Most people reading this book have been untouched by moral dilemmas in which life and limbs were at risk. Most people reading this book will not meet life-threatening moral dilemmas involving trams. That certainly is so, assuming typical perception of morality’s demands. Readers are unlikely to have been in civil wars, forced to choose between killing innocent villagers and being shot themselves, or, under dictatorships, deciding whether to protest or merely to bind protestors’ wounds, either way running the risk of torture. That is not to say we are not exposed to serious moral dilemmas – but they are unlikely to endanger our lives. Our serious moral dilemmas may be very personal; they may concern marital fidelity, kidney donation or assisting elderly parents, suffering pain and indignity, to die.
Serious moral dilemmas also arise on the bigger stage: should you whistle-blow, exposing your employers’ supply of arms to repressive regimes, yet risking the jobs of your colleagues? A business that benefits from this country’s infrastructure, stability and services, can avoid paying tax by registering as overseas; should it do so? In self-defence, ought a government to authorize the bombing of terrorists operating outside its borders, despite knowing numerous innocent civilians will be maimed or killed? A French humanitarian aid worker, in war-torn lands, is held hostage, threatened with torture and death: are the French authorities right secretly to pay the ransom, despite their international stance against yielding to such demands? Even if the authorities ought not to pay, may it still be right for friends of the worker to do so, if they could raise the funds? Recall the moral differences brought about by agency and relationships (first met through ‘Jim and the Indians’).
As well as big dilemmas, there are, of course, numerous small. The down-and-out on the pavement asks for money; we walk on by, yet should we? We can leave the restaurant without paying for the wine – they forgot to charge us – ought we to tell the staff? A drawing is being sold as junk, as virtually worthless, yet you recognize it as probably a Titian. Should you take advantage of the vendor’s ignorance? There is a water shortage; but you want to water your lawn and no one will notice – should you go ahead?
Reflection on morality may open eyes to further moral dilemmas that we – perhaps too conveniently – tend to overlook. Wealthy people often see no immorality in bequeathing assets to their children, yet know that unknown others are in desperate need of financial help whereas their children are not. Finance executives, professional footballers, celebrities, accept remunerations worth millions; do they really deserve such sums when the unemployed and vital workers – nurses, cleaners, shop staff – receive proportionately so very little?
We have argued that people do not always act in self-interested ways; it is true, though, that our overwhelming concern is usually for ourselves, family and close friends. Doubtful considerations are often provided to justify such focus, such self-interest.
A gift from us to the overseas charity for the impoverished would make only a negligible difference – if the money even reaches the intended people – so it is pointless to give.
Is that true? No doubt money gets wasted, even diverted, but it is likely some lives would still be saved or radically eased. Perhaps we could help in other ways.
Knowing that people are starving to death abroad – and doing nothing about it – is not at all the same as killing them ourselves.
There are differences, but are they morally relevant? Were there a child, desperate for food, in front of you right now, would you not help? If so, why should distance – geography – make so much, or indeed any, moral difference?
I can walk on by, forgetting about the beggars, forgetting about the poor elsewhere, because someone else will help.
Yet should you be the sort of person who leaves any help to others? Is that how you ought to be? What if everyone thought in such a way? Perhaps, in some circumstances, everyone does.
If this country does not supply the weapons to the war-torn regions, others will – so we may as well accept the business, increasing our country’s prosperity.
But do we want to live in a country that prospers through aiding others to torture, repress and harm? Is that really a community we should value – a community in which we want to live?
Reason, it is often insisted, has no role in morality; people have moral beliefs grounded in their feelings or in religion – and that is that. This chapter displays some appropriate reasoning in certain life and death controversies, starting with abortion, to reveal underlying principles and potential inconsistencies. Minds may not change, but at least the unchanged minds will better grasp their moral commitments. Sometimes, of course, minds do change.
Abortion is opposed by millions of people with the firm assertion, ‘Life is sacred’. Splendidly sounding as that is, more needs to be said. Perhaps the underlying principle is:
P1. The intentional killing of a life is always morally wrong.
We simply add:
P2. Abortion is the intentional killing of a life.
