Eighteen IS IT IRRATIONAL to HAVE CHILDREN?

Eighteen

IS IT IRRATIONAL TO HAVE CHILDREN?

Richard Ashcroft

1. Matti Häyry’s Argument

Matti Häyry has advanced what he takes to be a knock-down argument against the rationality of child-bearing for everyone. It goes like this:

I am convinced it is irrational to have children. This conviction is based on two beliefs that I hold. I believe it would be irrational to choose the course of action that can realistically lead to the worst possible outcome. And I believe that having a child can always realistically lead to the worst possible outcome, when the alternative is not to have a child.1

He also has a version concerning the immorality of having children:

I am also personally convinced that it is immoral to have children. Chil- dren can suffer, and I think it is wrong to bring about avoidable suffering. By deliberately having children parents enable suffering which could have been avoided by reproductive abstinence. This is why I believe that human procreation is fundamentally immoral.2

I will not here address the immorality argument, which turns on fundamentally the same conceptions of formal argument and of causation, outcome, comparison between suffering and non-existence. The issue of the relationship between the rational and the moral is too complex to go into here. Here I am in- terested in the questions of rationality raised by this argument. Before we go any further, it is worth setting this argument into the context of Matti Häyry’s previous work. One interpretation might go as follows: in this paper (and in his reply to critics3) he is simply drawing a logical conclusion from a previous paper4 in which he argued that it is both irrational and immoral to bear children who are at risk of perinatal infection by the mother with HIV. In fact in this paper, he conflates the rational and the moral, as (some) consequentialists often do. Here is what he says:

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The normative starting point of this paper is simply that avoidable suffering should not be inflicted, by acts or omissions, on actual or prospective individuals, unless even greater suffering can thereby be alleviated or prevented. This is a position I share with many contemporary philosophers of the consequentialist tradition.5

In this earlier paper (first presented in 1995) he concentrates on the policy options for preventing, or reducing the number of, births of HIV positive babies, taking it as given that to be born HIV positive is to be born harmed. He then generalizes to other kinds of disorder, disease or disability:

I agree that it would be wrong to single out HIV carriers, and blame only them for bringing suffering children into existence. I do not however, wish to restrict my comments to them. Everybody who intentionally or negligently allows avoidable suffering in reproductive matters is equally guilty, be the source of suffering medical, social or hereditary.6

The relevant difference between the argument in 1995 and the argument of 2004-5 is that in 1995 he was comparing the state of children born with HIV with that of children born without (other things being equal), whereas in 2004- 5 he was comparing the state of children born with the state of non-existence (if state it be). Notwithstanding the notorious difficulties involved in comparing the state of existence with the (non-)state of non-existence, or in comparing children born in different possible worlds with different characteristics,7 many people would want to say that a child is harmed in some relatively com- monsense terms if it is born HIV positive, and this could have been avoided. As Matti Häyry says in his 2004 article:

The conclusion relies on the judgement that human lives can sometimes be bad. Individuals who see their own lives as good, and assert that everybody else’s life must be similarly assessed have frequently challenged this view. Many actual people believe, however, that they would have been better off had they not been born. This is often the essence of “wrongful life” charges on which individuals have sued their parents or medical providers for damages. These legal claims may be controversial, but it cannot be disputed that at least some of the people in question genuinely see their lives as worse than non-existence.8

Now in recent work Julian Savulescu has applied consequentialist reasoning consistent with Matti Häyry’s 1995 argument to ground a principle of procreative beneficence, such that would-be parents are obliged to ensure that any child they bring into being is as well off genetically and environmentally as they can manage. Crudely put, to do less than this is to harm the infant, since

