Erik Magnusson

According to the consent-based argument for anti-natalism, procreation is always morally problematic insofar as it involves imposing serious and protracted harm on children without their consent and without an appropriate justification, for unlike other cases in which we are morally permitted to harm others without their consent, imposing the harms of existence is not necessary to prevent children from experiencing greater harm. In recent years, several philosophers have issued responses to this argument that attempt to avoid its anti-natal implications. For instance, some have rejected the principle that it is wrong to non-consensually impose harm on persons who are not otherwise at risk of experiencing greater harm; others have sought to demonstrate that this principle is not in fact violated in the case of procreation, either because we are permitted to act paternalistically on behalf of the children we create and so do not require their consent to the harms of existence or because we are normally justified in inferring their consent hypothetically; and others have sought to demonstrate that procreation may nevertheless be permissible if parents perform compensatory duties to their offspring or take sufficiently robust measures to minimize the harm they are likely to experience over the course of their lifetimes. My objective in this paper is to show why these arguments are less persuasive than they initially appear, and hence why the consent-based argument for anti-natalism still presents a serious challenge to the moral permissibility of procreation.

In this paper, I argue that respecting a child’s autonomy requires feeding them a plant-based diet, at least until they develop the capacity to formulate their own judgments about the morality of animal consumption. Drawing on the independence view of autonomy, I begin with the premise that a child’s autonomy is violated when their parents enrol them into particular moral, religious, or philosophical doctrines before they are capable of independently examining those doctrines. I then argue that feeding children animal products constitutes such a violation, as it presupposes a contested view about the morality of animal consumption and involves forcing children to participate in a practice that is based on that view.

This book explores how considerations of justice apply to procreative decision-making. Despite its immense personal significance, procreation is an inherently other-regarding endeavor. By its very nature, the decision to procreate is the decision to bring into existence another morally considerable being, one who will be exposed to the full range of harms, benefits, and risks that accompany a typical human life, and one who cannot by its nature ever consent to being born. Moreover, when this decision is undertaken in a community of persons, it is also a decision to affect the lives of others in a host of profound if often underappreciated ways, from its effects on population size and environmental sustainability to its consequences for a community’s distribution of resources. In many ways, of course, these interests coincide: adults need children for their parenting projects, societies need citizens for the maintenance of their institutions, and children themselves are often happy to have been brought into existence. However, as the book demonstrates, the various interests that are implicated by procreative decision-making can also come into conflict as well, and in ways that raise basic questions of justice. Through a systematic examination of six of these questions, the author argues that taking adequate stock of the conflicting interests at stake in procreative decision-making leads to a narrower view of the conditions under which it is morally permissible to procreate and a much more demanding conception of our procreative responsibilities. Procreative Justice will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on the morality of procreation and related areas of philosophy, including bioethics, intergenerational ethics, environmental ethics, population ethics, and the ethics of the family.

Since the early 1990s, one of the most prominent objections to the use of prenatal or pre-implantation testing to prevent the birth of children with disabilities has focused on the negative judgments it expresses to and about existing persons with disabilities. Commonly known as the expressivist objection, it is based on the conjunction of two key claims: (1) the use or provision of tests to select against disability in offspring expresses negative judgments about existing persons with disabilities; and (2) the expression of these judgments itself constitutes a wrong to those persons. Despite depending on both claims, however, philosophical discussion of the expressivist objection has largely centred on the first: while commentators continue to debate whether disability screening does or does not express negative judgments, relatively little attention has been paid to explaining how the expression of those judgements wrongs persons with disabilities. In this paper, I argue both that whether or not the expressivist objection succeeds will ultimately depend on whether a plausible explanation can be supplied for how persons with disabilities are wronged by the expression of negative judgments, and that the existing literature surrounding relational egalitarianism can provide such an explanation, albeit with important limitations.

Is it wrong to bring new children into existence when there are so many existing children in need of parental care? Several philosophers have defended the view that prospective parents have a pro tanto​ duty to adopt rather than procreate as a means of fulfilling their interest in parenting. The most prominent argument for this view in the existing literature is the rescue-based argument, which derives an individual duty to adopt rather than procreate from a more general duty to rescue or assist those in need. In this paper, I critically examine the rescue-based argument and explain why it fails. First, I argue that we do not necessarily have a duty to rescue in cases that resemble the global orphan crisis, where one’s intervention is merely sufficient to prevent serious harm to a potential victim. Second, I argue that even if we had such a duty, it would not necessarily generate a duty to adopt rather than procreate given the significant financial, emotional, and agency-related costs of adoption, particularly in current, non-ideal conditions. The upshot of these arguments is that the rescue-based argument can only generate a duty to adopt rather than procreate with respect to a relatively small constituency of orphaned children, many of whom are likely to be adopted anyway by willing volunteers. In the vast majority of cases, then, the rescue-based argument does not entail that it is wrong to create new children when there are already existing children in need of parental care.

