“How Can Procreation be Permissible?” | Jeff McMahan

UC San Diego Philosophy Department
Ethics in the Public Sphere Series
June 3, 2021

Professor Jeff McMahan, White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University, a distinguished research fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and a fellow of Corpus Christi College.

Abstract: Most people believe that the expectation that a person would have a life worth living does not in itself provide a moral reason to cause that person to exist. Most of us also believe that there is a moral presumption against inflicting a harm on a person even if in doing so one would confer on that person a benefit of equal or even somewhat greater magnitude. We also accept that there is a presumption against any act that risks causing a person to have a miserable life. Taken together, however, these claims seem to imply that there is a moral presumption against procreation. For in choosing to have a child, one causes the conditions in which the child will inevitably suffer harms and one also risks creating a person whose life will be miserable. Although there is a high probability that the harms will be outweighed by benefits, so that the life will be well worth living, most believe, as I noted, that these considerations are not reasons in favor of having a child that weigh against the reasons just cited not to have a child. Hence the question in the title. Is procreation morally justifiable only when the interests of existing people – in particular, potential parents – override the moral objections to procreation? Or might a small risk of a miserable life be morally offset by a high probability of a good life? And might a small number of miserable lives be morally offset by a sufficiently large number of good lives?