Richard Ashcroft - 9789042027404 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:33:13PM via free access Is It Irrational to Have Children? 185 there is, relative to these parents, a possible infant in comparison to whom this actual infant is worse off.9 This, if you like, is the “positive utilitarian” version of what Matti Häyry is attempting in “negative utilitarian” guise in 1995 and in 2004-5. I must confess that I feel more comfortable, metaphysically, with the positive utilitarian version of the argument, since we are comparing identifi- able individuals and their measurable welfare, albeit across distinct logically possible worlds, rather than individuals with non-individuals.10 Nonetheless, I do not feel that this is the interesting element in the argument here. Intuitively, we do make such comparisons, although we may be wrong to do so; theoretically, there may be ways to reconstruct our intuitions appropriately in order to make nearly equivalent comparisons. But the power of Matti Häyry’s argument lies with its claim to rationality rather than any more or less debatable metaphysical or epistemological claims about the substantive matter of possible comparison. In this I think at least Bennett and Aksoy partially miss the point. Before we leave this question of negative or positive utilitarianism, it is interesting to recall what Matti Häyry said about this issue in his major theoretical statement, Liberal Utilitarianism and Applied Ethics (1994):

An axiological variant which is closely related to the “need” and “interest” approaches is “negative utilitarianism,” which states that it is not the maximization of pleasure but the minimization of pain that counts in the moral assessment of actions. … [I]t can be argued that the most effective way to minimize suffering in the world would be the extinction of all sentient life forms. But nihilist normative conclusions like this are widely regarded as immoral.11

Later he argues that, on his own needs-based reconstruction of utilitarianism, this “negatively hedonistic strategy” would be blocked:

Since many sentient beings recognize in themselves a need to survive and a need to make autonomous choices concerning their own lives, the prin- ciples of liberal utilitarianism would not condone the minimization of suffering by minimizing the number of beings who have the capacity to suffer.12

Indeed, at this point he allows that “even granting that the removal of pain and misery is more urgent than the promotion of positive happiness, it cannot be denied that it is the latter that provides life with its ultimate value.”13 This qualification is surprising in the light of the position he reaches in 1999, in an essay investigating the normative and axiological foundations of John Harris’s work in applied ethics:

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Although the fully voluntary extinction of humankind ought to be condoned, there will, one could argue, always be people who want the human race to continue to exist. As these individuals cannot legitimately be forced to cooperate, the extinction must presumably be condemned.14

Here he admits that one can assume “that individuals can have a serious need to have their own children”. Given that his own liberal utilitarianism has as an axiom the following:

The principle of other-regarding need frustration When the need satisfaction produced by various action alternatives is assessed, the most basic needs of one individual or group shall be considered only if the satisfaction of those needs does not frustrate the needs of others at the same hierarchical level.15

This is hardly surprising, but what is clear is that for Häyry although we may be barred from compelling others to adopt this pain minimization strategy (of non-reproduction) by this principle, we are fully entitled to talk them out of it. Hence, in 1995, he argues that firm social disapproval is a legitimate tool of persuasion to discourage HIV positive women from having children at significant risk of HIV infection, and in 2004-5, he says:

I am fully aware that other people have different moral views on this and other matters. I do not think moral considerations are universal, overrid- ing commands, as some philosophers do. I think they are opinions which I am entitled to express freely in private and in public, as I think other people should be entitled to express their opinions.16

While in 1999 there is an ambiguous note to his suggestion that voluntary extinction be “condoned”, as it is in the context of whether John Harris’s views about the impermissibility of voluntary extinction are consistent with John Harris’s negative utilitarian views (as Häyry sees them), by 2004 the ambigu- ity has passed, and Häyry is advocating quite explicitly a voluntary extinction- ist position. This seems to involve a retreat from his 1994 view that positive pleasure was of legitimate interest to the utilitarian and analytically distinct from the simple absence of pain or suffering. In retrospect, his admirably liberal and humane, dare I say Enlightenment, version of utilitarianism of 1994 has now been fully driven out by a Schopenhauerian version of utilitarianism, in which the only reason not to annihilate the human race (and other sentient creatures) is that doing so coercively would create even more anguish, through the violation of autonomy and the frustration of certain basic, if irrational, needs.

