In a post last week, I asked:
How can it be okay to remain childless but not okay to have children and treat them badly—given that the children themselves would presumably prefer being treated badly to not being born at all?
There are a lot of comments there worth reading, including one from Ryan Yin that rephrased the problem so clearly that I want to highlight it here.
First, though, some answers that I think don’t work. Cos asked:
Why is it so puzzling that we value the preferences of people who exist over the hypothetical preferences of people who might’ve existed but don’t?
Sierra Black drew the same distinction between people who exist and those who don’t, though she phrased it in terms of rights:
Children aren’t possessions or art projects, they’re people. Before you have a child, you’re a person with a certain right to control what happens to your body. After the child is born, that child has some of the same rights you do, including the right not to be mistreated.
Ryan Yin (after agreeing with Sierra!) put his finger on exactly why I find her answer (and others like it) so unsatifying— though I’m not sure he intended his observation to be used in exactly this way:
Suppose you were thinking of having a child. Suppose that once the child is born, the child would wish he’d never been born (and prefer that to killing himself), and further that this is entirely predictable. By the logic given above, you aren’t allowed to care about this fact until after the child is born (at which point there’s nothing to be done). This seems like a very odd way of valuing the preferences of others.
Exactly! If (as Cos says) it’s perfectly reasonable not to value a person’s preferences until after s/he’s born, or (as Sierra says) people don’t acquire rights until after they’re born, then there can be no objection to creating a miserable life. I might be dooming my child to a life of misery, but that’s okay because s/he hasn’t been born yet and therefore has no rights and no preferences I choose to care about.
Surely this can’t be right. And if it’s not, then the Cos/Sierra story can’t be exactly right.
Morality is about suffering not preferences. It is OK to take your children to the Grand Canyon on holiday rather than to Disneyland even if they would have preferred the latter. It’s not OK to beat them with a large stick instead of taking them to Disneyland, but that is not because of their preferences; it is because the former predictably causes suffering.
Deciding not to have a child does not cause any predictable suffering, that is why it is OK. Abusing your child (when you have the choice not to) is not OK because it causes predictable, but avoidable, suffering.
As an aside, “I wish I’d never been born!” is a common cry from children even when they haven’t been treated particularly badly, so it’s not clear that you are right about their preferences. :)
May I assume you’re familiar with Derek Parfit’s “Mere Addition Paradox”? It seems to grapple with pretty much the same issue that you’re addressing.
While the Mere Addition Paradox is usually said to afflict utilitarianism (specifically, the kind that says to maximize the total rather than the average utility of people), I’ve argued that a version of the paradox afflicts deontological positions as well:
http://agoraphilia.blogspot.com/2006/05/deontology-meets-mere-addition-paradox.html
As indicated by the term “paradox,” this could be one of those situations in which a fully acceptable answer simply does not exist. And if so, your approach of saying “claim X [made by Cos/Sierra] leads to untenable conclusions, and therefore X must be wrong” might be incorrect, inasmuch as claim not-X could also lead to untenable conclusions.
Why can’t you resolve the whole paradox by saying: It’s good to maximize the amount of happiness in the world minus the amount of suffering in the world. That means you shouldn’t have a child if the child’s life will be below some threshold of happiness (that threshold depends on how you weight happiness vs. suffering). But once a child exists (yours or someone else’s), you shouldn’t make them miserable.
This doesn’t contradict itself and doesn’t seem to lead to any untenable conclusions.
Ryan says, suppose… the hypothetical child’s preference not to have been born is entirely predictable. Great thought experiment! But it’s not predictable — is impossible to predict. Without this crucial element, the thought experiment doesn’t seem workable, at least not in the reality we [seem to] share.
If we valued the lives of the unborn as much as we value the lives of the born, all we would ever do is procreate. Every act of birth control would be a moral crime. Every act of celibacy would be a moral crime. Every act of chastity, even by 12-year-old girls, would be a moral crime.
This doesn’t shed any light on the philosophical question of why we don’t value the existence of the yet-unborn, but I think it’s the same issue as the one you suggest.
We just feel that “not being born” is not a bad thing that causes harm to someone. My gut agrees with that. But why?
