Marcus 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.

The ‘one voice’ doctrine holds that the executive’s recognition of foreign states and governments is conclusive evidence of their status as such in English proceedings. However, the doctrine—properly understood as an irrebuttable presumption of status—is beset with theoretical and practical problems. Here, I argue that courts should abandon it, for three reasons: first, the doctrine is motivated by overbroad accounts of the executive’s foreign affairs prerogative; second, it suffers from inconsistencies on matters of scope, which its underlying justifications cannot resolve; and third, the doctrine creates conceptual incoherence, undermining the purpose of other doctrines which operate contingently upon it. In its place, courts should adopt an alternative rule, triggering a rebuttable presumption of status and attributing evidential weight to executive certificates, which avoids these problems while still serving the ‘one voice’ doctrine’s only legitimate purpose: helping courts reliably answer questions of status.

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.

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.