There is a discussion of this issue in rabbinic Judaism, whether it is better to have been born, suffer and then die, or to never have been born at all. The answer they come to is that the latter is preferable, but since we are alive, we might as well behave well. From a secular point of view the question as to whether one ought to stay alive if one's sufferings are immense is a very real one. I suppose comparing oneself with others is one way of putting one's experience in proportion and accepting that perhaps life is not as bad as it might otherwise seem. There is an entertaining Monty Python sketch making fun of precisely what you are getting at, where different people talk about how tough their childhoods were, with the worst off trumping everyone else. The penultimate person talks about living in a box and the last man says with apparent envy "You had a box!" . But there is a serious point here, that we often feel miserable in situations which do not really call for that reaction, and we can...

I wonder why you think that those outside Haiti who ignore the disaster there are letting harm happen which they could otherwise prevent. They might think that aid can do no good, they might think that they are better to give money to causes they genuinely understand and can supervise more directly, or they might not have the resources free that allow them to give. It is not like letting a child drown when one could prevent that from happening, presumably because it is happening near to you and you can swim. With Haiti you have to believe a lot of things about how charity operates and whether it works properly before you can justify giving money. Also, you might decide that if you have limited funds then it is better to give to something much more unfashionable than the cause which is the flavor of the day. You do not in that situation ignore the vast human suffering, you just take the position that you can only do so much, and this is not something which you wish to support, given your limited means.

It clearly would be betrayal since Bob is regularly doing something he tells his wife he is not doing, and deception is part of betrayal. She does not know but to argue that as a result she is not harmed is like arguing that if I steal from someone and they never know, then I am not harming that person. Clearly I am and theft is not only theft when the owner of the stolen property misses it. Perhaps even more significant here though is not the harm to Mary but the harm to Bob. He apparently spends a year lying to someone, and carrying out the activity which he denied practising on perhaps a daily basis, and one wonders what effects this has on his character. Would this make him likelier in the future to be tempted to deceive others? Might this encourage in him a feeling of contempt for the truth and communicating the truth to others, even those close to him? These factors suggest that there is also an issue in whether Bob is in danger of betraying himself as well as Mary.

Not necessarily, I suppose one might want it to do good things and so on. On the other hand, if the desire is for power just for the sake of being in control, or dominating others, then this would be problematic. Why would one want to do this, unless one had a suspect moral nature? We are familiar with people who enjoy directing others and controlling situations, but since the basis on which they act presumably is that they know better than others what ought to be done, and how and when it ought to be done, they place themselves in a position of implicit superiority and this is morally questionable. Even though we may need some people to take on these authority roles, they should always be aware of the damaging effects such roles can have on them as well as on others and seek to prevent the onset of moral corruption as a result.

It may be to you but to a lot of people they would prefer a life of discomfort to no life at all. It is difficult to know how to judge the rationality of such attitudes, and is perhaps more an issue for the psychologist than the philosopher.

You are right and they are wrong. It is not. On the other hand, we are part of the natural world so it is no bad thing for us to acknowledge this.

You put the point very clearly, and yet it is not clear to me why a photographer would feel that he or she could not intervene in a situation where such intervention would be helpful. Of course, by recording the event one is perhaps setting up a wider response to it which is going to put events like that within a context that may discourage them in the future. The viewing public may be horrified and so prevent their recurrence. On the other hand, if one can help an innocent person then surely one ought to do so, and taking a photograph as opposed to helping would be difficult to justify, since even if one's profession was photography, the individual is not thereby excused from normal human morality. If on the other hand there is nothing one can do, or at least nothing one could do without undergoing huge risks, then recording the event is the next best thing, if one has that sort of skill.

There is a Jewish joke that suggests that it would be better never to have been born rather than to live and then die, but who is so lucky? Many issues are raised here, but for most people it might be hoped that there are more pleasant than unpleasant aspects of life, and so playing a role in bringing them to that life is not such a grim choice as is suggested here. The fact that some suffering will occur does not mean that there will be so much that life itself becomes unbearable. Unless one has any special reason to think that one's child will be subject to special problems of this kind, procreation is not necessarily going to be as grim as you suggest. In fact, if you are going to concentrate on suffering you might want to look not so much at the child as at the parents!

Of course, you might think that although his body is dead, his soul lives on somewhere and would be horrified at what you did and so would be harmed. Otherwise, I suppose it would be relevant to ask whether you had agreed to his demand, since if you did and then reneged on it, you would be at fault. Let us suppose this is not the case. It does seem to me to be possible to harm a dead person, not directly perhaps, but in the sense that you dishonour their memory by going against their wishes. Even on utilitarian grounds this might be problematic, since it might create generally a disinclination for people to trust their descendants to uphold their wishes, and so might discourage passing property from one generation to another. The father could use the value of the house while he was alive and then it passes to the institution that financed him on his death. Not that there is anything wrong with this, but he would not in his last years have the feeling that his property would remain in the family,...

Surely one does not have to be religious to think that life has inherent value, one would just identify that value without reference to religion. Life would not perhaps be sacred, but still could be seen as having value, and that value need not be linked to its social role or economic standing. You don't have to be religious to respect people, quite the contrary. It might even be said that without religion respect is more unconditional, since there would then be no religious limitations on its breadth!