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2. Defeating Häyry’s Argument

Having set out Matti Häyry’s argument for the irrationality of procreation, I have set it into the context of his work on utilitarianism and its applications. I think grounding it in his previous work on “wrongful life” due to foreseeable medical or genetic harms or wrongs to future people shows something of the point of the argument, as well as illustrating its structure more perspicuously. But of course the argument is a formal one, standing on its own feet, and although this contextualising work may help orient the mind, we should perhaps disregard it in evaluating the argument. Other commentators have suggested two lines of attack. The first is to dispute that the form of rationality Häyry has taken to be normative in decision situations of this kind is in fact inapt to this sort of choice.17 The second is to dispute Häyry’s axiology.18 According to the first line of attack, Häyry’s approach to rationality is no more or less than the precautionary principle, which, it is argued, is not normative for rational choice and fails to be action- guiding in any useful way.19 I find this entirely convincing. Although Häyry in his 2005 paper20 denies that he takes it to be the only criterion of rationality, it is clear that sometimes21 this is the criterion he is using to mount this argument. However, I don’t find this argument against what Frank Jackson calls “decision-theoretic consequentialism” entirely conclusive, since something structurally very like this kind of rationality is at work in many (most?) com- monsense decisions and choices, and so if it fails in this kind of low risk (but serious consequence?) situation, it is probably the axiology that is at fault, rather than the criterion of normative formal rationality.22 An alternative, which I shall explore, would be to say that this kind of rationality is not rationality tout court but only a specific model of rationality embedded within a more general model. Häyry, in his reply to his critics23 accepts this possibility, without acknowledging that this means that failure to adhere to the require- ments of this decision-theoretic rationality is not in itself irrationality tout court. Suppose, then, that we grant the possibility that decision-theoretic rationality just is rationality tout court. Suppose further that we accept (pace Bennett and Aksoy) Häyry’s axiology, and in particular his proposals for the compara- bility of welfare between states of existence and inexistence of persons. And suppose, finally, that we accept that within decision-theoretic rationality is embedded (at least) classical first order propositional calculus, so that we are allowed to draw standard inferences from combinations of propositions. Then it does look as if we are committed to accepting Häyry’s argument for the irrationality of procreation. One way to block the argument, for those who accept his more obviously persuasive argument that it would be wrong to expose a foetus to a serious risk of HIV infection perinatally, would be to deny that existence (and any associ-

Richard Ashcroft - 9789042027404 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:33:13PM via free access 188 RICHARD ASHCROFT ated suffering) is formally comparable, in all cases, to existence with HIV. We could say: existence does involve some suffering, arguably as a necessary con- stituent of life. We could try to run an argument that such suffering, while bad in itself, is part of what constitutes the good life, considered as an “organic unity.”24 All things considered, although there are some organic unities which are overall bad, such as an infant life HIV positive and without access to treatment (perhaps), most are not. We can distinguish between a life with some suffering in it, from a life of suffering, and indeed a significant part of moral philosophy is devoted to doing just this and explaining how it can be done. However, Häyry may reasonably respond that his axiology does not permit this move, and that the distinction drawn misses the point that suffering, if bad, is bad and to be avoided even when the good things and experiences of life predominate. So we cannot pursue this line of argument while accepting his axiology. Another approach might be to deny that we “allow” avoidable suffering by procreation. We might say that it is a foreseen, but not intended, consequence of an act whose intended consequence is a life of flourishing and value. Only where this act cannot reasonably be expected to have this good consequence, and where the foreseeable bad consequences cannot be minimized below the point where they outweigh flourishing or pleasure, should we desist from procreation. This is a “double effect” argument. However, given the uncertainty of the positive outcome of a procreative decision, it is hard to see that this helps much, on Häyry’s premises. It does not appear to preserve our intuitions in the HIV case, since it allows one to reject that argument as much as the general argument.