“Suppose you were thinking of having a child. Suppose that once the child is born, the child would wish he’d never been born (and prefer that to killing himself), and further that this is entirely predictable.”
Again, a meaningless premise. In the same way that preferences cannot ever be compared across individuals, they cannot ever be predicted or known to another individual.
Bennett Hasleton: The conclusion to your resolution is that you must have as many children as possible if they will be above the minimum standard. You may agree with this, but I suspect most would not.
These dilemas are fascinating, and can be very revealing about human nature. I agree with some that there is no absolutely self-consistent moral philosophy possible, and that we will always come up against this sort of dilema. This does not mean we should not attempt to resolve them. Our morals are riddled with inconsistencies. We seem to have a very general idea that to cause the most happiness is a good thing, so we should act accordingly. This is balanced against a strong conviction that we should maximise our own personal happiness above all else. Thus no-one donates all their organs whilst alive, but a great many donate a small amount of their income to charity. How do we decide how much to give? Some sort of balance between personal and general good, I suppose.
Noah Yetter:
There is an enormous difference between a meaningless premise and an unlikely one.
Dr. Landsburg,
It seems to me that the distinction between rights & preferences is pretty critical here. If I use a consequentialist framework to say A is immoral but B is moral, and then you point out that A Pareto dominates B, then your argument seems to devastate my claim. But it’s perfectly reasonable to make a deontological argument for a Pareto-dominated outcome. (In fact, it seems to me that therein lies the entire distinction between the two. After all, how else to make sense of something being an “inalienable right”?)
Suppose that we can’t tell for sure if someone’s marginal child would not have been conceived if not for the possibility of abusing it. Then, by allowing abuse, we run the risk of less ‘profit’ — some people who would have not abused their children will start. If you value a life at X, and disvalue abuse at -Y, it’s possible that your total utility will DROP if you allow child abuse. You’ll get too many “minus Ys” for your additional “plus Xs”.
That is: the additional children born to abuse are happy they were born, but the ones like us who would have been born anyway are kind of peeved that now we have to endure abuse. That’s assuming that we can tell which kind we are, of course.
Unless society can practice a form of price discrimination, by figuring out who would have a child ONLY if they were allowed to abuse it, and granting them, and only them, abuse licenses.
After settling this argument about the preferences of hypothetical beings, can we turn to something more important, like angels dancing on heads of pins?
Presumably not everyone wishes that they had been born. The suicide rate in the U.S. is 11.1 per 100,000. Allocated over the U.S. life expectancy, 868 of every 100,000 people want to be dead. I know that’s not the same as wishing they had never been born, but the implication is that at least some people wish they had never born.
Harold, I had thought of that, but you can avoid that paradox by saying that just because something is a good thing does not mean you are obligated to do it. (But your conscience should enjoin you on the other hand from doing anything bad.) Just like it’s good to donate to charity but that doesn’t mean you’re obligated to donate as much as possible.
So, it’s fine to have kids if their lives will be happy, but you shouldn’t feel obligated. Just don’t have kids if their lives will be miserable, and don’t make anyone else miserable. QED. So I’m still not sure where the paradox is.
By the way, this issue is addressed by Orson Scott Card in one of his novels (one of the later Bean ones). Not that his treatment would add much to this discussion (as far as I remember).
I don’t think you can look at this from the point of view of children- their preferences don’t matter, and as you said, they’d rather be alive than dead, so you can do anything to them. Instead, let’s look at it from the point of view of the parent & society:
A parent can decide to have or not to have a child. Having a child incurs a fixed cost for the parent. Therefore the benefit of having a child must be slightly greater than the cost of having a child.
After having a child, the parent can choose among three options. They will either 1.) put the child to work and be compensated now monetarily (or beat the child and gain some psychic utility) or 2.) put the child in school and defer compensation, or 3.) let the child have leisure and defer compensation. The parent would prefer 1, to 2 and 3.
1 is illegal, 2 is compulsory, so 3 is out of the question. Note – the child is “mistreated” in 1 or 2; they would obviously prefer 3, but won’t get it, which highlights the fact that their choice is irrelevant. So the choice is how to get parents to put their children in school rather than working/beating them now?
