by I’ve seen a bit of discussion about a provocative little essay in the New York Times by Peter Singer called “Should This Be the Last Generation?” http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/should-this-be-the-last-generation/?hp The central question, as you might guess, is that given the damage humans do the earth, and given the (obviously contestable) observation that many or most people experience suffering in excess of the happiness they enjoy, would it make sense for us all to agree not to bring any more children into the world? We could quit feeling guilty about using up resources and causing global warming, because there wouldn’t be any future humans to suffer the bad consequences of these actions. Singer seems tempted by the idea but in the end rejects it, in part with the hope that our species will learn to live more sanely and sensibly.
In the course of his interesting reflection, Singer suggests (again, contestably) that “we think it is wrong to bring into the world a child whose prospects for a happy, healthy life are poor, but we don’t usually think the fact that a child is likely to have a happy, healthy life is a reason for bringing the child into existence. This has come to be known among philosophers as ‘the asymmetry’ and it is not easy to justify.” This suggestion reminded me of a little essay that I did about ten years ago for a workshop at UNLV, called “Missing Persons,” 2 Nevada L. Rev. 590 (2002). The essay may be the wackiest thing I’ve ever written– and I recall the UNLV faculty staring at me dumbfounded as I presented the idea, as if I were a complete lunatic– and to my knowledge the essay has never once been cited anywhere (an embarrassment I hereby remedy– imprudently, probably). I don’t remember the details, but the basic problem arose from the conjunction of the common assertion that every life is of inestimable value (or “infinitely precious,” as we sometimes say, ignoring stodgy economic teachings) and the basic notion of what economists call “opportunity costs.”
Grant for purposes of argument the first point– that every life is precious. On this assumption, we think it a sad loss when, for example, a child is killed by a car accident or a disease. Now add in the point about “opportunity costs”– i.e., that the failure to realize a good is as much a loss or “cost” as the deprivation or destruction of a good already realized. (Your bank account is as much impoverished by your failure to pick up the $20 bill on the sidewalk as by the loss of the $20 bill that was in your pocket. I realize that psychologists find people’s reactions to these events differ, but from the economic perspective these different reactions are not entirely rational.) Putting the points together, it would seem that every failure or omission to bring into existence a person who could have been brought into existence is as much a loss of the precious value of an individual life as the death of an existing person is.
I understand that this conclusion has implications that nearly everyone, including me, finds wildly implausible. (It tends, for example, to suggest a sort of moral equivalence among murder, abortion, contraception, and celibacy.) For that reason, most people with whom I’ve raised this question simply dismiss it out of hand (which may be what the question deserves). Occasionally someone has taken my question seriously and tried to explain where my reasoning goes astray, but the explanations have never satisfied me. Maybe the most common response has suggested that only existing people have “rights”– which may be true (I wouldn’t know; I pretty much throw up my hands whenever “rights” are invoked as an answer to any genuine question) but seems to me beside the point. So, with misgivings, I once again present the question, just in case anyone finds it interesting or has anything to offer.
Steve,
To summarize your points:
1. Every life is precious.
2. A failure to realize a good is equivalent (in economic terms) to losing a good…failure to pick up $20 is equivalent to losing $20….failure to bear a child is the same thing as losing a child.
3. Therefore, “it would seem that every failure or omission to bring into existence a person who could have been brought into existence is as much a loss of the precious value of an individual life as the death of an existing person is.”
Assuming I have your argument roughly correct, the difficulty I see is that the $20 analysis proceeds on the calculus of the benefit to the individual in question. Let us suppose that the individual is running to catch a baby falling from the building and elects to ignore the $20 on the sidewalk in favor of catching the baby. The individual is $20 poorer, but one baby richer. Similarly, assume an individual gives up reproduction for a lifetime of working towards the salvation of souls (say, a celibate priest). The individual has not lost (say) 4 – 10 lives in the process by failing to reproduce. Such an argument would seem to hint that a married man ought to be out procreating with many other woman if his wife were pregnant, infertile, etc. Every life IS precious. Every conceivable life in the best of all worlds is simply that – an idea or conception. Rather, the celibate has simply determined that something else – salvation of others’ souls (assuming a correct orientation of mind) is important.