3. Why Kill Time (When You Can Kill Yourself)25

I believe that Häyry’s (apparent) extinctionism gives us a clue to the way out here. On Häyry’s argument, we have a rational argument for suicide. Indeed, a strong rational argument (since it seems to make suicide rationally required, rather than only rationally permissible). For if “it would be irrational to choose the course of action which can realistically lead to the worst possible outcome”, this means that continuing to live is irrational. I have no reason to suppose that tomorrow I will not be violently waylaid by gangsters or terrorists, subjected to horrible violence and humiliation, and left to a life of self-loathing and bodily agony. Continuing to live leaves this possibility perpetually open, and the way the world is going appears to involve the probability of this outcome rising. It might be objected that my continuing to exist and procreation affect different people. And so they do. But perhaps not in a morally important way. If it is states of suffering with which we are concerned, it really doesn’t matter who is in that state, and whether that state is a state of my future self, or of

Richard Ashcroft - 9789042027404 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:33:13PM via free access Is It Irrational to Have Children? 189 some other future self. We are not here concerned directly with morality (where we might distinguish between harming oneself and harming another) but with rationality, and the principle of avoidance of the worst possible outcome of decision-making, judged non-morally. And yet I continue to live, and I hope so does Matti, for many years to come, other things being equal.

4. From Suicide to Procreation

French-Algerian writer Albert Camus famously explored the absurdity of continuing to live in his The Myth of Sisyphus. This theme has been explored in- sufficiently in English-language bioethics. The application of this thought here suggests a variety of responses to the irrationality of procreation argument. One obvious observation is that it shows that there is nothing specific to procreation in the irrationality argument, other than filling in with “procreate” in the following argument schema:

To choose a course of action that can realistically lead to the worst possible outcome is irrational To is to choose a course of action that can realistically lead to the worst possible outcome Therefore, to is irrational.

The very generality of this schema suggests that we are in trouble, since it is hard to conceive of an action to specify which does not make good semantic sense of the schema. As noted above, part of the problem may be with the se- mantics of “realistically lead to the worst possible outcome.” Following on from this thought, we might reasonably argue about whether to ascribe this characteristic to actions is not really to pick out any morally relevant features of the action (if we allow that any action can go wrong), and indeed need not be the “privileged” description of the action in question. Indeed, we might say that to say of an act that it can go wrong is merely to say that it is an act. It seems at least superficially plausible that the capacity to misfire or generate unintended consequences is a necessary feature of action per se. So concentra- tion of this feature of actions does not pick out which actions are to be pre- ferred or dispreferred. This argument is attractive, but has all the advantages of “theft over hon- est toil.” We do after all characterize some acts as reckless or negligent, and hence more likely to misfire than actions which are not reckless or negligent. Here all Häyry needs to show is that of the option set {procreate, don’t procreate}, procreate is more likely to misfire than don’t procreate. Note in pass- ing that as a consistent utilitarian, Häyry’s theory of action includes a denial of the act/omission distinction, so that the given option set is a set of actions

Richard Ashcroft - 9789042027404 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:33:13PM via free access 190 RICHARD ASHCROFT which are comparable, rather than the murkier comparison between acting and not acting. What he does not deny, however, is the existence/non-existence distinction, so that there is a genuine difference between continue to exist and don’t continue to exist. While I think there is some mileage in the semantic argument, I will not pursue it here, as it takes us too deeply into the theory of action and the theory of descriptions.26 Another approach would be to argue that the no-procreation- suicide-instead result is a reductio ad absurdum of the argument schema. Thus, although we cannot show that the schema leads to a strict contradiction, no “reasonable person” would accept in informal reasoning a set of premises entailing such a conclusion. Were it not for the consistency of Häyry’s argu- mentation over the past 10 years and the fact that he has published versions of this argument several times, and rebuttals of criticisms of this argument, one could even think that he intended the argument to be taken as a reductio. But I think this unlikely. It is, however, clear that this reductio was foreseen in his 1994 thoughts on the problems of negative utilitarianism, even though since 1994 he has changed its mind about whether it is ad absurdum. We might be somewhat more generous, and argue that there is in fact nothing wrong with Häyry’s argument here, and that the validity of his argument scheme and apparent acceptability of his premises entails that the argument is sound. Thus, he (with our help) has established an antinomy of practical reason. This is, in its turn, a conclusion supporting a sort of absurdist approach to living and procreating. We can neither justify these activities, nor their rejection. We simply choose, beyond reason. There may be a dialectical argument which grounds a particular resolution of the antinomies, but there will always be something fishy about this resolution. So, our tour around Häyry’s arguments may lead us to the following conclusion:

The choice to procreate cannot be justified consistently with decision- theoretic consequentialism and its embedded rationality. But neither is it irrational. The decision is thus a pure choice.

