Marcus T.L. Teo

In this short paper, I detail a case against Dr Guido Pennings’s latest publication in the Journal of Medical Ethics, titled ‘The moral obligation to have genetically related children”. I argue that Pennings, despite raising awareness of issues of bioethical and scientific import, fatally neglects to interact with a central debate in reproductive ethics: the non-identity problem (NIP). Taking the NIP seriously, we can see that the moral obligation that Pennings argues for falls victim to the same kinds of issues as the principle of procreative beneficence, which Pennings also cites. This response then considers the possibility of damaging upshots if Pennings’s arguments were read uncritically.

In this article I aim to paint a novel picture: that parents who birth children with lives worth living are cases of moral good luck. To do this, I paint the standard picture of moral luck, and then extend this to show that childbirth is, in essence, an exercise in moral luck. I refer to this as the Parental Gambit. In reflecting about how ex ante knowledge informs our biases in evaluating the deontic status of moral luck cases, I posit the Resultant Moral Luck Asymmetry of Parenthood, which states that a parent remains blameworthy if their child turns out not to have a life worth living but is not praiseworthy if their child turns out to have a life worth living. I consider possible counterarguments against my account towards the end of the paper.

In this short paper, I detail a case against Dr Guido Pennings’s latest publication in the Journal of Medical Ethics, titled ’The moral obligation to have genetically related children”. I argue that Pennings, despite raising awareness of issues of bioethical and scientific import, fatally neglects to interact with a central debate in reproductive ethics: the non-identity problem (NIP). Taking the NIP seriously, we can see that the moral obligation that Pennings argues for falls victim to the same kinds of issues as the principle of procreative beneficence, which Pennings also cites. This response then considers the possibility of damaging upshots if Pennings’s arguments were read uncritically.

Treatment-resistant depression (TRD) holds centrality in many debates regarding psychiatric euthanasia. Among the strongest reasons cited by opponents of psychiatric euthanasia is the uncertainty behind the irremediability of psychiatric illnesses. According to this argument, conditions that cannot be considered irremediable imply that there are possible remedies that remain for the condition. If there are possible remedies that remain for the condition, then patients with that condition cannot be considered for access to euthanasia. I call this the irremediability requirement (IR). I argue that patients with TRD can, indeed, meet the operationalisation of irremediability in the IR. This is because the irremediability it asks for is not some global or absolute irremediability, but rather a present irremediability based on the current state of medical science. I show this by considering irremediability relating to (1) possible future treatments and (2) not trying presently available alternative treatments. I extend Schuklenk nd van de Vathorst’s argument from parity to terminal malignancies, to show that (1) is an unreasonable expectation for all cases of euthanasia. Taking (2) as a more serious opponent to psychiatric euthanasia, I show how the IR, based on how it is presently operationalised, can be realistically applied to cases of TRD. I do this by further developing Tully’s argument on broad-sense treatment resistance with the robust empirical data from the STAR*D trials. If my argument from Tully’s is valid, then we have reasons to, again, seek parity between the operationalisations of irremediability in terminal malignancies and TRD.

This essay begins from the point that developments in antinatalism, or the view that it is wrong to bear children, place legitimate pressures on prospective parents to seriously consider the harms of bringing their prospective children into existence. This essay does not defend antinatalism but instead considers an upshot of bioethical import if one takes these antinatalist pressures seriously. Attending to the debate on the normative legitimacy of Savulescu's Principle of Procreative Beneficence (PPB), I argue that antinatalist pressures give rise to reasons that count in favor of the PPB. I show how an antinatalist‐corollary version of the PPB might be derived and how we might respond to the PPB's main criticisms and conceptual difficulties.

This article starts by examining the present state of death ethics by attending to the euthanasia debate. Given that voluntary active euthanasia has seen strong support in the academic community, insights on the choiceworthiness of continued existence may be derived. Having derived cases of choiceworthy nonexistence (which I refer to as choiceworthy nonexistence [CNE] cases), I extend these intuitions to lives not worth starting, or choiceworthy nonexistence for potential people (which I refer to as foetal‐CNE, or fCNE cases). Although I depart from Benatarian antinatalism by rejecting Benatar's claim that all existence is necessarily a harm, I posit a weaker argument that all existence is likely a harm since we cannot know until later in life if an existence is a harm. If I am right, then we have prudential reasons not to bear children, since they are more likely to suffer in lives not worth living than not.