It follows that – the conclusion is –
C. Abortion is morally wrong.
We have a valid argument: the conclusion C follows from the premisses P1 and P2. Before we accept the conclusion, we need to know whether the premisses are true. Many abortions occur spontaneously, unintended; many occur in non-human animals. Premiss 2 abortions are meant to be those of the intentional killing of a human life. Let us hereafter read Premiss 2 as true by definition, restricted to intended human abortions.
Premiss 1 is easily challenged. Premiss 1 is rarely accepted, even by those who aver that life is sacred. Millions find nothing wrong with killing non-human animals; vegans rarely object to killing mosquitoes, tsetse flies, and weeds of the garden. Premiss 1 minimally needs restriction to human life; even then, few people truly accept that premiss. Many opposed to abortion favour the death penalty and support wars in which innocent civilians are killed. Even if we think of abortion as the killing of innocent life, the killing may be judged collateral damage resulting from the pregnant woman protecting her way of living. Perhaps Premiss 1 needs to be:
P11 The intentional killing of innocent human life, where the beneficial results do not outweigh the harm of the killing, is morally wrong.
P2 cannot combine with P11 to justify the required conclusion, for some abortions do lead to outweighing beneficial results for the women; yet many people still oppose those abortions. Their morality is deontological, akin to Kant’s: some acts are just wrong, regardless of consequences. Interestingly, when contemplating wars with innocent civilian deaths, those same people often embrace, apparently inconsistently, a consequentialist stance; desirable consequences, such as regime change, receive top priority. The distinction between foreseeing and intending deaths, as earlier found in the Doctrine of Double Effect, sometimes shields them from the inconsistency charge: the abortions are intended, but the civilian deaths are merely foreseen.
Let us place the caveat about beneficial consequences to one side and raise a distinct problem with P11: its focus on human life, its seeming speciesism. What justifies the need for protecting humans when most people accept that non-humans may be killed? That differential treatment seems inconsistent.
The inconsistency is denied. Humans typically possess a feature that (most) non-human animals lack: that is, most humans possess a reflective sense of themselves persisting into the future; they are persons. Human beings suffering extreme Alzheimer’s, if no longer with a sense of self, on this understanding lack personhood. Persons can reason (even if badly) about their interests. Until now, we have been using ‘person’ and ‘human being’ more or less interchangeably, not least because the person/human distinction is drawn in different ways. The distinction, though, one way or another, has moral force – well, so it is claimed. On the one hand, utilitarians could argue that the pleasures of self-aware, persisting individuals with a sense of the future – persons – are greater, or higher, than the immediate pleasures of non-persons. On the other hand, non-utilitarian thinkers, such as Kant, confine moral engagements to creatures with a sense of right and wrong, requiring a sense of self, thus ruling out non-human animals.
Using the person/human distinction, Premiss 1’s principle needs to be understood as:
P12 The intentional killing of innocent persons is morally wrong.
To conclude that abortion is wrong, Premiss 2 would need now to propose that abortion is the intentional killing of persons. Abortion, though, is not that. The foetus must surely be placed on the side of the duck and lamb with regard to awareness, with indeed radically less consciousness, if any at all. No doubt it is wrong to cause a human foetus – duck or lamb – pain, but the painless death of those lives falls, it seems, within the same category. Further, just because the foetus at some stages may experience pain is insufficient reason for rejecting abortions; anaesthesia could be deployed. In any case, the distress of women with unwanted pregnancies easily outweighs any brief foetal pains. It is the killing that is morally challenging.
Religious believers may respond that conception, or some early developmental point, marks the presence of a soul. As there is no biological evidence for a foetus being en-souled, their belief must rest on scripture or be grasped as self-evidently true. Many non-religious believers, though, consider abortion typically to be morally wrong – so let us press on, to see if there are consistent non-religious considerations upholding an anti-abortion stance.
Voluntary Euthanasia: a Slippery Slope?
Moral prohibitions sometimes rest on the cry ‘slippery slope’, a cry often heard over assisted dying – people needing help to end their lives – and voluntary euthanasia, people being killed in their own interests at their request. Permitting either, we shall slide down a slope into accepting forms of involuntary euthanasia – or shall we? Physician-assisted suicide has been legal for years in the US state of Oregon and a few other places, yet with no obvious sliding.