5. Rationality and Procreation, Revisited

I showed how Häyry’s argument could be understood as a generalization of an argument against bearing children subject to actual or probable serious medical or genetic disorder or disability. I then showed how the general argument, if taken in full generality, amounted to an argument for a rational requirement to commit suicide. I reviewed various ways to block this argument. The most natural, I concluded, was that we take the argument not to establish the irrationality of procreation, but instead the existential absurdity of both procreation and non-procreation.

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In a sense this is a cheering result. It shows—if correct—that while it is not rational to have children, neither is it irrational, and this is an example of a domain of human freedom not bound by rational necessity.27 And in one sense, this is coherent with an understanding of child-rearing as an assertion of human creativity and liberty in self-fashioning. However, I think that although this argument gives us a clue to how we should reason about procreation, it is incorrect as it stands. An unsettling feature of Häyry’s argument is that it does draw on one sort of reason against procreation, or at any rate for caution in procreation, which is acknowledged widely, viz., that to bring some kinds of children into the world, or to bring children into the world under some circumstances, is inad- visable where there is an alternative. A mistake in Häyry’s approach is to ex- aggerate the force of reasons which may apply in some specific circumstances by taking them to give a categorical argument against procreation as such.

6. From Rationality Back to Reasons

In my discussion of Holm’s critique of Häyry’s reliance on the precautionary principle, I suggested that the rationality of decision-theoretic consequentialism could be embedded in rationality tout court. By this I meant that although for some purposes decision-theoretic consequentialism did indeed give normative criteria for decision-making, this was not in general the case. Some kinds of decision-making subject to reasons are not appropriately modelled by decision-theoretic consequentialism.28 Consider first what Häyry’s rational argument took for its premises—statements about beliefs. It was because it involved statements about beliefs that he was able, uncontroversially, to set out his argument as a syllogism. The next stage in his argument was to give accounts of why we should share the beliefs he laid down as premises in the syllogism. This is then purely an argument within theoretical reason. Now, in addition to theoretical reason, we have practical reason, which concerns normative reasons for action: what we ought to do, given what we want (and any moral motivations we may have). On the standard belief-desire model of phi- losophical psychology, it is clear that although beliefs about states of affairs should follow the norms of theoretical reasoning, it need not be the case that reasons for action have this structural constraint. As John Broome puts it, we weigh reasons:

Intuitively, weighing is characteristic of goods. When we judge which of two options is better, we typically think that each option has some good and some bad features, which have to be weighed against each other. So we can use weighing as a criterion for what counts intuitively as a good. It is not the right criterion for the purposes of a theoretical account of

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good. A theoretical account of good might allow one good to dominate another lexically, which rules out weighing.29