Well, it’s true that for the (potential) parent there is a tradeoff. That’s a tradeoff that people have to face all the time. Have a child and suspend my career, or . . . .? But often people believe that’s the wrong way to look at it, because even if I might think that my own life would be more rewarding if I were to just enjoy myself or single-mindedly pursue my career or whatever, there’s the whole matter of the preciousness of life for the other person– i.e., for the child-teenager-adult. So maybe my own life would be more satisfying and happy if that person never came into existence, but what about him or her? His or her life is “infinitely precious,” however he or she might affect me. Certainly we think this way after the child is born: it would be monstrous for the parent to think, You know, my life was better before you came into it, so . . . .
The opportunity cost point suggests that this reasoning could apply just as much before the child is conceived/born. There is a potential person that I (along with a partner, of course) might or might not choose and act to bring into existence. If brought into existence, the person might help make my own life more rich and happy, or maybe not. But what about him/her, and his/her “infinitely precious” life? From this perspective, it’s not clear that anything turns on whether this person has already been conceived/born or not.
Again, someone might try to get out of the problem by saying that potential but unconceived persons have no “rights.” And again, that observation, even if correct, seems to me beside the point– relative to this line of reasoning, anyway.
Here’s my crack at your argument, for what it’s worth-
I think the submlimated premise (at least in the version of the argument you are presenting here — I haven’t read your prior paper) is that we have an independent duty to maximize particular goods. Notice, for example, that the normative force of ‘opportunity costs’ in your argument varies with one’s perception of the plausibility of this principle. If you think we lack any general duty to maximize goods, then “opportunity costs” as such are unlikely to motivate us (despite the loaded language, and however we might be motivated to achieve a particular good in any given situation). On the other hand, if you think we do have a duty to maximize goods, then the concept of opportunity costs is likely to be felt as a full-blown normative category, because it will be seen to be a category necessarily capturing instances where particular goods are lost (in violation of the relevant principle).
This doesn’t answer your argument, but it recasts it in terms of a more general ethical problem which philosophers have gestured at or noticed before. (I think Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion poses an ethical puzzle similar to yours by similarly screwing with our intuitions vis-a-vis the plausibility of a maximizing principle. I could be wrong though.)
The essential question which has to be faced is whether we have a general duty to maximize good for any particular good. (I call this a goods-maximzing principle, notice the plural “goods”). The principle initially seems very plausible, but as your argument and others show, it has really bad consequences if followed through.
If this is the general problem, how to resolve it? I suspect that the way out of these puzzles lies in specifying precisely what we mean by “good” and by distinguishing between a principle requiring the maximizing of goods (plural) and one requiring action which brings us nearer to The Good (or something like it). The reason the goods-maximizing principle initially seems plausible to us is because we are confusing it with the correct nearer-to-The-Good principle.
Strictly speaking, there is no contradiction in affirming that, by maximizing goods, we might get further from attaining The Good. Your argument underlines this point: the picture of the world resulting from following your proposed principle is a worse picture, which is some evidence that we lose The Good (in some relevant sense yet to be specified) by following it, even if we also maximize some goods (plural) thereby.
Sorry to ramble. It was a thought-provoking post…
I would want to be more than usually tentative in responding to this interesting commentary. But I’m sympathetic to the distinction Michael proposes, and generally sympathetic to the view that various goods can’t be commensurated and aggregrated into any overall Good. As for any duty to maximize either particular goods or the Good, for these purposes I think I can be agnostic about that. For that matter, I think for these purposes I can be agnostic about the connection if any between the assertion that some thing or some state of affairs is good and the question of anybody’s duty or motivation to pursue, achieve, or maximize that good. However one comes out on that question, I think the problem that bothers me still arises.
