What Are Parents For?: Reproductive Ethics After the Nonidentity Problem
- What Are Parents For?Reproductive Ethics After the Nonidentity Problem
Bernard Prusak is Gallen Fellow in the Humanities at Villanova Center for Liberal Education, Villanova University, where he teaches ethics and great books. His research is focused on parental obligations, the intersections of philosophical anthropology and bioethics, and moral epistemology. He is writing a book with the working title Parenting and the Obligations of Justice and Virtue toward Children.
Notes
1. J. Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. G. Teskey (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), bk. 10, lines 743-5, p. 250.
2. F. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie (Stuttgart, Germany: Philipp Reclam, 1993), ch. 3, p. 29. Translated by W. Kaufmann as The Birth of Tragedy (New York: Random House, 1967), 42.
3. Job 3:3-5 (New Revised Standard Version).
4. P. Larkin, "This Be The Verse," in Collected Poems, ed. A. Thwaite (London, U.K.: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1998), 180.
5. The poem here concurs, interestingly, with the judgment of Adam contemplating the human condition after the fall, namely, bound by sin passed from generation to generation. "'But this shall not serve/,'" Adam says: "All that I ... shall beget/Is propagated curse.'" See Paradise Lost, bk. 10, lines 727-9, p. 249.
6. But see D. Benatar, "Why It Is Better Never to Come into Existence," American Philosophical Quarterly 34 (1997): 345-55.
7. See for analyses of "wrongful life" that avoid the logical pitfalls surrounding this concept, J. McMahan, "Wrongful Life: Paradoxes in the Morality of Causing People to Exist," in Rational Commitment and Social Justice: Essays for Gregory Kavka, ed. J.L. Coleman and C.W. Morris (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 215, and A. Buchanan, D.W. Brock, N. Daniels, and D. Wikler, From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 234-5.
8. D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1984), 378. See for defense of this supposition Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 351-5, and McMahan, "Wrongful Life," 208-9.
9. J. Harris, Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 94. What sense does it make to say that it is in the interest of a child-to-be to be born? A child who does not yet exist does not have any interests! And what sense does it make to say that a child can be benefited by being brought into existence? Existence is not a better state for a child-to-be than nonexistence, when after all the child is not!
10. J. Harris, Wonderwoman and Superman: The Ethics of Human Biotechnology (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1992), 71-2; see also Enhancing Evolution, 95. Compare Buchanan et al., From Chance to Choice, 249.
11. J. Harris, On Cloning (London, U.K.: Routledge, 2004), 88.
12. Harris, Enhancing Evolution, 94. See also J. Harris, "Rights and Reproductive Choice," in The Future of Human Reproduction: Ethics, Choice, and Regulation, ed. J. Harris and S. Holm (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1998), 34-6.
13. J. Harris, Enhancing Evolution, 159. Compare J.A. Robertson, Children of Choice: Freedom and the New Reproductive Technologies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 122, on artificial insemination by donor and surrogacy, and 169, on cloning.
14. By the way, Harris speaks of the "'nonidentity' argument," not "problem" as Derek Parfit called it. See Harris, Enhancing Evolution, 153.
15. J. Glover, Choosing Children: Genes, Disability, and Design (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2006), 24. Compare M. Warnock, "'The Good of the Child,'" Bioethics 1 (1987): 141-55, at 143-4.
16. A. Donagan, The Theory of Morality (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 101.
17. Ibid.
18. D.S. Browning, "Adoption and the Moral Significance of Kin Altruism," in The Morality of Adoption: Socio-Psychological, Theological, and Legal Perspectives, ed. T.P. Jackson (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005), 57. Browning cites texts of Aquinas, Maimonides, and Al-Ghazali. Compare, more recently, M. Midgley, "Rights-Talk Will Not Sort Out Child Abuse," in Children's Rights Re-Visioned: Philosophical Readings, ed. R.E. Ladd (Belmont, Calif...
