A related moral question is whether it is morally right for a pregnant woman to consume a fifth of Rebel Yell every day during her pregnancy.
The main difference between getting blotto every night knowing you are pregnant, and having unprotected sex knowing you're 45 and are carrying mostly damaged eggs, is the so-called identity problem: the FAS baby "could have been born" with normal capacities, and his mother is knowingly taking his capacities away, whereas the baby at age 45 could not have been born other than with a high risk of genetic damage.
Most people would agree that it is wrong to
people's capacities. And people generally do not want to give up their capacities. Chip comments that if the trade-off of capacities for happiness were more straightforward, we might see more of it, but I think it would be rare. An example would be the side effects of certain prescription drugs - SSRI antidepressants, for instance, notoriously drop sex drive, while apparently (for some people) increasing happiness. But many, many people who experience the loss of sex drive find the effect intolerable and stop their meds. Some even stop over the loss of other capacities, such as the capacity for feeling (even negative feeling) and complex thought. There are studies on people valuing existing choices to irrational extremes - making choices that will preserve options
, even if it will not benefit the person. (See
from Management Science
in 2004; while it deals with discrete options, not capacities, I think the analogy holds.)
But is it wrong to bring someone into existence with less-than-normal capacities, as distinct from removing the capacities of an existing person?
Most people feel that it is morally acceptable to bring people into existence who will have normal capacities. I do not. So, of course, I find it perhaps extra-unacceptable to bring people into existence with less-than-normal capacities. Although I do think the person's likelihood of subjective suffering is an important part of the calculus, I don't think it's everything, and I certainly don't think it's true that people with developmental disability lead the kind of happy, pain-free lives that we should all aspire to.
But let's say you're one of the people who thinks it's acceptable to bring normal people into existence. Are there
people it's immoral to bring into existence? (Is the Austrian basement rapist extra wrong for conceiving seven children with his daughter and forcing her to bear them, rather than merely raping her for decades?)
I suppose ever non-antinatalist has to draw the line somewhere. It's interesting - when I discussed the issue with my non-antinatalist boyfriend, he thought it was fine to bring a baby into existence in an affluent household in the United States, but maybe not to bring a baby into a slum in Africa. Hmm.
I would like to hear where more non-antinatalists draw the line on which babies it's acceptable to bring into existence.