Question There's no moral obligation on us to bring into existence lives that are good; on the other hand, if we know a life will be bad, perhaps we are under an obligation not to create it. So, perhaps, not knowing whether the lives we introduce will be good or bad, but knowing there's a significant risk they'll be bad, are we morally obliged not to risk introducing such bad lives?

Accepted:
April 28, 2009

Comments

Yes, I think you're right.

Many will complain that this sort of thinking leads to eugenics or worse. Others will complain that all life is a gift, so there can be no bad life. Personally I think these objections can be overcome.

There are major kinks that need to be straightened out, however. These kinks come in the form of ambiguities: How much risk is significant? Who decides how to weigh such risks? What constitutes a bad life? Does it mean it is a life which the live-r would be better off without? Can this really be judged ahead of time, before the individual in question is born (and thus without his or her first-hand testimony)? Will this have implications for lives that are already here and are already 'bad'?

Despite these worries, I still think you're right. The abuser who cannot control his worst impulses around children, for example, ought not parent.

(By the way, much of our discussion here assumes a world where teens and adults are reproductively empowered - where birth control and/or abortion is readily available, safe, free of stigma, and inexpensive. Alas, this is not the actual world.)

If you haven't been reading David Benatar's book Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, then you might want to read it, because his argument is very much like yours.

Perhaps we ought to say that there actually is some obligation to bring into existence lives that are good. This only seems counterintuitive if you make the mistake of thinking this obligation trumps all other considerations, when people are deciding whether to have children. If that were so, we'd all be under an obligation to run around making the maximum number of babies--which seems absurd. But there are lots and lots of other considerations. Perhaps having children will interfere with the enormous good I'm doing as a concert violinist. Perhaps having children in an overpopulated world has both good and bad effects. Still, we should acknowledge some obligation to bring into existence lives that are good.

Thus, there is an obligation to create lives that are good to put in the balance with the obligation not to create lives that are bad. So the latter obligation is not all that matters when people are deciding whether to have kids. We have to think through the real risks involved in having a child, case by case, taking into account both the possible good and possible bad. We are not always morally obliged not to have a child.