A portable defense of the Procreation Asymmetry

Abstract

The Procreation Asymmetry holds that we have strong moral reasons not to create miserable people for their own sakes, but no moral reasons to create happy people for their own sakes. To defend this conjunction against an argument that it leads to inconsistency, I show how recognizing ‘creation’ as a temporally extended process allows us to revise the conjuncts in a way that preserves their intuitive force. This defense of the Procreation Asymmetry is preferable to others because it does not require us to take on controversial metaphysical or metaethical commitments – in other words, it has the theoretical virtue of portability.

Keywords:

• Procreation Asymmetry
• harming
• benefiting
• life worth living
• moral actualism

Notes

1. My way of formulating these intuitions closely follows Frick (2014, 2–3) and McMahan (2009, 49).

2. However, Narveson (1967) first identified the intuitions behind these conjuncts and noted the peculiar tension between them.

3. See Smuts (2013).

4. Though we sometimes gloss the idea of a life’s being not worth living by saying it would be better for person living it never to have existed, on McMahan’s analysis that sort of statement is merely metaphorical, though still intelligible.

5. See Gert (2003).

6. Others have formulated the Procreation Asymmetry in terms of prima facie moral obligation or moral permissibility rather than moral reasons (e.g. Elstein 2005, 49; Roberts 2011b, 765). Using the language of moral reasons rather than obligation or permissibility is more a difference in style than substance.

7. Not everyone finds the Procreation Asymmetry to be so intuitive, especially Creating Happy People. I will return to this issue below.

8. See Parsons (2002) and Hare (2007).

9. The ultimate plausibility of this claim turns on whether the outcomes of our actions are determined before we choose to act and whether agents can have normative reasons in favor of or against actions they are already determined to perform (see, e.g. Haji 2012; Jeppsson 2016). In this article, I assume that the outcomes of our actions are not determined before we choose to act. This assumption is more for convenience of presentation, and I believe the notions of possible and actual persons could be replaced with the notions of dependently and independently existing persons (Temkin 2012, 417) without significantly altering the force of my argument. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.

10. See Singer (1976, 92–93) and Heyd (1994, 12). David Heyd endorses a stronger claim than moral actualism, which is that only presently existing people (a subset of actual people) matter morally.

11. See Parsons (2002, 139).

12. See also Shiffrin (1999). Note that Harman and Shiffrin both argue for noncomparative notions of harm and benefit. It probably doesn’t make sense to say that someone can be made comparatively worse off or better off by being brought into existence (Parfit 1984, 361–364). However, coming into existence can make one noncomparatively well off or badly off with respect to some independent standard of welfare. Harman and Shiffrin argue that the intuition about the asymmetry between harming and benefiting applies to both the comparative and noncomparative conceptions of harm and benefit.

13. See, e.g. Persson (2009).

14. One might be able to avoid this consequence by also rejecting premise 1 of the Moral Actualism Dilemma. If one is prepared to do that, however, one can construct a much simpler preservationist argument, one I will consider in the next section.

15. See also McMahan (2012, 31–32).

16. As Wiggins (1975/76, 45) says, ‘The man of highest practical wisdom is the man who brings to bear upon a situation the greatest number of pertinent concerns and relevant considerations commensurate with the importance of the deliberative context.’

17. See Williams (1976, 214).

18. These two objections to variabilism can be applied mutatis mutandis to other preservationist arguments that posit novel asymmetries in order to reject premise 4 of the Moral Actualism Dilemma. Elstein (2005) and DeGrazia (2005, 277, 279) have made such arguments.

19. See n. 12 above for the distinction between comparative and noncomparative conceptions of harm and benefit.

20. For discussion, see Griffin (1979) and Buchanan (1987).

21. See McMahan (2012, 15–20).

22. Some philosophers are happy to accept this implication; see Benatar (2006).

23. To be clear, McMahan suggests but does not ultimately endorse this claim.

24. This case shares some features with one devised by Harman (1999, 319, fn. 8).

25. Some philosophers who discuss the Procreation Asymmetry seem to take ‘creation’ to refer to ‘conception.’ McMahan (1981, 100, fn. 6) explicitly took this position at one point, though perhaps it is not his current view.

26. Plausible biological definitions of ‘conception’ include fertilization of an egg by a sperm cell, formation of a zygote, formation of a blastocyst, or implantation of a blastocyst into the uterine wall, among other possibilities.

27. How is Finishing Miserable People different from Singer’s (1976, 92–93) claim that while we have no moral reason not to create a person who would be miserable, we have a strong moral reason to euthanize such a person shortly after birth? First, Finishing Miserable People tells us something about our moral reasons with respect to the process of creation, while Singer’s claim pertains only to post-natal contexts. Second, Finishing Miserable People can support the intuition that if Anjali were to give birth to the person she conceived, she would have already acted against her moral reasons with respect to that person’s welfare or rights, while Singer’s claim cannot support this intuition. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.

28. I thank Nick Rimell, Mark Murphy, and an anonymous reviewer for their help in developing this example.

29. Additionally, one might endorse something like Harman’s contention that, at least in the case of comparative harms and benefits, our moral reasons to benefit others are weaker than our moral reasons not to harm others. This would mean that the moral reason to finish creating a happy person is necessarily much weaker than the moral reason not to finish creating a miserable person.

30. For their invaluable assistance with this article, I thank an anonymous reviewer from the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Megan Dean, Johann Frick, Marcus Hedahl, Colin Hickey, Nabina Liebow, Maggie Little, Tony Manela, James Mattingly, Torsten Menge, Mark Murphy, Travis Rieder, Nick Rimell, Matt Shields, Dan Threet, Colva Weissenstein, and an audience at Virginia Commonwealth University.