In the Häyry argument for the irrationality of procreation, it is assumed that some sort of domination should apply, which permits the risk aversion written into his account of decision-theoretic consequentialism not merely to be something shared by some to a greater or lesser extent, but actually to be normative for everyone.30 The badness of suffering lexically dominates the goodness of other features of existence, albeit through the veil of uncertainty. A second feature of practical reasoning and its structure is that it need not be subject to the law of excluded middle. If I have an option set with two members, of which only one can be realized, it need not be the case that practical reason tells me which I should realize. Suppose I live in a country where Sibling’s Day is celebrated every year, and it is traditional to visit your sib- lings on that day. Suppose I have two brothers, equally dear to me, with whom I am on equally good terms. Sadly, they are not on good terms with each other, due to a failure on the part of one brother to visit the other one Sibling’s Day a few years ago. Recently, they moved to opposite ends of our (very large) country, and it is no longer possible to visit both within 24 hours. Pick a brother. I have good reason to visit him, so I ought to do so, other things being equal. However, by permutation of the options, I have equally good reason to visit the other, other things being equal. I cannot visit both within 24 hours, and neither is willing to visit me since they are unwilling to risk meeting each other. It would be unthinkable for me not to visit at least one brother. My reason to visit either brother does not contradict my reason to visit the other. Some further reason is required to motivate my choice of which brother to visit. Another feature of practical reason is that it involves reasoning on the ba- sis of desires that I have. Such desires need not be consistent; my preferences may not be coherent. Internal conflict of desires is familiar to us all, and although some philosophers do argue that desires can be rationally corrected, it is part of the phenomenology of desire that changing or moderating one’s desires, or resolving conflicts between desires, is difficult and painful. This suggests two things: first, that the structure of practical reason, to the extent that it reflects the structure of my desires, need not be particularly tidy. Second, the relationship between desires and reasons for action will be in part causal rather than rational. What I desire may cause me to desire it; that I desire something may cause me to see something as a reason for acting; what I take to be a reason for acting may, sometimes, alter my desires. In a sense this is why practical reason is considered practical—it relates to the operations of the mind and will in a world in which we are bodied forth as agents. The theory of practical reason is an enormously complex and challenging field, in which much contemporary work in philosophy is being done. I hope I

Richard Ashcroft - 9789042027404 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:33:13PM via free access Is It Irrational to Have Children? 193 have done enough to motivate the thought that if the sort of rationality with which we are concerned in making decisions to procreate is practical reason, then some of the theoretically rational arguments proposed by Häyry may be misleading. It can, for instance, be rational in the present sense to weigh the options concerning procreation and decide in its favor. It can, further, be the case that factors like the desire to procreate, the desire to nurture and cherish a child or children, and the desire to give of oneself in this particular way are not simply reasons for action in the motivating sense (that agents’ decisions to procreate can be explained by determining that these reasons are operative for them) but also in the normative sense—that they are good reasons for action, in that they are recognizable by the agent as giving sufficient reason to go on with their procreative and family-founding projects, and can be shared by others as such in judging the behavior of the would-be parents.

7. A Little Viennese Common Sense

I think we should consider the giving of reasons for (not) having children in Wittgensteinian terms: it may be that the question “why do you want to have children” makes no sense, or, that if it does, the answer “because I want to” is, as Wittgenstein said of some explanations, “where the spade turns.” This is not to say that we cannot give further articulation to the reasons involved, if the person we are talking to appears not to understand. But in a rather profound sense, if this interlocutor keeps insisting on being given further grounds, or denies that the descriptions of the kinds of interests and emotions motivating one to want to procreate give accounts of reasons, then we are entitled to ask whether they have understood what is being said. It is not required of this account that the interlocutor shares these reasons or takes them to be reasons which should motivate him or her. But it is a requirement of mastery of the conceptual resources of English that they can see them as reasons. The practice of giving reasons in dialogue is complex. One kind of reason-giving is contrastive: ordinarily in such a case we would do X, but we are here going to do Y—here’s the reason. Outside a teaching situation, we would ordinarily not give reasons for each and every performance we undertake. In the case of procreation, the practice has changed from the expectation that reasons be given for not procreating to expecting that reasons be given for procreating. So be it. But let’s not imagine that the reasons we are given for procreating are not reasons at all. Nor that these reasons are irrational, and the choice to act on them is, ipso facto, not irrational. To do that, adapting Wittgenstein a little, would be to see what happens when logic goes on holiday.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper was written while the author was holder of an Australian Bicenten- nial Fellowship at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Uni- versity of Melbourne. The author thanks Mark Sheehan, Michael Parker, Rony Duncan, Tuija Takala, and, especially, Leslie Cannold for comments and discussion of the arguments of this paper.