At some point, the parent needs to make back their cost of having a child. The only thing I can think about is through Social Security. The parent will receive Social Security in the future, so is dependent upon the future labor of their & other children in the aggregate.
In addition, they get tax deductions for having dependents. Those deductions & the taxes they pay into social security should compensate them exactly for the costs of having children. (this is very simplistic).
But a parent has the incentive to work/beat their child today AND receive tax deductions & social security in the future. This would not be efficient because they would receive more than the costs of having a child, thus causing them to have more than optimal children. To ensure that this doesn’t happen, they are constrained by law to not work/beat their children.
How about singles? This type of society should mandate that people have children – and send them to school. The next best solution is to tax singles at a higher rate than married couples, and giving tax benefits to dependents.
I have to agree with EricK on this one. While preferences can matter in some cases, I don’t see how the unborn can even have preferences. I think the intuition that it is wrong to bring a child into the world that is likely to suffer to the extent that it actually wishes it were never born is simply based on the fact that it is wrong to knowingly cause others to suffer.
Likewise, while it might be admirable, there is no parallel moral obligation to give others happiness at the expense of our own. So childless couples who wish to remain childless are not obligated to have children even if this would increase aggregate happiness.
I feel like the only way to solve the paradox is to reject the given that the children would prefer being treated badly to not being born. It’s not that the statement can’t be true; it’s really more that it artificially limits possibilities. Methinks that puts me in league with mcp and Benkyou.
John Rawls explored this kind of thing using his “Veil of Ignorance”. In this case the veil lies between the unborn and the living. I think that our assumptions about what is happening on the unborn side of the veil matter in this case. If we assume that there is a seething mass of infinite unborn souls (I use the term in the most secular way possible) that all want nothing more than to enter our realm and inhabit a human vessel, then yeah, the paradox stands and everyone should have lots of kids even if they abuse them. However, if we assume that one soul is created at a time beyond the veil and is born into the next available vessel, the paradox is solved – clearly every soul created would prefer abusive parents choose not to procreate.
Why should we espouse this view? I haven’t a clue, and I doubt that most people who don’t recognize the paradox need to think about it so deeply to discount it. People like to feel special though, so perhaps the one at a time soul creation scheme resonates with them on some instinctual level.
One thought experiment to distinguish between a suffering theory and preference theory is that I believe most people would think it wrong to bring a child into this world in which the parent knows the child will inordinately suffer even if the child once born prefers to live. It is not morally sufficient that there is just enough happiness to balance out the suffering. The hard question is how much suffering is too much? I don’t know that it is possible to answer that.
Looking back at the original post, the dilema is that if we do not value the “rights” or existence of the un-created, then we cannot intentionally prevent the creation of a life that would be pure suffering. I don’t see how the non-existing can have rights as individuals. There are too many of them for a start, even though in another sense there aren’t any of them. So if we can’t owe them anything, how can we prevent their future suffering. Perhaps we have an obligation to reduce suffering, even though we cannot attach the suffering to individuals. We should prevent the creation of beings of pure suffering not because we owe it to the to-be-created, but because we should reduce suffering generally if we can.
It is difficult to find a situation where we can have absolute knowledge that a created life would not be worth living. Perhaps the closest we come is both parents possesing a dominant gene for a painful, rapidly terminal condition. Assume there was no possibility of not passing on the condition. I think we would very much discourage the prospective parents from having children in this case, and feel justified in doing so. I don’t think we could compel them not to, but should we be able to?
Are you familiar with antinatalism? Nine Banded Books is going to publish Jim Crawford’s musings on it soon, but if you want the more high-falutin university-educated argument, it’s in David Benatar’s “Better Never to Have Been”. I’m not an antinatalist myself, but it’s an interesting argument.
Exactly the same points made here:
http://robertwiblin.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/non_existent_people/
http://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/mistakes-with-nonexistent-people/
hm…I don’t think the moral calculus of bearing a child you know will have a ‘miserable’ life is the same as that of deliberately abusing a child. For one thing, as others have said, we can never really know what makes others happy.
Some people, for example, like being hit and called names, while most people very much don’t.
Parents frequently make hard choices about whether or not to bear a child into circumstances likely to cause misery: carrying a pregnancy when you know the fetus has a severe birth defect, for example, or having a baby in a war zone.
