have had that child. The same goes if she had waited till 24 years old, only she might be telling us how great both their lives were and how pleased she was to have waited so that she had this child. This is a key distinction, because the child she’s referring to in either case already exists to be a person. She can make value judgements about how her decision affected this person, but she cannot do the same prior to conception. It makes no sense to talk of different times, sperms, and eggs. They are only physical matter (which I have already stated insufficient for personhood), and the potential person at this stage is just an object of imagination; an object with no moral relevance.
Holtug (2001, p.361), in another example, thinks that people are fortunate to have come into existence. He suggests that if we consider it a benefit to have been saved from certain death (and most people would), then we should consider ourselves benefitted by coming to life in the first place. This is because in both cases we have been given a quantity of life that we would not have had otherwise. I believe his thinking is incorrect. When we are saved from death, we are a subject who already exists and wants to continue existing because we value things continued existence will bring us. In this case there is a subject with desires, and in particular a desire to exist. When we speak of ourselves as benefitted by coming into existence we speak an absurdity. We cannot say we are better off, because there was no subject to be worse off. There was no subject to gain from existence prior to us already existing, and once we exist we cannot benefit from the event of coming into existence because it has already occurred. We can only benefit then through further (desired) existence. In demonstrating his ‘Value of Existence View’, Holtug makes a logical error from the very beginning, by telling us he will argue that coming into existence can be better for a person than never existing (2001, p.364). As physical existence is a necessary condition of personhood, a person cannot be in the state of never existing, and we therefore cannot make any such comparison.
The mistake that we make as humans is to assign properties to an empty or non-existent subject, and it is our seemingly unique faculty of imagination that permits this. Consider the ‘nuclear plan’ thought experiment forwarded by Kavka (1982, p.97). In this case, selfishness in the present (building a leaky nuclear plant instead of a solar energy system to save money) will cause future generations to suffer. Kavka says that because choosing the nuclear option over solar power will change history, the future generations that will suffer are different individuals to those that wouldn’t suffer (parents would copulate differently in some way). Therefore the suffering generation are no worse off because otherwise they simply wouldn’t exist, the people we would ordinarily compare them to are different people altogether and the comparison is invalid. This reasoning is invalid. We are creating objects of imagination for subjects that do not exist. Whether one subject or another exists is irrelevant before the fact. Humans should work to maximise the possible goodness of a future situation (i.e. no nuclear leaks) based on the knowledge unidentified human beings will exist regardless. As a human being satisfies a definite and necessary condition for personhood (physical existence) it is the best target of moral deliberation we can effectively hope to take into consideration.
For making procreative decisions, the implication of this is that we must only consider the way in which a human being might be benefited or harmed by being brought into existence. If we make a decision which provides a future child with a better chance at a high quality of life, we should consider that future child the same being as it would be if we had not taken action. We should consider the same human being as profiting from this more fortunate situation, and attempt always to be genethical maximisers (Savulescu, 2001, p.415) in our decisions.
I choose genethical maximisation over satisfaction, because the kind of satisfaction which Purdy (1983, p.377) puts forward states only that we should try to provide children with a ‘normal opportunity’ for health; a standard I consider far too difficult to comprehend. If we tried to determine whether an existing human being can be benefited or harmed by being brought into existence, we could theoretically make statements about whether their existence can be worse than non-existence based on the assumption life brings a number of rights and wrongs. To do this, we would consider two things; firstly, non-existence is a valueless (null) conception. Secondly, life brings both physical and psychological affects, which a human may consider good (positive) or bad (negative). We have, then, a situation whereby a counter could be increased for every good and marked down for every bad that a person will, or does, experience. We could, then, consider a scenario where someone is, or will be, born in constant pain but with no capability for developing an intelligent mental faculty. This human would be unable to experience any positive aspects of life (either mental or physical) to increase the counter, but would be experiencing a negative physical aspect to decrease the counter. This would put that being’s counter into negative figures and existence could be accurately be described as more of a harm than non-existence. Conversely, if someone experienced mostly good things (as is often the case), their counter would be positive, and we could describe existence as better than non-existence. The first issue with this idea however, is at what plus figure do we consider someone has met the ‘normal opportunity’ for health? This would surely be subjective and vary from person to person. For future human beings no-one can make calculations prior to experiences being had, and who are we to make such judgements about others? Further, for existing persons the difficulties of weighing up the good and the bad could never be declared objectively, and bias would always be given to the most salient experiences of the present. So again, we have a skew. The reason for this, of course, is related to the second issue with this idea; it is completely impractical, and most likely impossible. We could never make calculations like this, and we could never set a stable and accurate threshold for ‘normal opportunity’. Even if science one day allowed us to measure goods and bads, how could we predict the social situation that a child would exist in? This could be just as restricting as poor health, or just as liberating as good health, but no-one can predict the future. By aiming for genethical maximisation, we will always seek the best option available to the situation, and consider the facts not as objective to all cases, but as appropriate to the case in question.
I have argued that personhood is a pre-requisite for moral judgements about coming into existence. Assigning properties to non-existent persons leads to logical errors and confused conclusions. Instead we should think of future people as concrete human beings, and strive to be genethical maximisers in our deliberations. No system can accurately measure the quality of existence against non-existence for a living human being, nor can we realistically predict the social landscape for any future child to satisfy a threshold we consider to be normal opportunity. We are left to seek the maximum benefit always, and to hope this next generation will do the same.
REFERENCES
· Kavka, G.S., "The paradox of future individuals", Philosophy and Public Affairs, 11:2 , (1982), pp.94-112.
· Parfit, D, “Reasons and Persons”, (1984), Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp.351-379.
· Locke, John. "Of identity and diversity - extract" in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , Locke, John; Nidditch, Peter H., (1975), pp.328-347.
· Holtug N, “On the Value of Coming into Existence”, The Journal of Ethics, Vol. 5, No. 4 (2001), pp.361-384.
· Savulescu, Julian. "Procreative beneficence: Why we should select the best children" Bioethics , 15:5 , 2001 , 413-426.
· Purdy, L. M., "Genetic diseases: Can having children be immoral?", Moral Problems in Medicine, Gorovitz, S; Macklin, R; Jameton, A.L.; O'Connor, J.M.; Sherwin, S, (1983), pp.377-384.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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· Holtug N, “On the Value of Coming into Existence”, The Journal of Ethics, Vol. 5, No. 4 (2001), pp.361-384.
· Kavka, G.S., "The paradox of future individuals", Philosophy and Public Affairs, 11:2 , (1982), pp.93-112.
· Locke, John. "Of identity and diversity - extract" in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , Locke, John; Nidditch, Peter H., (1975), pp.328-347.
· Parfit, D, “Reasons and Persons”, (1984), Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp.351-379.
· Purdy, L. M., "Genetic diseases: Can having children be immoral?", Moral Problems in Medicine, Gorovitz, S; Macklin, R; Jameton, A.L.; O'Connor, J.M.; Sherwin, S, (1983), pp.377-384.
· Smilansky, Saul., "Is there a moral obligation to have children?", Journal of Applied Philosophy, 12:1, (1995), pp41-53.
· Savulescu, Julian. "Procreative beneficence: Why we should select the best children" Bioethics , 15:5 , 2001 , 413-426.
· Steinbock B & McClamrock R, “When Is Birth Unfair to the Child?”, The Hastings Center Report, Vol. 24, No. 6 (Nov. - Dec., 1994), pp.15-21.
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