Erstwhile roomie Glen raises a point I sort of dodged in the post below, partly because it was already way too long, partly because I’m not sure what the right thing to say is. What I suggested was that there’s a tension between the idea that it’s counterproductive to shame or judge young prospective mothers and fathers, and the idea that we do want to say there’s something bad about having a child under circumstances that typically present a variety of problems for the child, because we want to encourage young people to take precautions against having kids before they’re really ready.

The problem here is that you can’t really coherently talk about this as a harm to the child, since the alternative to a child being born to young parents and facing the problems associated that is for the child not to exist. If they postpone childbearing and have another kid later, that kid may have an easier time of it, but it will be a different child. And as Derek Parfit has argued, the obvious candidates for general principles to determine our obligations to future persons (when we can affect not only the welfare but the identity of those persons) all yield some kind of paradox or otherwise unappealing conclusion.

It might be tempting there to say: Fine, these different identity situations are just incomparable, and so long as the child born in whatever suboptimal circumstances doesn’t literally wish he had never been born, there’s not much to say either way about the ethics of having the child. I once wrote a paper defending just that position. But that, too, has some intuitively very unappealing implications. Suppose couple are planning a child, and one has a condition that will make any child they have very severely disabled, mentally and physically, but with a life just barely worth living (from its own perspective). The child will not quite regret having been born, but only just. The incomparability principle entails that if the afflicted partner can just wait a month, take an inexpensive pill, and cure this condition, there is nothing moral (as opposed to prudential) to say in favor of doing this. And that can’t be right either.

I don’t really have a well worked out resolution to this—if I did, Ethics would presumably be banging on my door for a paper submission—but here are a few quick thoughts. Whether or not we’re dealing with these sorts of different-identity cases, I very much doubt the right way to think about parental duties to children is as a subset of a general consequentialist obligation to promote better outcomes. And this may mean that certain kinds of principles are open to us that Parfit rejects because he’s fundamentally concerned with a different kind of question. Consider this summary of Parfit’s take on the proposal that some other threshold above merely “having a life worth living” might be the right baseline for evaluating choices that lead to there being more people:

[One] might argue for some threshold above the level at which lives become worth living but below which additional lives would nonetheless make the situation worse. Parfit argues that for this position to be plausible, such a threshold would be so low as to apply only to lives that are “gravely deficient” and which, “though worth living … must be crimped and mean.” Parfit calls this hypothetical threshold the “bad level,” and argues that its existence would not resolve the paradox because population A would still be better than an enormous population with all members having lives at the “bad level.”

The trick here is that while prospective parents can’t be thinking of their obligations in the familiar person-based terms of harms or benefits to particular, determinate children, neither is it terribly illuminating to think of their choices in terms of what “makes the world” better or worse. They are still thinking in terms of what will be good for their child, even when “their child” is as yet just a placeholder term.*

So we might intelligibly say that it violates some parental obligation to intentionally bring a child into the world (or fail to take precautions against this) without being reasonably assured of being able to provide it with a certain level of care, resources, capacities, and so on, even where the child would clearly have a life “worth living,” and even a life that was not “gravely deficient” in the extreme sense Parfit’s talking about. Moreover, we might say this without any implication that this child’s life “makes the situation worse” somehow, because questions of parental obligation just aren’t about “how the world is” in some broad or abstract way. And it’s not because it makes the child “worse off” than it could be—you need two bound variables for “worse” to be a coherent predicate—but because that baseline is built in to the project of responsible parenthood. That’s just a rough stab, and I’m not sure how or whether it can be fleshed out in a satisfactory way, but that’s where I’d start.

*Tangent: Think of Rawls’ emphatic claim that parties behind the veil of ignorance are not just thinking of themselves as having an equal probability of being any member of society, which would yield utilitarianism rather than his Difference Principle. I’ll confess I never quite fully grokked precisely how his alternative is supposed to work, but I have always had a sense that there’s something there, and that it’s connected to this problem.