Squares, logical connections: If drawing a square, it logically follows that you are drawing – ‘sliding’ into drawing – a four-sided figure; but if permitted to read philosophy, that does not slide into enforced philosophy-reading. The voluntary is logically distinct from the involuntary. No slide is justified as a matter of logic.
Sheep, empirical slopes: Logic does not show that a sheep must follow the sheep; but the empirical world is such that a sheep is likely, sheepishly, to follow others. If you have a beer, logic does not dictate you having another; but, as a matter of empirical fact, some slide from sensible drinking to intoxication and drunkenness – just as one chocolate can lead to chocolates too far.
Voluntary sexual intercourse: Acceptance of voluntary sexual intercourse does not entail acceptance of rape. No one argues that voluntary intercourse should be prohibited because we may slide into permitting involuntary intercourse. We encourage awareness of relevant distinctions through education, laws and possible punishments.
Voluntary euthanasia: Opponents need to explain why sliding dangers, if they exist, outweigh the involuntary sufferings many undergo, when unable to end their lives. Opponents need also to explain why intending to reduce suffering via morphine is often permitted even when death is foreseen as a result. Opponents need further to explain why establishing the true intentions of those seeking help to meet their death is any more difficult than telling whether killers intentionally killed. The law is no stranger to judging intentions and coercions – to handling areas of greyness.
Potentiality may now come to the fore. Only the human foetus possesses the potential to be a person; thus, human abortions are morally wrong. Here we meet obscurity. A potential X is not an X. Acorns are not oak trees; living humans should not be treated as corpses. If invited to dine on chicken, disappointment sets in if served omelettes made from fertilized eggs. Talk of potentiality could be understood as indicating that human abortions are usually preventing persons (developed humans) from entering existence. If we value persons, then it is morally wrong to prevent items developing into persons. Abortions do just that; they prevent future persons. If that is good reasoning, then contraception, even sexual abstinence, may be morally wrong; they can prevent the existence of future persons.
That last conclusion is unjustified, it is replied, because with a fertilized ovum, embryo, foetus, there is a single entity, tending to develop into a person. The retort is: why should the ‘singleness’ of the entity be morally relevant? An ovum and a spermatozoon could be seen as a unity, albeit with space between its parts. If it is wrong to prevent a fertilized ovum from developing into a person, then it is surely wrong to prevent the fertilized ovum from entering existence. True, there can be vague talk of how a fertilized ovum possesses an active principle of unity, whereas the sperm and ovum could have gone their separate ways; but when a fertilized ovum has resulted, clearly the ingredients did not go their separate ways.
In view of the above, can contraception and abortion be rightly treated as morally different – ignoring indirect considerations such as medical dangers and distress? Here is a proposal: the nearer we approach – in time and likelihood – a person entering existence, the greater the wrong in preventing that existence. The limiting case, at the late end of the spectrum, is the person existing; clearly it is then wrong, prima facie, to halt his continuation. The limiting case at the early end is sexual abstinence, but were abstinence to be forgone, a person may still not result; conception may not even occur. The degree of wrongness, it is being suggested, depends on the likelihood of the action – abstinence, contraception or abortion – blocking the creation of a person. That points to an epistemic feature: namely, what we are justified in believing will likely result from our action or inaction. That feature may also provide some comfort when seeking to justify our greater care for the lives of nearby others than for those far away.
Numerous instances of unprotected sexual intercourse would not ultimately result in persons; hence, contraception is radically less likely to prevent future persons than late abortions. Further, fertilized ova and embryos can naturally fail to develop. Further still, going ahead with a pregnancy now prevents other persons coming into existence: usually a woman cannot be simultaneously twice pregnant. Indirect factors do, in fact, enter the assessment. Very late abortions could generate a casual attitude to human life, running risks of brutalizing human nature.
Biological development – ‘nature’ – offers no sharp dividing line showing when prevention of a future person’s existence is morally acceptable and when not. In practice, lines need drawing. Although of great significance, pragmatic line-drawing required here is otherwise no different from much line-drawing elsewhere. A speed limit is needed, but whether set at 30 mph or 31or 28 – well, it is a matter of decision. Societies draw lines regarding when young people are deemed capable of consent to sexual intercourse. In Britain and many US states, that line is age sixteen, though we know full well that some younger individuals are capable of giving informed consent just as some older are not.
