Procreation and Parenthood: The Ethics of Bearing and Rearing Children * Edited by DAVID ARCHARD and DAVID BENATAR

Abstract

Procreation and Parenthood deals with moral questions in relation to decisions about bringing children into existence and how to rear them. In their comprehensive introduction, David Benatar and David Archard provide a helpful overview of contemporary discussions of these two sorts of questions and explain how each chapter fits into the larger picture. In the following, I shall focus primarily, but not exclusively, on the part of the book that deals with procreation. In Chapter 2, Tim Bayne discusses the theoretical basis for so-called wrongful life cases and in particular three possible accounts thereof, namely the no-faults model, parity models and dual benchmark models (32). According to the no-faults model, it is incoherent to claim that being caused to exist can be harmful to the child. The two other models deny this. According to parity models, the level of welfare required for a life to be worth starting does not differ from the level required for a life to be worth continuing, whereas dual benchmark models require a higher level in the former case. Bayne critically discusses no-faults and dual benchmarks models and ends up defending a parity model. While I agree with his conclusion and many of his arguments, I nevertheless find a couple of them too swift. For example, I cannot see that no-faults theorists need to be committed to an Epicurean view of death (while they deny that existence can be better/worse than never existing, e.g. because the latter outcome does not include a welfare level, the badness of death can be assessed by comparing outcomes with different life lengths and indeed with different welfare levels; see e.g. McMahan 2002: Ch. 2).