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Discomfort and Moral Impediment Discomfort and Moral Impediment Discomfort and Moral Impediment: The Human Situation, Radical Bioethics and Procreation By Julio Cabrera Discomfort and Moral Impediment: The Human Situation, Radical Bioethics and Procreation By Julio Cabrera This book first published 2019 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2019 by Julio Cabrera Copyright © 2016 Editora Universidade de Brasília. All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-1803-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-1803-2 CONTENTS Preface ..................................................................................................... viii Part I: Ethics and the Human Situation Chapter One ................................................................................................ 2 The Minimal Ethical Articulation (MEA) The Role of Feelings and Sympathy in Ethics ...................................... 6 Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 10 Human Life and Discomfort (The Non-Structural Arguments) Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 23 The Structural Discomfort Argument (Or: The Structural Argument) Further Remarks on the “Terminality of Being” ................................. 24 The “Ser/Estar” Distinction in the Structural Argument .................... 27 Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 32 Positive Values are Reactive against the Terminal Structure of Being The Objection to Human Value as the “Source of Valuations” .......... 34 Disorganizing the Structure: Humans in Conflict with the Terminality of their Own Beings ..................................... 35 Vicissitudes of the Operation of “giving oneself a value”: Between Excess and Disappointment ............................................ 36 Residual Actions ................................................................................. 39 What do philosophers really mean by the “intrinsic value” of human life? (Dialogue with Ronald Dworkin) .......................... 48 Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 52 The Idea of Moral Impediment and its Hardships Three Kinds of Moral Impediment ..................................................... 55 Remark: “It was not my intention” ..................................................... 59 The Moral Impediment Thesis in Argumentative Form ..................... 60 Moral Impediment: Some Current Counter-arguments ...................... 62 vi Contents Chapter Six ............................................................................................... 68 “Evil” as an Affirmative Category: the Collapse of the Metaphysical Notion of “Evil” into the Profound Discomfort of Being On Human “Monstrosities”: The Rhetoric of Unintelligibility. Nazism as Experimentum Crucis. ................................................. 78 Chapter Seven ........................................................................................... 92 The Radical Asymmetry of Birth and its Impact on “Freedom” Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 103 Ethics for a Minimal Life Negative Inviolability ....................................................................... 103 Disposition towards Death ................................................................ 104 Life Minimalism ............................................................................... 107 Part II: Procreation Chapter Nine ........................................................................................... 118 The Primary Ethical Question: The Moral Justification for Procreation Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 121 The Proc Thesis Interlude: Recalling the Characterization of Ethics .......................... 125 Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 129 Development of the Proc Thesis From Schopenhauer to Negative Ethics ............................................ 138 Chapter Twelve ...................................................................................... 157 A Few Words on “Accidental Births” Chapter Thirteen ..................................................................................... 161 Phenomenology of The Child Chapter Fourteen .................................................................................... 174 Education and Punishment Being eternally grateful for a valueless being? ................................. 174 Educating .......................................................................................... 177 Regarding Adoption .......................................................................... 181 Abstention does not work either? ...................................................... 181 If we should not procreate for whom do we write our books? .......... 183 Discomfort and Moral Impediment vii Hans Jonas searching for the “Good Being” ..................................... 186 Chapter Fifteen ....................................................................................... 192 Procreation Meets more Ethical Problems than Heterodox Sexuality (an Afterthought on Kant) The Decency Objection ..................................................................... 205 Chapter Sixteen ...................................................................................... 208 Abstention is not the Same as Abortion A Negative-ethical Argument against Abortion ............................... 208 Many Kinds of Abortion ................................................................... 222 Other Pathways ................................................................................. 229 How to be antiabortion in an antinatalist environment? ................... 231 Chapter Seventeen .................................................................................. 234 From Procreation to Suicide (Is a Valueless Life Worth Starting, Worth Continuing or Worth Ending?) Starting to Live ................................................................................. 234 Continuing to Live ............................................................................ 236 Ending Life ....................................................................................... 242 Concluding Words .................................................................................. 251 Negative Antinatalism: between Ethical and Logical Pessimism ..... 251 Bibliography ........................................................................................... 266 Filmography ........................................................................................... 270 PREFACE My main goal in this book is to connect two things usually separated in books on ethics: the hard situation of human beings in the world–as described in previous books like Critique of Affirmative Morality and other writings of mine–and the very possibility of morality and of a morality of procreation in particular. One of my explicit intentions is to contribute to removing procreation from its usual position as a mere “natural act”, or as an obviously ethical act, or even as the most ethical of all acts. In the first part of the book, I discuss “human situation” (as different from “human condition”, the term usually employed in some lines of thought from which I prefer to distance myself), in terms of sensible and moral “frictions” or disturbances regularly affecting human beings, questioning thereby the usual idea of human life as obviously “valuable”. The notion of a profound “discomfort” in the mere fact of existing, provoked by these frictions, is crucial to a structural assessment of the value of human life and its impact on many moral (or mortal, in Thomas Nagel’s terms) questions like preserving one’s own life, taking life from others and giving life. The book also illustrates the way positive values that we enjoy–with some luck in the social lottery–in our lives, are hard human constructions operating without guarantees, as a defence against the advances of the discomfort of being. In more technical terms, I will refer to this structural discomfort as the “terminality of being”, a much more abstract philosophical category than mere “mortality” as we shall see. This basic human situation (composed of discomfort due to the frictions of terminality and the reactive construction of positive values) is essential to a structural–not merely sociological or empirical–assessment of the “value of human life”. This is a very primitive situation in which we are already immersed long before we begin to think about it. In the second part of the book, such a structural dimension of the “human situation” will play a fundamental role in reflecting the amazing lack of ethical care in the act of procreation, where new human beings are thrown into a situation of discomfort and into the field of the arduous creation of positive values.
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