A growing band of philosophers, and a smaller number of economists, have wondered how to value a life not yet lived
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Before making that call, any analyst would need more practical details. They would want to know how the smaller population could be achieved, for example: could it be done while respecting everyone’s reproductive rights? But they would also need to answer a philosophical conundrum: what weight to place on the 1bn or so people who would exist in one scenario but not the other?disaster, an official inquiry concluded that ships should carry more lifeboats, despite the expense.
The usual answer is no. The life of your potential offspring “has never been counted as part of the value of saving your life,” notes John Broome, a moral philosopher at Oxford. These lives can go uncounted even when they are the point of a policy. In justifying the public provision of infertility treatment, Britain’s clinical guidelines dwell on the treatment’s benefits for the mother. But they decline to consider the value of the child that might result.
You might object that the never-born child has lost out in some way. Their non-existence is worse for them than the life they could have led. But that is a metaphysical mistake, Mr Broome points out: if they never exist, there is no “them” for it to be worse for. But this creates a moral dilemma. Everyone who gives birth takes an ethical gamble. They hope to bring a happy child into the world. But there is always a chance the child will suffer horribly, perhaps because of a rare birth defect or later accident or illness. Thus in order to do something morally neutral, they run the risk of doing something morally regrettable.
Difficulties of this kind have prompted philosophers like Parfit and Broome to look for a moral reason, and a workable method, for weighing potential people. Parfit was wary of saying that existence is better for a person than non-existence . But even if causing someone to exist is not “better” for a person than the alternative, it might still be “good” for them, Parfit argued in his book “Reasons and Persons”. He quoted another philosopher, Thomas Nagel.
On a planet that already feels overstretched that is not an obviously appealing position. But the same philosophical logic can be recast as a radically green argument. Imagine the world reaches a point of great environmental precariousness, such that every cut in pollution today allows humanity to survive just a little longer. By living less well ourselves, we can, in effect, add another generation to the lifespan of our species.
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