Many people yearn for the ‘black or white’, thinking there must be a determinate way of telling whether something is right. Morality, though, breathes in areas of grey. Consider the colour spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, and so on. Central cases of red clearly differ from those of orange, yet there is no determinate borderline between the two. There are many clear-cut cases of what is right and what is wrong; but regarding the generation of people, we meet grey areas – and we next see further factors contributing to that greyness. Before doing so, it is worth noting that philosophers who deploy the human/person distinction are not arguing that, before deciding how to treat a human being, we must judge whether a person is present. We naturally treat human beings as persons and human babies as developing into persons. There are, though, difficult cases, cases we ‘naturally’ find difficult, where our inclinations need moral reflection and where right actions may yet be performed in sorrow.
We have not yet spoken of the rights of the woman and of the foetus. ‘Rights’ talk can muddy waters; here the talk is shorthand for intuitions regarding basic moral principles. A woman surely should be free to do with her body as she wants, providing she is not harming innocent others; that is her right. Innocent human beings – or, at the very least, persons – surely ought not to be killed; they have a right to life. Put that simply, we have the question again of whether foetuses are persons; but here is a different line.
The Violinist (a tale sketched in ‘What does morality demand?’) is an influential analogy offered by Judith Jarvis Thomson. Let us pretend the foetus is a person with a right to life. The tale suggests that abortion may still be rightly permissible, and not only when the woman’s life is endangered. Indeed, even if that latter danger holds, we need a reason why the mother’s life should take priority over that of the foetus. Let us say you are the woman in the hospital. On awaking, you find the man, a violinist (as it transpires), plugged into your system. The man needs special lymphocytes that only your blood supplies. So long as he remains plugged, he is fine; and so are you. Well, so are you – except for the inconvenience. Wherever one goes, the other goes too. The man has a right to life, but does he have a right to your blood supply?
The right to something does not typically entail a right to whatever is required for that something. In particular, the right to life does not guarantee the right to whatever is required for life. You have not granted the violinist the right to your blood supply. He is, so to speak, trespassing; hence, you are under no obligation, in terms of rights, to put up with him. The analogy, though, leads to the exposure of degrees and greyness in what morality demands.
First, whether someone has a right to your body depends on circumstances, on what has been agreed or is reasonable to believe. Did the hospital have a known reputation for using patients in that way? Were you aware of the risks? Secondly, even if there is no question of rights, there are other relevant factors. You ought not to be callous and unkind; you would be, if you stopped the man’s intrusion, when his need was just for one day. You would be a saint to put up with him for a lifetime; he should not demand that. After a while, perhaps he should voluntarily suggest the unplugging. Morality, one may feel, cannot demand saintliness.
Significant differences exist between the violinist-plugging and pregnancy, but also similarities. Even though we are pretending the foetus is a person, we may now see how pregnancies from rape merit treatments different from those of consensual sex, especially where pregnancies from the latter were initially sought. If a woman insists on her right to remove the trespassing foetus because she has changed her mind, now realizing that pregnancy prevents her easy painting of toenails, we should be appalled; and so too if the sole reason for the abortion is that the pregnancy interferes with a planned ski trip. Mind you, if the woman is that way inclined, maybe she is unlikely to be a suitable parent, perhaps pointing to an abortion being appropriate – or adoption.
Thomson introduced the Minimally Decent Samaritan, someone who appreciates that morality extends beyond rights to the virtues: for example, to compassion, generosity, courage. It can be wrong to insist on one’s rights. In cases of pregnancy – and of the plugged-in violinist – what it is minimally decent to do is not solely a matter of respecting rights, but also a matter of moral character, of preparedness to be kind, to help another fellow creature. A woman may suddenly feel unable to go ahead with a desired pregnancy because the father has absconded; as minimally decent, though, she may appreciate the need for courage, harmonizing with the tenderness she feels for the being she is carrying.
