Abstract
Peter Singer has argued that the affluent have very extensive duties to the world’s poor. His argument has some important implications for procreation, most of which have not yet been acknowledged. These implications are explicated in this paper. First, the rich should desist from procreation and instead divert to the poor those resources that would have been used to rear the children that would otherwise have been produced. Second, the poor (and possibly also the rich) should desist from procreation because doing so can prevent the very bad things that would otherwise have befallen the children they would have brought into existence. Third, the rich (and others) sometimes have a duty to prevent the poor from procreating. Fourth, the rich sometimes have a right to prevent the poor from reproducing. Although these implications may not amount to a categorical prohibition on all procreation, they do significantly restrict the permissibility of procreation. They are, in that sense, anti-natalist.
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Notes
In one place he quotes Robert McNamara’s definition approvingly: “a condition of life so characterized by malnutrition, illiteracy, disease, squalid surroundings, high infant mortality and love life expectancy as to be beneath any reason definition of human decency” (Singer, 1993, p. 219). Elsewhere he follows the World Bank definition of extreme poverty “as not having enough income to meet the most basic human needs for adequate food, water, shelter, clothing, sanitation, health care, and education” (Singer, 2009, p. 6.)
Stuart Rachels (Rachels, 2014) considers only this anti-natalist implication of Peter Singer’s argument. He generally calls his own argument the “Famine Relief Argument against Having Children” but he briefly notes that it appeals to “opportunity costs”. He does not discuss the other connections between Peter Singer’s argument and anti-natalism, that I shall present in this paper. There are other differences too between his paper and mine. For example, he considers some objections that I do not discuss (because I take them to be insufficiently important for my purposes) and I consider objections that he does not consider. Even where we do discuss the same objection, we often do so differently. I shall not discuss all these differences here because they are beyond the scope of this paper, the purpose of which is to discuss the different anti-natalist implications of Peter Singer’s argument rather than to engage Stuart Rachels’ presentation of one of those implications.
A few people have raised this objection in response to reading a draft of this paper or to hearing me present the arguments contained in it.
I say more about this below.
This is apparent both from his answer to the question above, but also from his explanation elsewhere that by “sacrifice of comparable importance”, he means “without causing anything else comparably bad to happen, or doing something that is wrong in itself, or failure to promote some moral good, comparable in significance to the bad thing that we can prevent” (Singer, 1972, p. 231).
This will be true only so long as there are unwanted children in need of adoption, but that does not undermine the force of this consideration until that time. People can now (and for the foreseeable future) rear altruistic children without first reproducing.
Peter Singer does not directly address this question (so far as I know). He has commented on a related question – whether it is better to give now or to invest and give more later. In response to that question he says that if one has the investment skills of a Warren Buffett then one should invest and give later. Otherwise, he is unsure. He cites Claude Rosenberg’s view that “the rate at which the cost of fixing social problems grows is ‘exponentially greater’ than the rate of return on capital” but notes that this is “difficult to prove or disprove” (Singer, 2009, pp. 37–38).
More generally, he thinks that our duties are influenced by what others are and are not doing. Thus, if one accepts that if altruists were not to procreate the future would have fewer altruists, it does not follow that every altruistic couple can use this as a justification for their own procreation. The more other altruists are procreating, the less a particular altruistic couple can invoke the need for new generations of altruists in order to justify their own procreation. While others are providing the more tenuous benefit of future altruists, this couple could instead provide the immediate and more reliable benefit.
In any event, we know from his drowning child analogy that he (plausibly) regards a death even in the absence of extreme poverty as bad.
It is no use responding that given the availability of anaesthesia the pain of amputation is bad all things considered, because then we might as well alter the first premise to: “If we can prevent something (all things considered) bad from happening we ought to do it.” The “without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance” condition would be unnecessary because if one had indeed considered everything one would already have established whether something of comparable importance would be sacrificed.
Of course, one cannot be certain of every harm that will be befall one’s child, but one can be certain that serious harms will befall that child.
If we think seriously about lives of absolute poverty – lives of people who lack the bare essentials for living and who are thus on the brink of dying or who actually die from poverty – it is hard to imagine that the good could possibly outweigh the bad. One way to see this would be to enumerate all the awful features of such lives, then enumerate the goods and ask whether the latter really do outweigh the former. Put another way, if one fully appreciated just how appalling a life of absolute poverty is, could one really think that it contained as much or more good?
To clarify, E and C are not resources, but rather quantities of good. It remains true, given diminishing marginal utility, that more resources will produce less good for those with more than for those with less.
The most common kind of exception is disease.
(iv) contains two options. These can be viewed in two different ways. They can be seen as reflecting examples of the variation in quality of life among affluent individuals. Alternatively, they can be viewed as reflecting reasonable disagreement about the average ratio of good to bad in affluent lives. Some might wonder why the amount of bad in these lives is comparable to the amount of bad in (ii). The answer is that optimists underestimate how much bad there is in the lives both of extreme poor (ii) and of the affluent (iii). (iv) is not the view of optimists.
This, of course, is quite different from what a (law) student of mine once wrote in her exam: “Your right to swing your arm ends at the tip your finger” (my emphasis).
There are other family relief arguments that have this basis. See, for example (Pogge, 2002).
How great these costs are, depends in part on whether procreation is really the result of autonomous decisions. People in dire poverty often lack access to contraception and do not always intend to have children. Insofar as their procreative actions are not fully autonomous, we would not be violating their autonomy by preventing them from procreating, in which case the moral costs of such interventions would be reduced.
This need not be forcible sterilization. There might be incentive or inducements to sterilization.
The “all things being equal” condition is important because, it may sometimes be the case that moral costs of preventing the poor from procreating are too great. Nevertheless, as I have argued, this is true much less often than may be thought.
The conclusion of the “poverty costs” argument was that the affluent sometimes must prevent the poor from procreating (just as they must prevent themselves from procreating). If one must prevent X, then a fortiori one may prevent X.
To clarify, the implications presented in this paper – and especially the conclusions of the natality costs, poverty costs, and duty costs arguments – are not alternatives to the conclusion of the poverty relief argument. They are further implications.
Stuart Rachels, as noted above, is one exception, but only in the case of the “opportunity costs” argument.
We are all utterly powerless in the face of the reproductive decision or action that led to our being brought into existence, but the worse the quality of one’s life, the more significant that powerlessness is.
I am grateful to anonymous referees for incisive, helpful comments, offered in a constructive manner, that significantly improved the paper.
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Benatar, D. Famine, Affluence, and Procreation: Peter Singer and Anti-Natalism Lite. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 23, 415–431 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10073-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10073-4