Antinatalism and proxy consent

Consider the consent argument for antinatalism (the view that human reproduction is morally wrong) that we shouldn’t impose great risks on people without their consent, but by having a child one imposes great risks on them (life may turn out really badly), and one cannot get consent.

One obvious response is that we are willing to accept proxy consent in medical decision making when the patient is incapable of consent. And of course in the case of a child, normally the first people we turn to for proxy consent are the parents. So it seems reasonable to think that proxy consent from the parents should take care of any worries about the child’s not having consented to come into the world.

What kind of a response can an antinatalist give?

One response is that the whole idea of proxy consent in medical cases is itself bogus. We just should not do medical procedures on children or other non-competent persons that are of a sort that would require consent—say, procedures that are highly invasive or significantly change the course of future life in ways that are not unambiguously for the better. If it is a choice between amputating a child’s leg or letting the child die, we should just let the child die, because a choice whether to live without a leg is the kind of choice that a person should make, and if they cannot make that choice themselves, no one should make it for them.

This seems implausible. It seems pretty clear that we shouldn’t let a child with a gangrenous leg die when the parents consent to amputation. But perhaps the antinatalist can try to distinguish the cases of procreation and amputation. In the amputation case, the child already exists and will suffer a painful death if we do not amputate. Perhaps that overrides the autonomy concerns to a sufficient degree that proxy consent becomes sufficient to justify the amputation. I think that doesn’t work. We can suppose that the child is unconscious, and that in the absence of amputation death will be painless. And it still seems permissible to amputate with parental permission.

A response that I’ve seen is that the fact that standard medical proxy consent cases differ from the procreative case because one cannot even give proxy consent on behalf of someone who doesn’t exist. But this response seems to me to be rather problematic. For if one thinks one cannot give proxy consent on behalf of someone who doesn’t exist, it seems that by the same token one cannot violate the autonomy of someone who doesn’t exist.

But actually both ideas seem false. We can violate the autonomy of someone who doesn’t exist. For instance, we can manufacture a robot that is going to be dormant for 25 years, and will then activate, choose a random 20-year-old and forcibly perform cosmetic surgery on them, radically changing their appearance. By manufacturing the robot we are violating the autonomy of someone who doesn’t exist. And similarly it seems quite possible for prospective parents to provide proxy consent for emergency medical procedures prior to the existence of their children. For instance, supposing (in violation of antinatalist norms) they have several children and expect to have several more, and are afraid that they will forget to sign emergency medical consent forms for their future children, so they sign a blanket consent form for single-leg amputation in case of otherwise untreatable gangrene for all of their present and future children.

Another possible response is that while it’s acceptable for parents to give proxy consent for medical procedures for their incompetent children, the life they create in procreating will one day be the life of a competent person who never agreed. However, this just doesn’t create a disanalogy, because in a number of cases of proxy consent for medical procedures, the child’s entire future life is affected, including the future life once the child reaches competency—this is true in typical cases of amputation.

Furthermore, the idea that one cannot give proxy consent for things that can have significant negative effects on the future life of a competent person, but one can in the case of things that only affect the parts of life when the person is incompetent, leads to the following really weird consequence. A couple is ordinarily not permitted to have a child, but if they find out that they have a genetic condition which will result in the painless death at age four of any child they have (after an ordinary life, without any suffering beyond the ordinary), and if there is no afterlife, then they are permitted to have the child, because their proxy consent does not affect the future life of a competent person. That finding out about this condition would make procreation permissible, while it would be impermissible absent the condition, seems absurd.

Kantian antinatalism

Intuitively:

1. It is permissible to deliberately have children.

But there is a powerful Kantian antinatalist argument against (1). To decide rationally to have a child, one needs to have a purpose for the child’s existence. But to have a purpose for another person’s existence, no matter how good that purpose might be, is to treat that other person as a means rather than as an end. And that’s wrong.

Assuming the Kantian thesis that it is wrong to have an end for another person’s existence, the only way to block the argument against (1) is to find a way to rationally motivate having a child without having to have a purpose for the child’s existence. How can this be done?

So one needs a reason to have a child which is not grounded in having a purpose for the child. Such reasons can exist. For instance, if I promise you to make a scarf, my reason to make the scarf is grounded in my promise to make the scarf rather than in any purpose for the scarf itself.

This points to a way out of the Kantian antinatalist argument. A couple might have a duty, perfect or imperfect, to attempt to have a child. If so, they need not have a purpose for the child, but only a purpose to attempt having a child. Such a duty could come from a divine command or from some kind of natural law perspectives (both of which are compatible with the broadly Kantian opposition to treating others as mere means).

Few people, apart from Catholics, Orthodox Jews and optimistic utilitarians, think there is any duty to have children. But thinking that there is such a duty may be the best way to get out of Kantian antinatalism.