The value of Thomson’s Violinist is to draw us away from the thought that abortion is always immoral or that a woman’s right to her body always has absolute priority. Here, as elsewhere, morality troubles us because it presents grey areas, matters of degree, of judgement, of different circumstances. Morality surely does not judge a young victim of rape as callous if she has an abortion. Morality presumably is not so favouring of a woman, greatly and voluntarily pregnant, who suddenly insists on her right to have the foetus removed, without reason. It would be casuistry at the level of sophistry for her to argue that she intends removal, but does not intend the foetus’s death, merely foreseeing it.
Whatever people say, the right to life, even if restricted to persons, is not treated as absolute, as paramount. If we seriously held human life paramount, we should resist climbing mountains, imbibing alcohol and rushing down stairs. We should probably withdraw from perils of love and lust, especially in countries permitting ‘honour killings’. Mere existence, although necessary, is hardly sufficient for our fulfilment. We enmesh lives in relationships, intimacies, activities and causes, exposing ourselves to physical, psychological and emotional risk.
Most of us – certainly in Western societies – prioritize high-quality living for ourselves over securing even minimal requirements for the lives of many others. Businesses promote consumerism; they encourage feelings of failure if we lack the latest electronic gadgets or wear clothes out of fashion. Consumerism consumes our attention, putting the dispossessed out of mind. Within wealthy countries such as Britain and the US, a certain number of the elderly, frail and poor die of cold each winter. Were greater help given towards heating costs, their lives would be enhanced; deaths would be fewer. Instead of providing that help, governments spend money elsewhere – building high-speed trains, entertaining guests at receptions or yielding to demands for lower taxation.
Other people’s right to life fails to persuade us to help much towards their means for life – unless on our doorstep. Perhaps it should. Perhaps the typical understanding of what morality demands fits too snugly into what is convenient – convenient for us to justify our own luxurious living. Sipping the college sherry, discussing moral nuances while in comfortable armchairs, may not be the best context for assessing what morality requires regarding the suffering of millions. Ethics as an academic subject may risk too much detachment – just as do certain moral theories and certain cultural and religious beliefs.
Focusing solely on our own lives, we are still inconsistent. Consider John Harris’s Survival Lottery, derived with or without armchair. Background assumptions are that there is always a shortage of organs for transplant and there is a significant risk that, one day, we shall need a transplant – a kidney, for example – yet none will be available. Current availability rests on various accidents, including accidents of whether the deceased ever consented to donation. Here is the lottery solution.
Let the names of all healthy people enter the Survival Lottery. Tickets, randomly drawn, determine which healthy individuals, the ‘winners’, will be painlessly killed, their organs used for required transplants. One healthy person is a potential donor of a range of organs, so the likelihood of you – of any one of us having our name drawn – is lower than the likelihood that, without the lottery, we shall one day need an organ, yet none be available.
Virtually everyone is repelled by the proposal. True, on the proposal, innocent healthy ‘winners’ lose or ‘give up’ their lives; but without the lottery, innocent unhealthy people lose their lives because of shortages of available organs. At least the lottery draw is fair. The key objection to the lottery is probably Kantian in spirit. We should be deliberately using lottery winners solely as means to an end; we prefer, it seems, to leave whether we live or die more to the (un)lucky draws of nature.
Remaining within the Kantian spirit, respect is due to persons, to autonomous beings; no one should be forced to donate one of his kidneys. Individuals in persistent vegetative states, with no chance of regaining consciousness, though, could have organs removed, their lives unaffected, for they no longer exist as persons; they are but living shells. Often there is reluctance by relatives, though, to permit use of organs in such circumstances. That could derive from doubts about diagnoses, but perhaps from lingering beliefs or hopes that while a body breathes, a soul is present.
Advocating use of organs from the ‘living dead’ does not mean anything goes regarding the bodies of those deceased. As noted earlier, a person’s interests extend beyond his life. We should typically respect deathbed wishes; we ought not to defile corpses. That does not mean that living organs should be left to wither, not helping others to live. Unless contrary to the deceased’s earlier informed wishes, making use of his organs is surely rational, sensible and can be performed with respect. We may yet hesitate over that proposed sensible rationality. Perhaps a person and his biology cannot be separated so easily, even conceptually. ‘Life and death’ matters can make us morally queasy.
COMMODIFICATION: WHAT CAN MONEY BUY?