Basically, the question is this: if you say (as many people do, and as I would) that the life of every actual, born person is “infinitely precious,” or a distinctive and significant value, or something of that sort, can you consistently decline to say that the failure to bring into existence a person who could have been given existence and whose life would have been “infinitely precious” or whatever is the loss of a comparable good? It seems to me that the question should be askable of and meaningful for people regardless of their views about duties to maximize goods, etc.
I guess I can say, with you, that the failure to bring into existence any particular person who might have been brought into existence is the loss of “a” good. But I don’t see why this ought to worry us at all in general, unless we adhere to the wrong sort of goods-maximizing principle. So it’s still not clear to me why you think in the first place that we ought to be necessarily worried necessarily in cases where we lose “a” good, even one of unique, intrinsic, incommensurable, inestimable value (which is how I’m taking you to mean “infinite” here). Where the “loss” of such a particular thing of value does not mean we are necessarily moving further from the ultimately ideal Good (overall), and especially where it may mean we are moving closer to that ideal, it seems to me obvious that we have “lost” nothing at all ultimately.
By the way, notice that your argument can be run for all kinds of intrinsic goods of unique, intrinsic, incommensurable, and inestimable value. Think of all the magnificent art that hasn’t been created! all the pleasure that hasn’t been experienced! all the friendships that have gone uncreated! all the wealth that doesn’t exist! etc. Does this give us duties to create or experience any of these things maximally? (The question here is not whether there is an antecedent maximization principle, but whether your argument produces one. If so, then it produces one equally for all of these goods, at least if they really are pricless.)
Better strike a “necessarily” from the above.
Also, it occurs to me that the loss of an infinite good isn’t the same thing as an infinite loss of good. (To the extent we can make sense of “infinite” here at all; I suspect the word means different things in each half.) The latter certainly does sound really bad to me, but, fortunately, I don’t think that your argument shows we have to worry about that at all. “Loss of an infinite good” also sounds pretty bad at first blush, of course, but upon reflection and analysis (of the sort provided in the prior post), it doesn’t appear to be anything generally concerning at all.
Hmm. I think Michael is making a valid and valuable point, and I need to mull it over more. (In my case, this sort of mulling often takes years.) But it seems right that in many instances we do say, “Well, by choosing to realize good X, I necessarily failed to realize good Y, which admittedly would have been a really valuable good. But I had to choose, and I chose X.” Nothing especially worrisome about that. In fact, life would be impossibly complicated and tragic if we couldn’t say that.
Even so, it seems more worrisome when the X that got chosen was, maybe, a little extra disposable income, or a better house, or whatever, and the Y that went unrealized was the hugely and distinctively valuable good of a human life. (“Infinitely precious” is, I think, a sort of metaphorical or exclamatory phrase, surely not a precise measure, but it still is an attempt to express something.) In that case, one still could say, “Well, I chose X.” But many people would feel very uncomfortable admitting that the choice involved the loss of the distinctively valuable good of a human life. They wouldn’t want to say that. Instead, they would want to deny the opportunity cost point. They would want to say and think that the failure to realize a human life is completely different than the destruction or loss of a life already in existence. But why? That’s the part I have trouble with.
Another way of trying to see this is to think of the case (which I think is pretty common) of a couple who is trying to decide whether to have a child. Maybe it’s a close call, and they go back and forth (“I’d have to take a break from the law firm, and there’d be less money to go around. But babies are so adorable.” etc., etc.), and maybe narrowly decide to have a child. Later, the child is there in the flesh, blowing out the birthday candles, or going to prom, or whatever, and maybe occasionally the parents think with dismay, “We almost decided not to have her . . .,” and the prospect now seems almost unthinkable. Not because the child has brought them a net increase in satisfaction– maybe, maybe not– but because she is a person, “infinitely precious,” and the cosmos would somehow be tragically impoverished if she weren’t in it. But why is the post hoc assessment essentially different than the ex ante assessment was?
I’m not sure I entirely understand the puzzle, but I think I get some of the overall drift of it. You seem to be combining cost-benefit analysis with a view of value that defies cost analysis, which is of course bound to produce problems. That may show we have inconsistent intuitions about such things, which suggests one or more of the intuitions may be wrong.