NOTES

1. Matti Häyry, “A Rational Cure for Prereproductive Stress Syndrome,” Journal of Medical Ethics, 3 (2004), p. 377. 2. Ibid., p. 377. 3. Matti Häyry, “The Rational Cure for Prereproductive Stress Syndrome Revisited,” Journal of Medical Ethics, 31 (2005), pp. 606–607. 4. Matti Häyry, Playing God: Essays on Bioethics (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2001), chapter 3. 5. Ibid., p. 32. 6. Ibid., p. 40. 7. See also S. Aksoy, “Response to: A Rational Cure for Pre-reproductive Stress Syndrome,” Journal of Medical Ethics, 30 (2004), pp. 382–383; Rebecca Bennett, “Human Reproduction: Irrational But in Most Cases Morally Defensible,” Journal of Medical Ethics, 30 (2004), pp. 379–380; Søren Holm, “Why It Is Not Strongly Irrational to Have Children,” Journal of Medical Ethics, 30 (2004), p. 381. 8. Häyry, “A Rational Cure for Prereproductive Stress Syndrome,” p. 377. 9. Julian Savulescu, “Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children,” Bioethics 15 (2001), pp. 413–416. 10. J. Broome, Weighing Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 11. Matti Häyry, Liberal Utilitarianism and Applied Ethics (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 66–67. 12. Ibid., p. 123. 13. Ibid., pp. 123–124. 14. Häyry, Playing God: Essays on Bioethics, p. 78; See also ibid., 71–72; cf. John Harris, Wonderwoman and Superman: The Ethics of Human Biotechnology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 15. Häyry, Liberal Utilitarianism and Applied Ethics, p. 124. 16. Häyry, “A Rational Cure for Prereproductive Stress Syndrome,” p. 377. 17. Holm, “Why It Is Not Strongly Irrational to Have Children,” p. 381. 18. Aksoy, “Response to: A Rational Cure for Pre-reproductive Stress Syndrome,” pp. 382-383; Bennett, “Human Reproduction: Irrational But in Most Cases Morally Defensible,” pp. 379–380. 19. John Harris and Søren Holm, “Extending Human Lifespan and the Precautionary Paradox,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 27 (2002), pp. 355–368. 20. Häyry, “The Rational Cure for Prereproductive Stress Syndrome Revisited.”

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21. Ibid., Häyry, “A Rational Cure for Prereproductive Stress Syndrome”; Matti Häyry, “If You Must Make Babies, Then At Least Make the Best Babies You Can?” Human Fertility, 7 (2004), pp. 105–112. 22. F. Jackson, “Decision-Theoretic Consequentialism and the Nearest and Dearest Objection,” Ethics, 101 (1991), pp. 461–482; E. Stein, Without Good Reason: The Rationality Debate in Philosophy and Cognitive Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 23. Häyry, “The Rational Cure for Prereproductive Stress Syndrome Revisited.” 24. T. L. S. Sprigge, The Rational Foundations of Ethics (London: Routledge, 1987). 25. Cabaret Voltaire (1986) The Crackdown, All tracks composed by R Kirk and S Mallinder (Virgin Records, catalogue number CVCD1, 1986), track 7. 26. Onora O’Neill, “Modern Moral Philosophy and the Problem of Relevant Descriptions,” Modern Moral Philosophy, ed. A. O’Hear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 301–316. 27. S. Smilansky, “Is There a Moral Obligation to Have Children,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, 12 (1995), pp. 41-53; Häyry, “If You Must Make Babies, Then At Least Make the Best Babies You Can?”; L. Cannold, “Do We Need a Normative Account of the Decision to Parent?” International Journal of Applied Philosophy, 12:20 (2003), pp. 277–290; L. Cannold, What, No Baby? Why Women are Losing the Freedom to Mother, and How They Can Get It Back (Fremantle, WA: Curtin University Books, 2005). 28. Richard E. Ashcroft, “Hanging Around with Jackson: Consistency in Ethical Argument and How to Avoid It,” A Life of Value: Essays for John Harris, eds. S. Holm, M. Häyry and T. Takala (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, in press). 29. Broome, Weighing Lives, p. 37. 30. J. Broome, “Reason and motivation,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume LXXI (1997), pp. 131–146; J. Broome, “Reasons,” Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, eds. R. J. Wallace, P. Pettit, S. Scheffler, and M. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 28–55.

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