According to the “reasons-relevance thesis,” why we have children matters for assessing the morality of our procreative conduct. This chapter asks whether, and on what grounds, procreative motives might be politically relevant. Three different grounds for thinking that procreative motives matter are considered—predictiveness, justification, and expressiveness. In addition, reasonable disagreement about procreative motives complicates the extension of the reasons-relevance thesis into the political domain. Taking that disagreement seriously leads to the doctrine of liberal neutrality with its attendant notion of public reason. The application of public reason to procreative motives leads to the Principle of (presumptive) Procreative Motivational Irrelevance. According to that principle, the state must tolerate otherwise morally suspect procreative motives so long as, when acted upon, they do not violate the justice-based entitlements of others; similarly, it cannot tolerate such violations, even if they are motivated by otherwise morally innocuous motives.

In this paper, I explore the prospects for risk-based arguments in favour of anti-natalism, which explain the wrongness of procreation in terms of wrongful risk-imposition on the resultant child. After considering and rejecting two risk-based arguments from the existing literature - David Benatar's and Matti Häyry's - I propose a more promising version that focuses on the lack of appropriate justification for imposing the risks of existence, namely, one that refers to the essential interests of the child on whom those risks are imposed. The paper proceeds in four parts. In Part 2, I set the stage for my discussion by clarifying the basic structure of risk-based arguments and identifying some of their important features. In Parts 3-5, I consider three distinct risk-based arguments for anti-natalism and argue that only the third, justificatory argument has the potential to be successful.

In law and common-sense morality, it is generally assumed that adults who meet a minimum threshold of parental competency have a presumptive right to parent their biological children. But what is the basis of this right? According to one prominent account, the right to parent one’s biological child is best understood as being grounded in an intimate relationship that develops between babies and their birth parents during the process of gestation. This paper identifies three major problems facing this view—the explanatory, adjudicatory, and theoretical problems—and explains how an alternative autonomy-based account is capable of avoiding them.

In this article I reconsider David Benatar's primary argument for anti‐natalism—the asymmetry argument—and outline a three‐step process for rejecting it. I begin in Part 2 by reconstructing the asymmetry argument into three main premises. I then turn in Parts 3–5 to explain how each of these premises is in fact false. Finally, I conclude in Part 6 by considering the relationship between the asymmetry argument and the quality of life argument in Benatar's overall case for anti‐natalism and argue that it is the latter argument that is actually doing the work. In this sense, the asymmetry argument is not only unsuccessful in generating Benatar's anti‐natalist conclusion, it is also unnecessary as well.

Can appealing to children’s rights help to solve the non-identity problem in cases of procreation? A number of philosophers have answered affirmatively, arguing that even if children cannot be harmed by being born into disadvantaged conditions, they may nevertheless be wronged if those conditions fail to meet a minimal standard of decency to which all children are putatively entitled. This paper defends the tenability of this view by outlining and responding to five prominent objections that have been raised against it in the contemporary literature: the identifiability objection; the non-existence objection; the waiving of rights objection, the lack of legitimate complaint objection; and the unfairness objection.

In a just society, who should be liable for the significant costs associated with creating and raising children? Patrick Tomlin has recently argued that children themselves may be liable on the grounds that they benefit from being raised into independent adults. This view, which Tomlin calls ‘Kids Pay’, depends on the more general principle that a beneficiary can incur an obligation to share in the cost of an essential benefit that the benefactor is responsible for her requiring. I argue in this paper that this principle is both generally false and particularly suspect in the kinds of cases that Tomlin needs it to be true, namely, cases in which a benefactor has created the need to be benefitted to satisfy a self-regarding interest in providing the benefit. In a nutshell, I argue that because parents electively put their children into a needy circumstance for the purpose of satisfying a self-regarding interest in meeting their children’s needs, they lack a legitimate claim against their children to share in its associated costs.