Some items, commodities, can rightly be bought and sold. Other items ought not. Children – people – ought not to be traded. Mistreating people as commodities differs from mistreating them as objects. A woman may use men as sexual objects without viewing them as commodities to market. Natural beauties, the Grand Canyon – or buildings, the Great Pyramid of Giza, King’s Chapel, Cambridge – are objects, yet we should be appalled at bringing them to market.
Sullying and enhancing: Once such items are viewed as commodities, valued in monetary terms, Oscar Wilde’s quip applies: there are those ‘who know the price of everything, the value of nothing’.
Money can sully. If Nathan has befriended Lady Ludmilla solely for her wealth, then that casts doubt on his friendship. When parents pay children to ‘make friends’ with their lonely child; they buy pretence, not friendship. Of course, relationships change. Genuine friendships can develop, thereby continuing without cash calls.
Money can enhance. Although value from working should not be solely monetary, people are not respected if paid badly. The awkward question arises: what counts as ‘fair pay’?
The money trail: Zach and Amelia sat the same exams for high-flying employment. Zach gets the job, not because he is wealthier, but because his exam answers were better. Why were they better? He received a better university education, though not because of wealth, but his school grades were better. Why were they better? He attended a better school than Amelia – but surely not because of… wealth? Well, yes. His parents could afford costly superior education for him. Money, not just merit, can be the route to success.
We should be appalled at higher grades awarded, if exam answers arrive with large cheques. Exams should be fair; people should succeed through talent. The mindful wealthy, though, ensure their children are better placed than others. Which merits higher priority: equal educational provision or liberty to buy superior education?
Similar questions arise over medical care, even equality before the law. Defendants who instruct expensive lawyers do so because they believe their cases will be better put than otherwise.
Creating children is a moral matter – and not just one about who will look after them. Think of the controversies and unease over allowing would-be parents to select their children’s gender or to abort foetuses with likely impairment. Whose interests do we have in mind? Consider the following.
A couple’s child is desperately ill, in need of bone marrow transplantation. The parents could have another child, a ‘saviour child’, genetically similar for successful marrow donation. It sounds as if the saviour child will be used, immorally, solely as means to an end. The ‘solely’ ascription, though, may be mistaken. The sole motive for the pregnancy is to help the sibling, but the child once born may still be treated as an end in himself. The creation of children often results from a motivational mishmash, yet is not thereby morally suspect. Indeed, child creation motives are often absent – alcohol and sexual intoxications may be high – yet the offspring outcome is usually valued.
Marrow donation causes discomfort; assume here that there are no lasting adverse consequences. Moral worries persist. How could parents live with themselves, if not helping their child in need by producing the saviour pregnancy? Yet, how will the saviour child feel when of an age to learn what happened? Had he known, maybe he would have agreed to donate; perhaps now he values having helped his sibling. Or does he feel abused? He could simply be pleased, reflecting that, but for the saviour need, he would not have existed. That latter observation leads to moral puzzles over non-existents, as we shall now see.
Start with women who decide not to bear children. May possible children, possible people, have a moral claim? ‘Why did you not create us, providing us life?’ The question is absurd. Those children do not come into existence, so there is no one who is directly harmed through non-creation – a thought voiced by Henry Salt, an English social reformer:
A person who is already in existence may feel that he would rather have lived than not, but he must first have the terra firma of existence to argue from: the moment he begins to argue as if from the abyss of the non-existent, he talks nonsense.
Salt’s reflection – for someone to be harmed, that someone must exist – does not undermine would-be parents’ concern about future offspring. Before conceiving, a woman may sensibly resist smoking, alcohol and recreational drugs; in line with Mill’s thinking, she may also ensure sufficient financial resources. She is being procreatively beneficent.
Consider a couple intent on having a child; they learn that if conception occurs now, the child will be born severely disabled, a lifetime of pain ahead. Perhaps the woman has a genetic disorder. Will they not harm that currently non-existent child by going ahead with the planned family? It would surely be immoral knowingly to create a life of pain; yet if that child is not conceived, there is no child who has been saved from harm. How can a benefit be delivered to a non-existent?
Add the supplement: by waiting three months without conceiving, the woman’s disorder is corrected; a conception can then take place, a healthy child resulting. The thought may be:
It would be better for your child if you delay conception.