I think intention matters more here than the child’s actual preference. We can’t be responsible for another’s happiness. Maybe the baby born in a war zone with the severe birth defect will lead a short, happy life of bliss and bring joy to her family while the privileged brat whose parents give her every convenience will suffer miserably every day of her life just because she’s depressed.
Intending to provide our children with health, safety, happiness, etc. is an ethical thing to do, and intending to cause them pain and suffering is an unethical thing to do.
Taking off from a concept mentioned by Ms. Black, I think that having children is ultimately a matter of responsibility.
Humans are not born with any responsibilities. Responsibilities–legal, social, ethical– are conferred upon us by society, but we cannot logically be expected to acquire these until we can understand and act autonomously upon them, at least to a certain degree.
This of course raises another potential controversy, about when children reach the age when they begin to acquire any social and individual responsibilities. I would increases at a more or less steady rate beginning at about 15 months, when we have developed the scaffolding of an intellectual and emotional framework to be able to comprehend choice, or at least reward/punishment.
http://www.childrenshospital.org/az/Site1725/mainpageS1725P0.html
http://www.kidsgrowth.com/resources/articledetail.cfm?id=323
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-76759116.html
Of course, the way society in much of the modern, “Western,” world is organized, human parents are legally responsible for their children until they reach a somewhat-arbitrary “age of maturity.” Before this, the child reaches various ages where the law deems them mature enough to handle increasingly complex and delicate privileges and responsibilities: driving, drinking, having sex, etc.
Except for those who are sterile, having sexual intercourse means running the risk of producing a child. I assert that caring for a child in a way that is legal requires a considerable investment of the parent’s time and resources. This is to say nothing of the intrinsic value that many people harbor for human life (consciously or not). As such, I would argue that no other decision confers quite so much responsibility as having sex with the potential of having a child.
That said, some clever members of our species have devised ways for mitigating the chances of generating offspring, i.e. contraceptives. Others have developed the means to terminate a fetus in-utero.
Not clearly explaining these options and their associated consequences to those humans reaching the age of sexual maturity is thus, in this writer’s view, irresponsible. But that is again, raises a tangential moral debate that I do not wish to dive further into at this time.
Ultimately, my chain of reasoning finds that sexually-mature humans should fully consider the social, legal and ethical responsibilities that becoming a parent confers upon them. Once they produce offspring, and until either A) they legally shift their child-rearing responsibilities over to the state or other individuals or B) said offspring reach the legal age of maturity, they are responsible for that offspring.
Whether the offspring prefers to have been created or not then becomes less important than who and/or what will be responsible for its caretaking once it enters the world and human society. If caretakers are likely to be irresponsible or unable to care for children in a way that is humane and socially responsible, then it behooves a sexually mature human to avoid having a child.
Again, there are countless examples of children who have persevered and contributed positively to society, or at least not knowingly damaged it, despite being born into and raised into extremely socially dysfunctional, oppressive, or otherwise flawed, fundamentally irresponsible circumstances. But there are many more examples of children who are born into such circumstances only to perpetuate and aggravate them. Many others are born, suffer, and die without ever experiencing a modicum of social stability and comfort. Some of these people people are born, suffer, and then choose to take their own lives, suggesting that they experienced something or reached a point that made that life so utterly regrettable that it was not worth continuing.
I would hope that most people in the world wish this latter series of circumstances to be avoided or reduced. Certainly, even the materially “best” of parents have also produced children who have experienced such things as a result of their (the children’s) own choices and/or any number of extenuating circumstances.
But doesn’t that speak to my final point? That considering all of the social, moral, ethical and legal quandaries that human lives entail, it is important for sexually mature adults to understand that bringing a child into the world entails enormous, some would say supreme or ultimate, responsibility?
If sexually mature adults cannot say with a certain degree of self-confidence that they are capable and willing to assume the responsibilities of childcare, then they should not be put in charge of child-rearing. But if shifting child-rearing responsibilities over to another caretaker or series of caretakers will leave that child “worse off” throughout their lives result–as anecdotal and statistical evidence would certainly suggest–then it is irresponsible for that child to be conceived and carried to term in the first place.