Should I Have Children? PDF

# Should I Have Children? ## The Islanders and the Cube ### The Case No one passes through life entirely unscathed. Even the best lives contain pain, suffering, illnesses, disappointments, and ultimately death. Since we could not ask to be born, we never consented to suffer these harms. Does this...

# Should I Have Children? ## The Islanders and the Cube ### The Case No one passes through life entirely unscathed. Even the best lives contain pain, suffering, illnesses, disappointments, and ultimately death. Since we could not ask to be born, we never consented to suffer these harms. Does this mean that our parents have wronged us in creating us? Do they owe us compensation for the inevitable burdens that come with life, even if our burdens are no greater than most people's? Ethicists often defend procreation with an analogy, the "Rescue Case". Driver is knocked unconscious in a traffic accident and Rescuer sees that Driver is in danger of dying unless he can be removed from the car quickly. Rescuer also sees that the only way to remove Driver will require breaking his arm. If Rescuer does break Driver's arm without his consent in the process of saving his life, intuitively, Rescuer owes him no apology, and it would be absurd for Driver to demand that Rescuer pay the medical costs of repairing the break. Similarly, parents might argue, although they knew our lives would contain harms, they also believed it highly likely that the benefits would more than compensate for those harms, so that we would be better off on balance. Seana Shiffrin finds this defense of procreation unconvincing (Shiffrin 1999). She concedes that Driver has no grounds for complaint about the broken arm but claims that the following "Gold Cube case" is a closer analogy to procreation. In this case, Wealthy is searching for a meaningful project and decides to bestow some of his vast wealth on the people living on the neighboring island. They are living quite comfortably but they could still spend additional money in ways that would make them significantly better off. One problem is that the neighboring island has no paper currency and due to political tensions Wealthy is neither permitted to travel there nor to communicate with the inhabitants. Wealthy's solution is to craft 100 cubes of gold each worth 5 million dollars and to fly over the island and drop the cubes near people so that they will spot them and retrieve them. He does his best to avoid hitting anyone but cannot eliminate the risk entirely and one person, Unlucky, does get hit by a cube, which breaks his arm. But he also retrieves the cube and is 5 million dollars richer, so that Wealthy's dropping of the cube still leaves Unlucky better off overall. According to Shiffrin, even though Unlucky is, despite his broken arm, much better off on balance, Wealthy owes Unlucky an apology and special compensation for his broken arm. If we agree, Shiffrin claims that we ought to draw a similar conclusion about procreation: no matter how well our lives go, our parents owe us an apology for having imposed life on us and special support in managing the harms that inevitably come with it. One advantage of Shiffrin's position is that it explains something that would otherwise be puzzling; namely, why we expect parents, who have already bestowed the gift of life on their children, to bestow additional aid when needed even when their children's lives would have remained well worth living without it (Cholbi 2017). But is Shiffrin's argument persuasive? ### Responses According to Shiffrin, although Driver and Unlucky are are each made better off on balance, there is a crucial difference: Driver will suffer a harm if Rescuer does not act, while Unlucky will not. Shiffrin argues that what it is for someone to suffer a harm is simply to be in a state that is bad for that person, regardless of whether this state is worse in some respect for the person compared with some alternative state they had been in or would otherwise have been in. Broken arms, pain, injuries, disabilities, losses, the destruction of valued relationships and projects, and death are bad for a person. Similarly, a pure benefit that is, a benefit that is not merely the absence or prevention of harm, is a state that is positively good for a person, regardless of whether this state is better than some alternative state. Having 20/10 vision, enjoying fine food, developing one's talent for the piano and more generally the fulfillment of desires whose nonfulfillment would not be harmful, are examples of pure benefits. Applying this account of harms and benefits, we can say that Rescuer caused a lesser harm to Driver (broken arm) to prevent Driver from suffering a much greater harm (loss of life). We cannot say that Wealthy caused a lesser harm to Unlucky (broken arm) to prevent him from suffering some greater harm. Recall that the islanders were living comfortably and do not need the windfall to alleviate any badness in their lives. Rather, Wealthy harmed Unlucky to give him access to pure benefits, e.g., travelling, pursuing a master's degree in art history, acquiring a boat, and dining at nice restaurants. Here is the lesson we are meant to draw from Rescue and Gold Cube. What Rescue shows is that when getting consent is not possible, we do not wrong someone by causing them to suffer a lesser harm when this is necessary to prevent them from suffering a greater harm. What Gold Cube shows is that when getting consent is not possible, we can *wrong* someone by causing them to suffer a lesser harm to bestow pure, benefits on them, even when those benefits more than compensate for the harm. If this lesson is correct, the implication for procreation is clear. Procreation inevitably results in harms. Normally existence also bestows access to benefits that leaves the person better off overall. But it does not make them better off by preventing or alleviating greater harms or any harms at all. No harm can be suffered by a merely possible person, and so there is no harm to be alleviated or prevented by making a possible person actual. Thus, procreation imposes harms on the person brought into existence just for the sake of bestowing pure benefits on them, and it obviously does so without obtaining that person's consent. Insofar as Gold Cube is an apt analogy for procreation, we should conclude that we were all wronged by our parents and are owed compensation. ### Suggesting Readings - **Shiffrin, Seana. 1999. "Wrongful Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Significance of Harm." Legal Theory 5: 117-48.** - **Cholbi, Michael. 2017. "How Procreation Generates Parental Rights and Obligations." In Michael Cholbi and Jaime Ahlberg (eds.), Procreation, Parenthood, and Educational Rights: Ethical and Philosophical Issues (pp. 15-36). New York: Routledge.** - **Benatar, David, and David Wasserman. 2015. Debating Procreation: Is-It-Wrong to Reproduce? Oxford: Oxford University Press.** - **Weinberg, Rivka. 2015. The Risk of a Lifetime: How, When, and Why Procreation May Be Permissible. New York: Oxford University Press.** - **Boonin, David, 2014. The Non-Identity Problem and the Ethics of Future People. New York: Oxford University Press.** - **DeGrazia, David. 2014. "Chapter 5: Bearing Children in Wrongful Life Cases." In Creation Ethics (pp. 137-62). Oxford: Oxford University Press.**