Singer would shrug at your puzzle, since utilitarianism doesn’t accept the intuition that a person has intrinsic value (in the relevant sense). From that point of view, it’s easy to show how bringing another person into the world can produce more pain than pleasure in some cases, so the puzzle doesn’t arise.
Utilitarianism need not reject the intuition entirely. It can recognize that we might value something in a way that, for many purposes, removes it from cost-benefit analysis. That can be understood, for example, in terms of pleasures and pains so great or of a kind as to not be commensurate (or commensurable) with other kinds of pleasures and pains. But it could have been different. The child who has come to be “infinitely precious” could have been miserable and destroyed the lives of the parents, or simply failed to capture their love. The risk of that would rise by thoughtlessly multiplying children.
If you reject utilitarianism and insist on the intrinsic value of persons, then it is indeed a puzzle how to do cost-benefit analysis (as Michael suggests). How does the intrinsic value of a person compare to that of experiencing a color? Both are irreplaceable, and can be seen as of inestimable value in that sense. If you can work out that puzzle, then you can carry out cost-benefit analysis, I suppose. For example, any system that recognizes a potential negative value corresponding to the positive value of human life can reach a conclusion like the utilitarian one above about multiplying people without regard to what their lives will be like.
Another aspect of your puzzle seems to hinge on differences in how we treat potential and actual value. The potential child ought to be worth as much as the actual one in cost-benefit analysis. That may be true in some respects, but there are differences that can apply in cost-benefit analysis (e.g. the greater risk of the potential), and we have already invested in the actual child, and already have relations to it that don’t and often can’t exist with a potential child. That involves things like rights, which you seem to want to avoid, but they’re surely important here.
I should try to be more clear that I never supposed or meant to suggest that the value of a human life could be plugged into any “cost-benefit” analysis in the sense that the life’s value could be quanitified or rendered commesurable with other values or anything of that sort. (Of course, economists do try to do that, but that isn’t what I was concerned with.) Maybe I send the wrong signal by talking about “opportunity costs.” I just thought that this familiar notion could be used as a helpful way to make a point that people probably can acknowledge whether they are economists or utilitarians or whatever: namely, that the failure to realize a good is a real loss, even though that loss may be less noticeable to us (and thus less lamented) than the destruction of a good that is in view. In thinking (as we often do, it seems) that the death of a child, say, or an adolescent or young adult is something to be deeply lamented but that the failure to conceive a child that could have been conceived is not, we seem to ignore or deny this point. I’m just not sure whether or why we’re justified in doing that.
“But I had to choose, and I chose X”-
Just to emphasize a little bit, on my account, I’m not suggesting, I don’t think, simply that we are necessarily choosing the lesser of two evils by choosing not to create a particular good. Where a choice could be one that gets us closer towards a positive ultimate good (in a way not merely instrumental), I think it would be a mistake to think of that choice as (necessarily) the lesser of two evils. Casting it this way doesn’t do justice to the way in which we are (or could be) constituting the good by choosing against creating some particular good in some particular case.
The reason I emphasize this is because I’m afraid that in the “lesser of two evils case” we actually really do have something to regret in our choice, even if it was the correct choice. And, for my part at least, this feels like the wrong judgment (insofar as, in fact, we don’t properly have anything to necessarily regret in the sorts of cases you have in mind.)
It’s a small point, probably, and I may be reading too much in to your response. (This is all hasty stuff.) But I want to make really clear that, pace your intuition apparently, I really do not feel anything necessarily to be regretted in your sort of case (the sort of case where some particular “infinite good” could be created but is not), and I’m puzzled that anyone would.
I’m not disagreed, incidentally, that our moral choices generally ought to be free of improperly selfish desires and considerations, and ought to take into account a proper view of the good, which itself must place and order particular goods (including the intrinsic good of persons) within its own conception. (Just what that proper ordering is, I’d rather not say.
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I appreciate the exchange. I find that ethics is interesting stuff, and often trickier than you’d guess at first blush.