Meet Morgan, Yet Another Failure of Population Ethics

One day, Morgan, 24 years younger than me, showed up at my door. They informed me that I was their father; “Mom said you didn’t want me, which is why she married Jamie so quickly after I was conceived and you left for Illinois.” 

Morgan was right – as much as I desperately wanted Diane to stay with me, I didn’t want to have a child with her, at least while I was unemployed and she was a failing grad student (and we were so obviously incompatible). If she had told me she was pregnant, I would have wanted her to have an abortion. Yes, Morgan wouldn’t have existed, but Diane and Jamie would have had their own children (who wouldn't have had my unhappy genes).

Now this never happened, but theoretically could have. But if Morgan did exist, I would only want the best for them, regardless of how they came into existence. 

This is yet another problem with Population Ethics - we start with the baseline that the people who exist should exist.

Consider, for example, if you say 13-year-olds shouldn’t have children. (And you should say children shouldn’t have children! Unlike the crazies I document in Losing's chapter "God, the Greatest Murderer of All Time.") Saying that children shouldn't have children doesn’t mean you don’t want a 13-year-old forced mother to suffer, and it doesn’t mean you hate her baby. 

This really happens. My memory is that Peter Singer once wrote that it was a good thing that teenage pregnancies are down. Someone – let’s call them Jessie – angrily wrote that they were born to a teenage mother, so Peter was saying they shouldn’t have existed. True! But that is entirely irrelevant to Jessie. Peter only wants Jessie to experience the most utils possible (while not causing others to suffer). 

The same is true for disabled individuals. Or me. (“My parents definitely should not have married, nor my siblings or I been born.” p. 145) 

This remains one of the most insightful statements ever:

You know, Mrs. Buckman, you need a license to buy a dog, or drive a car.

Hell, you need a license to catch a fish! 

But they’ll let any butt-reaming asshole be a father.

–Tod Higgins as played by Keanu Reeves in the movie Parenthood 

These two thoughts are entirely compatible:

• Children should only be conceived and born to people who can provide the child a fair start.
  Children should not be born by children, or drug addicts, or mentally disturbed individuals, or people in crushing poverty, or people who have horrific genetic diseases, or people who don’t want to have a child (“every child a wanted child”). 
• Society should do everything possible to provide every child who is born with as close to a fair start as possible, regardless of the circumstances. 

The first bullet is not discriminating against 10 year olds, or people with bipolar disorder, etc. This is just to say the rights of potential new individuals should supersede the rights of potential parents. 

We don’t let just anyone be a surgeon, or drive a truck, or open a daycare. We want to protect people from being harmed by unqualified individuals. But we turn a blind eye when it comes to people breeding. We do nothing to protect the most vulnerable - new individuals.

This is the greatest failing of philosophy (and policy). We pretty much stop at, “If you can reproduce, then you have the right to.” To which I say, “Won't someone please think of the children?”

Peter Singer has had the audacity to say, basically, it is better for children to be born with as few handicaps as possible. (Life is hard enough!) For that, he’s been vilified, smeared, attacked as a Nazi. 

But again, it is entirely consistent to think it is best for a child to be born with an intact body and brain into a positive environment, while also wanting society to care for all children and provide them with equal opportunities, regardless of how their bodies and brains function.

Similarly, I can recognize that it would be better if humanity is Children-of-Men-ed into extinction and yet still want each existing human to be as happy as possible. Despite humanity’s utterly incomprehensible inhumanity to each other and other sentient creatures, I still recognize that each of us has a vast capacity for suffering, and alleviating extreme suffering is the most important task.