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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, compari- son between suffering and non-existence. The issue of the relationship be- tween 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 con- text 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 con- clusion 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: Richard Ashcroft - 9789042027404 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:33:13PM via free access 184 RICHARD ASHCROFT The normative starting point of this paper is simply that avoidable suffer- ing 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 philoso- phers of the consequentialist tradition.5 In this earlier paper (first presented in 1995) he concentrates on the policy op- tions 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 compar- ing the state of existence with the (non-)state of non-existence, or in compar- ing 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 eve- rybody 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 procrea- tive 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; theoreti- cally, there may be ways to reconstruct our intuitions appropriately in order to make nearly equivalent comparisons. But the power of Matti Häyry’s argu- ment lies with its claim to rationality rather than any more or less debatable metaphysical or epistemological claims about the substantive matter of possi- ble 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 theo- retical statement, Liberal Utilitarianism and Applied Ethics (1994): An axiological variant which is closely related to the “need” and “inter- est” 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: Richard Ashcroft - 9789042027404 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:33:13PM via free access 186 RICHARD ASHCROFT Although the fully voluntary extinction of humankind ought to be con- doned, there will, one could argue, always be people who want the hu- man 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 as- sessed, the most basic needs of one individual or group shall be consid- ered 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 signifi- cant 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 ex- tinction 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.
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