Natural Law and the epistemology of permissions

It is hard to know that something is permissible, because an action is permissible provided that no moral consideration is decisive against it. Thus, it seems, to know that an action is permissible requires surveying the infinite set of all possible moral considerations and checking that none of them rules out the action.

But natural law ethics provides a handy shortcut:

1. Actions characteristic of a kind of being are permissible in relevantly normal circumstances.

Principle (1), for instance, makes it difficult to defend strong versions of antinatalism or of ethical vegetarianism by conferring a default permission status on reproduction and the eating of meat, since we are organisms (and hence characteristically reproduce in appropriate circumstances) and omnivores (and hence have a characteristic diet that includes meat).

The natural permission principle shifts the discussion from the question whether a given action type, characteristic of us humans, is generally permissible, to the question whether the circumstances at hand are relevantly normal. Thus, (1) still leaves open the possibility of an antinatalism that holds that things are so abnormally bad that it’s wrong to reproduce, or an ethical vegetarianism on which global conditions require us to forego meat.

Subscribing to principle (1) also explains the incredulous stare I see on students’ faces when I explain Andrea Dworkin’s view that heterosexual intercourse is always wrong.

Permissibility of the natural

The usual way to argue that an action is permissible is to argue that the arguments against the action’s permissibility fail. But it would be really nice to be able to give a more positive argument for an action’s permissibility. Sometimes one can do so by showing that the action is obligatory, but (a) that doesn’t help with the permissibility of non-obligatory actions, and (b) often an argument for the obligatoriness of a positive action presupposes the action’s permissibility (e.g., the obligation to kill a dog that is attacking one’s child when no other means of defense is available presupposes the general permissibility of killing dogs with good reason).

Here is a place where Natural Law (NL) can provide something quite useful, namely this principle:

1. If A is a natural action, then normally A is permissible.

This principle could, for instance, be used to generate intuitively compelling positive arguments for such controversial theses as:

2. It is normally permissible to eat animals.

3. It is normally permissible for us to reproduce.

4. It is normally permissible for us to prefer those more closely related to us.

In addition to Natural Lawyers, theists in general might have reason to endorse (1), on the grounds that our nature comes from God.

Of course, there is always going to be a difficulty in determining whether the antecedent of (1) is true.

Non-theistic non-NL theories are unlikely to endorse (1) except as a rule of thumb. And it will be an interesting explanatory question on those theories why then (1) is true even as a rule of thumb.

The needs of the human community

Andrea Dworkin argued that sexual intercourse between a man and a woman is always wrong because it involves a violation of the woman's bodily integrity. She concluded that until recent advances in medical technology, it was impossible for humans to permissibly reproduce. The antinatalists, on the other hand, continue to hold that it is impossible for humans to permissible reproduce. Such views lead to an incredulous stare. It is very tempting to levy against them an argument like this:

1. Coital reproduction is necessary for the minimal flourishing of the human community under normal conditions.
2. Whatever is necessary for the minimal flourishing of the human community under normal conditions is sometimes permissible.
3. Coital reproduction is sometimes permissible.

The condition "under normal conditions" is needed for (2) to be plausible. We can, after all, easily imagine science-fictional scenarios where something immoral would need to be done to ensure the minimal flourishing of the human community.

Reproduction is not the only case where issues like this come up. For instance, the destruction of non-human organisms, say plants, seems necessary for our flourishing. And I suspect that under normal conditions the killing of non-human animals is necessary, too (if only as a side-effect of plowing fields, say). Taxation may be another interesting example.

I have heard it argued that (2) is in itself a basic moral principle, so that killing non-human animals as a side-effect of vegan farming is permissible because it is permissible to ensure minimal human flourishing. But that seems mistaken. Rather, while (2) is true, it is not a moral principle, but a consequence of a correlation between (a) fundamental facts about what moral duties there are actually are and (b) facts about what is actually needed for minimal human flourishing under normal conditions.

This leads to an interesting and I think somewhat underexplored question: Why are the moral facts and the facts about actual human needs so correlated as to make (2) true?

Theists have an elegant answer to this question: God had very strong moral reason to make humans in such a way that, at least normally, minimal flourishing of the community doesn't require wrong action. Non-theists have other stories to tell. These stories, however, are likely to be piecemeal. For instance, one will give one evolutionary story about why we and our ecosystem evolved in such a way that eating persons wasn't needed for our species' survival, and another about why we evolved in such a way that morally non-degrading sex sufficed for reproduction. But a unified answer is to be preferred over piecemeal answers, especially when the unified answer is compatible with the piecemeal ones and capable of integrating them into a single story. We do, thus, get some evidence for theism here.