The Rationality and Morality of Human Reproduction
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2014 Why Should One Reproduce? The Rationality and Morality of Human Reproduction Lantz Fleming Miller Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/78 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] WHY SHOULD ONE REPRODUCE? THE RATIONALITY AND MORALITY OF HUMAN REPRODUCTION by LANTZ MILLER A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate in Philosophy, The City University of New York 2014 © 2014 LANTZ MILLER All Rights Reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Philosophy in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy Noël Carroll ____________________ ___________________________________________ Date Chair of the Examining Committee Iakovos Vasiliou ___________________________________________ Executive Officer Carol Gould John Greenwood Jesse Prinz Nicholas Pappas Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Abstract WHY SHOULD ONE REPRODUCE? THE RATIONALITY AND MORALITY OF HUMAN REPRODUCTION by LANTZ MILLER Advisor: Professor Carol Gould Human reproduction has long been assumed to be an act of the blind force of nature, to which humans were subject, like the weather. However, with recent concerns about the environmental impact of human population, particularly resource depletion, human reproduction has come to be seen as a moral issue. That is, in general, it may be moral or immoral for people to continue propagating their species. The past decade’s philosophical discussions of the question have yielded varying results. This dissertation takes on the issue in a broader moral perspective and asks not only whether it is moral to reproduce but why one should. That is, are there positive normative reasons, whether moral or rational, to reproduce? This thesis approaches this problem first by facing three general philosophical challenges to its resolution: from contemporary population and environmental ethics and rationality theory; from traditional Western schools of moral philosophy; and from recent attempts to answer the narrower question of whether one should reproduce. The thesis finds that exploring these challenges cannot yield a clear response. However, taking cues from many of these approaches, such as care ethics’ emphasis on values, the dissertation proposes that lacking from recent attempts is recognition of a source-value for all human values, viz. the valuing of life in and of itself. Proposing that this valuing is a characteristic of humans and of how they value, it looks to anthropology for empirical justification. It observes that many cultures and individuals frequently prioritize their values so iv as to devalue this source valuing. Yet, when those value prioritizations give this valuing high priority, there may be some moral justification for reproduction. Furthermore, if one subscribes to the tenets of rationality, which enjoin agents to formulate their beliefs for action based upon the results of rational inquiry, this normative force may invest this descriptive (empirical) hypothesis about values with normative force to guide actions. That is, given certain value prioritizations, it may be rational as well as moral to reproduce. The thesis question of why one should reproduce would then at least have a plausible answer. v Preface Many people want to have a child. After all, despite all the attention they require, children are delightful. However, moral concerns may arise: In many contemporary societies, people increasingly worry about overpopulation. In reproducing, placing the main focus on what the agent wants—what “I want”— may border on egoistic. This act involves another life after all, one to whom one may or should be at least as dedicated as to oneself. At least two basic types of concerns are at work here, and both, I suggest, are recent in human history. The first has slowly been mounting in industrialized societies at least since Malthus, and more overtly as a moral issue since the 1960s. The Earth may have a limited carrying capacity for X amount of consumers of R amount of resources. The second concern builds on older moral issues, such as Kantian worries about using another person solely for one’s own ends. However, in terms of an agent’s decision to reproduce, this concern had long seen little if any discussion until that first concern started building steam since the 1960s. After all, it had long been common to have children because one wanted wage-free farm hands. But older moral worries, such as those about using another person solely as means, finally got applied to reproduction: Is it right, in terms of the offspring’s future interests, for you to act solely upon your own interests in creating a new being? A historical development bearing on these two concerns, and perhaps allowing them to grow increasingly widespread, is of course the development, in the same period, of effective and relatively safe birth control much less grueling than the forms of abortion and even infanticide that were long mainstays for humanity, not to speak of homemade potions of dubious efficacy. Safer and more effective birth control helped people especially women, to step back and view vi reproduction as an action about which one did have a decision and thus could be weighed morally, as in terms of these two concerns: that of a new consumer’s added environmental strain and that of the child as an end in itself. In contemporary industrialized/industrializing (I/I) societies, the agent may simply find that, despite the chore of childrearing, especially for women, being with children is the most beautiful experience in life, among a number of reasons to reproduce. While agents ascribe varying degrees of truth to the idea of impending overpopulation, most would have a response to it, such as “Human ingenuity will always find a way out of any problem,” or “No, we’re already over-capacity.” For many people in I/I societies, the issue of reproducing is then coming to include at least the question of “May I reproduce?” (in the moral sense of “may,” that is, morally permissible although not obligatory), with responses varying according to their subculture. However, for agents in I/I societies who have grappled with these worries, the question of “May I have children?” with its mere moral permissibility can be insufficient in prompting compelling reasons to reproduce. In such cases, “Should I have children?” can provide another, perhaps more illuminating angle on the issue. In fact, the “should,” if sufficiently substantiated, can provide a perplexed agent a compelling motive for acting one way or another, reproducing or not. Some agents may well find that there is no doubt but that one may have children, regardless of what current Malthusians portend, but should they have children is altogether another issue. For example, Tommy, an atheist champion of reason and believer in humanity’s manifest destiny may not doubt that he may reproduce but feels that whether he should is another matter. Other agents may feel that all people have moral permission to reproduce and in fact they should. Other agents, oddly, could find that people currently may not —are not morally permitted to—have children, perhaps because overpopulation is too problematic, even though there is compelling vii moral reasons that they ought to, such as divine directive; these agents, of course, would be morally conflicted. Still others, more consistently, would find that people may not have children and should not. The two questions then differ in moral content. The one concerns moral permission; the other, moral compulsion. If the first is answered positively, one is morally allowed to do an act but one has no duty to act one way or the other. If it is answered negatively, one has a moral duty not to act. By contrast, if the second question is answered positively, one has a moral duty to do it, and not doing it is breaking moral duty; while a negative answer morally compels one not to do the act. The two coincide in the negative answer to either: in such a case, one is morally compelled not to undertake the action. The population-ethics question of “May one reproduce?” prompts that of “Should one reproduce?”; and this latter question can come to be as pressing for agents as the former. Furthermore, as some potential responses to the question evidence, it prompts answers that pertain not only to the morality of the act, but to its rationality. A deliberative act such as reproduction, linked to such strong and often overwhelming drives as sex and the need to express care and love (whether parental or amorous), understandably for many agents could bring up concern about the “rationality” of the act. If the act by its very nature cannot be “rational” or come under the rubric of rational concern, then questions about whether it can even be deliberative arise. However, the advent of birth control and widely promulgated ideals of one’s rights to person have weakened such dismissals of the act’s falling outside of “rational” deliberative control. Given these developments, especially in many I/I societies, it is plausible that agents would begin assessing whether they could and should, rationally, have children. * viii As the population ethics debate over the past half-century has intensified from the matter of moral permission to that of moral compulsion, some answers have appeared in terms of whether one’s interests should trump another’s future interests or whether the displeasures of existence trump the pleasures.