Constraints On Procreative Wrongness

Global anti-natalists part ways with local ones in two important respects; (i) in contending that the overriding harms of existence bear on all birthed subjects rather than on some or most ones, and (ii) by believing that moral criticisms of procreative acts can be levied at deliberative agents broadly considered, rather than narrowing the pool of censurable agents to their peer group only, and/or to those who are similarly situated to themselves only.

Here my deployment of global vs. local anti-natalism focuses on the divisions captured in (ii), where moral judgment takes center stage. While local anti-natalists understand moral scrutiny of procreative acts to be position-relative in principle, global counterparts take their admonishments to be position-neutral broadly speaking, and perhaps even in principle. Birthing is a blamable act, according to the global group, insofar as the deliberative agent who births does so volitionally / non-coercively / knowingly. For the local group, standards for blameworthiness must undergo a further probing, leading to their thinning, owing to position-derived wrong-making features and other contingencies.

Additionally for global anti-natalists in (ii), procreative acts are hardly the whole story. Merely promoting birthing, or silently believing in the goodness of birthing, is a blameworthy act and/or belief, at least when the deliberator who promotes it or who silently believes in it does so volitionally / non-coercively / knowingly. And here too, for the local group, blameworthiness is not ruled out. Censure can take effect, but is set to vary once swarms of restrictions overlooked by the global group are introduced.

Pivotally, agent-positional distinctions of the (ii) sort are not intended to ground evaluative distinctions, meaning the badness of unnecessarily birthed lives remains theoretically unblemished in their wake. This is particularly noteworthy for the coherence prospects of all varieties of local anti-natalism. Lose track of it and they drop dead on arrival.

So global and local anti-natalists in (ii) may stand chummily united in believing that all lives are not worth starting, despite being disunited on the question of just how many initiators of unnecessary lives/harms are morally faulty for it. These differences can manifest as stringent absolutes, or (hopefully) as matters of degree.


Either way, the described zigzags deserve more attention than they receive from moral philosophers and evaluators.


What I take as incontestable: A procreative act may produce lives containing mortifyingly high amounts of badness or intensities of badness, and not see the bringer morally culpable for the blights endured. Paradigmatic cases include early/mid-teen pregnancies with the soon-to-be mother sensing that something is seriously awry, but falling short of thinking the matter all the way through. Barely tolerating her impregnation from the start, she ends up giving birth hesitantly, but technically consensually, given the tugs of family pressure and acculturation.


Much like natural disasters, these cases typify badness-sans-wrongness (or badness-sans-obvious-wrongness).


A very different type of procreative act can be seriously wrong and blameworthy without producing correspondingly high amounts or intensities of badness, or any badness for that matter. Any instance of a rightful involuntary abortion will do as the example here –– preventing the birth of someone slated to be a lifelong sufferer of tetra-amelia syndrome. Here our deliberator caused no actual harm, but obstinately wanted to, believing herself to be entitled to it and justified in wanting it.


Thus we have wrongness-without-badness 101.


If this all seems a trifling review, be reminded that anti-natalism is (supposed to be) a sharply ethical stance, and is not itself an evaluative program. Nor should it be artificially stretched-out into becoming any kind of pre-ethical program. Whenever moral analysts find themselves teetering on the edge of pure evaluations, they may consult the range of positions on offer in population axiology. This is what global and local anti-natalists in (i) have in mind when self-branding as anti-natalists; professing approval for a negative or non-positive population-theoretic viewpoint and disapproval of all the positive ones. The sole focus in (i) is therefore on evaluative targets, not on the moral probing of acts, attitudes or agents.

Popular misconceptions over the role the word “anti-natalism” is meant to play in analytic settings are unlikely to go away, so I won’t belabor the semantics of it all. We can stipulate that local anti-natalists in (i) are lapsed moral analysts for whom moral analysis is never the whole story. On this sketch, local anti-natalists form evaluative beliefs and court non-positive views in population axiology, but hold that all such views are variably sound. Their global counterparts also form strong evaluative beliefs and come to understand non-positive views in population axiology as being invariably sound.

Since moral disputes don’t take their marching orders from evaluative disputes, I will proceed without further reference to anything within (i).