That is paradoxical. It cannot be better for the child not born, to be born later – for there is no such child. If delay happens, then the (unhealthy) child who would have been conceived is not conceived. Someone else gets conceived and born – according to current biological theory. Conception deferment seems right; but, what wrong would be committed, if the woman went ahead now, giving birth to a distressed child, growing into a suffering adult? Would that be a ‘wrongful birth’?
If the non-delayed conception goes ahead, presumably harm rests, in part, on whether the resultant child’s life is harmful to him (or others). If he is pleased to be alive, then no overall harm has been done to him; mind you, a healthy child, who would have been conceived three months later, misses out on existence. That missing is no harm, given the reasons of Salt. If, though, the child ends up feeling he would rather not have been born, then he has been harmed. Hence, if the couple decide not to proceed with the conception now, they could be benefiting someone who forever lacks existence, namely the child who would have been born, yet wished he had not. That retains the paradoxical ring.
Ignoring the question, if even sensical, of whether it is better never to have existed – maybe pains in life inevitably outweigh pleasures – there remain questions of the moral permissibility of affecting lives that we do intend to create. Most (would-be) parents seek to influence their offspring, though the outcome may well be disappointing. Some parents prefer a child with lots of siblings; others do not. Some could well elect for interventions, were they possible, to produce children with yens for baseball, others for chess – with blue eyes, others with brown.
Our morality undoubtedly rests with an idea of what minimally constitutes a biologically healthy human life. Most people are appalled at deaf parents who deliberately want their children to be deaf, preventing medical interventions to cure any expected deafness. Such parents argue life for all of them would be better with their children as part of the deaf community. We should resist that argument; it would apparently justify such deaf parents deliberately causing deafness in babies born with good hearing.
Here it is worth noting how conditions that we should avoid may yet, in particular cases, lead to beneficial results. Consider a young, frivolous, aimless man who, because of a bomb blast, loses his legs; as a result of that tragic loss, he becomes determined to make something of his life. After immense effort, he triumphs in the Paralympics; he becomes a model for other people disabled. His life – the view from his ‘here and now’ – has meaning. He looks back and values, sincerely values, the earlier tragedy; but no one would seriously suggest it is therefore good to blow people’s legs off. Return to the woman who, if she conceives now, will bring a disabled child into the world. She goes ahead with the conception. She loves the child; the child grows into an adult, perhaps pleased to have been born – yet we may still rightly believe the conception morally ill-judged.
Typically we support therapy, curing diseases, correcting for genetic defects; yet we may frown upon enhancements designed to take children beyond ‘natural’ abilities. Perhaps the fear is that a superclass could be created by those sufficiently wealthy to pay for intelligence and beauty enhancements for their offspring. Perhaps the frowning manifests a fear of society with eugenics programmes, permitting only certain types of humans to exist.
Preferences for certain characteristics in offspring can manifest a disrespect for existent individuals lacking those characteristics: consider those who want only sons, aborting daughters, or those who would embrace therapies designed to prevent children from becoming homosexual – or even atheist. Preferences over children’s characteristics, though, do not have to imply disrespect for individuals lacking the desired characteristics. To note that everyone would prefer not to be paralysed – and would eagerly have a foetus treated to avoid paralysis when born – does not remotely imply disrespect for paralysed people now existing. Valuing contraception does not imply a low opinion of people who result from contraceptives not being used.
As ever, we seek lines – here lines between morally desirable and undesirable enhancements. As ever, there are smudges rather than lines; after all, it is undoubtedly good to have more or less eradicated smallpox, but would it be good, through foetal enhancements, to eradicate poor mathematical ability, sexual jealousy or melancholy? Of course, such questions bring forth puzzles again of our free will, and how far others should be permitted to determine our character traits, our nature.
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Matters of life and death, as just seen, involve the medley of moral concerns, the motley cargo encountered in our review of various moral theories. The topics here have been viewed mainly within the personal realm, but, of course, they are affected by societal surroundings. That raises questions of which interferences are permissible by a state and its laws – and how surroundings, wider still, may morally impinge on us. Morality extends beyond the personal, beyond the community – maybe beyond even those beings who are sentient, to the environment as a whole.
We are about to feel the long arm of morality.