The Geography of Genethics and the Ends of Life1 - University of ...

a higher level of well-being than the other, many have the intuition that the potential
procreator ought to create A rather than B (Parfit 1984; see Belshaw 2003 for a contrary
view). Perhaps we confuse the thought that B has a marginal life—that is, a life not worth
starting—with the thought that S should have created A rather than B. But these are two
quite different thoughts, and the latter does not entail the former. Of course, this point
does not provide a full explanation of the marginal life intuition, for the intuition seems to
retain some force where the decision facing a procreator is between having a certain child
and having no child.
Another intuition with which the marginal life intuition might be confused is that
someone might be unfortunate to have been born with a certain condition. The parity
theorist denies that Amy has been wronged by having been brought into existence, but he
need not deny that she is unfortunate to have been born without a limb. It seems to me
that we regard those born without a limb as unfortunate to have been born without a
limb, and not—as Benatar suggests—as unfortunate to have been born at all.
A third response is the most important: third-person marginal-life judgments are not
reflected by first-person marginal-life judgments. Consider the very example that Benatar
uses: it is better not to bring into existence somebody who will lack a limb. Whatever
intuitive support this claim might have, there is no doubt that it has less intuitive support
than the claim that someone who was born without a limb should regret having been
born. (Indeed, I suspect that most of us think that, ceteris paribus, it is not reasonable for
those born without limbs to regret having been born.) Perhaps those born without limbs
often regret having been born without limbs, but I doubt that they tend to regret having
been born. (And if they regret having been born, it’s not on account of the fact that they
were born without a limb.) Faced with a choice between having been born without a limb
and not having been born at all, such individuals would generally choose to have been
born without a limb.
But if cases that generate third-person marginal-life intuitions do not generate first-person
marginal-life intuitions, then we are faced with a difficulty. I argued earlier that firstperson
and third-person genethical judgments should be brought into alignment:
judgments as to whether or not it is reasonable for a person to regret having been born
should be tied to judgments concerning whether or not they have been harmed by being
born. The fact that we don’t have first-person marginal-life intuitions in the missing limb
case—and indeed think that such intuitions would be unreasonable—suggests that there
would be something problematic about third-person marginal-life intuitions in such cases.
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