The go-to example of local (position-relative) anti-natalism in action is the childfree movement. Childfree advocates want to see would-be procreators pay closer attention to seldom-considered reasons for remaining childfree, on the assumption that some of those considerations, once given a fair trial, will resonate with a share of would-be procreators. The catch; even though all prospective procreators and neutral parties are encouraged to listen open-mindedly, not all are reprimanded for walking away unconvinced after listening open-mindedly.

The reasons proud childfree arguers proffer for why it’s good to abstain from reproducing range from the brazenly prudential, to the ecological / neo-Malthusian / environmental, to the non-ecologically ethical (i.e. preventionist ends), to hybrids thereof. Crucially, I have their non-ecologically ethical reasons in mind when I write “not all (procreators) are reprimanded for walking away unconvinced after listening”. I am not concerned with any of their other reasons, intricacies and leniencies. [1]

Construed this way, the childfree approach should strike us as an example of position-relativistic overkill. You get off the moral hook by being non-judgmental of childfree people’s lifestyles, and for simply having listened to their opposing views with an open mind. If something about your current or past self –– cultural background, religious background, familial expectations, spiritual convictions, interpersonal projects –– leaves you fittingly unfit to shoulder the council of the childfree arguer, that’s just fine and well. Nothing more need be said about you.

But that’s not the worst of it, because the sense in which a promising version of position-sensitive anti-natalism can be advanced turns directly against this “Just hear us out, then decide for yourselves” ho-hum mode of request. It is precisely this exposure –– to well-argued, non-ecologically ethical reasons for abstaining –– that plays a considerable role in shaping who is and isn’t morally errant for their non-abstention post-exposure. Cultural, religious, familial, spiritual and a host of other reasons for non-abstention are invalid. But a total lack of exposure does ground a functionally valid reason for not abstaining.

Pre-exposure procreative acts = seemingly morally pardonable.

Post-exposure procreative acts = seemingly morally unpardonable.

In fairness, not everyone in the childfree tent is aligned on the “Just hear us out, then decide for yourselves” laxity. But enough of them are on board with it for me to cite them as the group most illustrative of the standard. But also, for all I know, many persuaders who see themselves as belonging to the movement are turned off by “morally unpardonable” rulings in light of hastily assembled inklings of what that entails. I can see them being under the impression that all “morally unpardonable” rulings call for “legally actionable” follow-through, at least once the constitutional and institutional conditions for follow-through have been met. But the intrusiveness of the law is rarely called for, even when a procreative act is clearly morally unpardonable, and even when civic appetites for punishing the act are in full swing.

You don’t shoot someone in order to prevent them from punching and wounding an innocent person. If shooting them is the only means of stopping the non-trivial assault –– in that you are witnessing the attack from afar –– it is morally wiser to let the smaller wronging play out than it is to risk killing the wrongdoer by shooting. Fatalities are worse than assaults, even when the victim of a wrongful fatality is himself a wrongdoer. Likewise, it is better to let strikingly wrongful procreative acts off the legal hook than it is to normalize forced abortions or something adjacent to them. A post-exposure pregnant couple is morally reproachable because they are nakedly hubristic, not because their act is guaranteed to launch a fatality-esque aftereffect (average new life) against which an assault-esque circumvention (average forced abortion) is worth the legal squeeze. Just the contrary; the abortion’s contusion is what comes closer to matching the sting of a fatality. The couple’s moral downfall is explained by their immodesty, and in extreme cases, their misguided sense of invincibility. But there are scores of other situations in which someone’s hubris might end up endangering innocents, but where we don’t think it justified to evoke the law as a sweeping preventative measure.

I’m sure that the more irascible anti-natalists would evoke it if they could, and would do so sweepingly, targeting all pregnant parties. We may deduce that this is down to their refusals or inabilities to grapple with their underlying motivations; a hot-headedly retributive attitude yearning to punish anyone displaying the temerity to be that conceited in (one additional) other-affecting class of cases. If these anti-natalists at any point in the future saw their way to enough institutional power to pull off this type of penal renovation, I would not hesitate to run interference against their means-tested reforms. Opposition to retributivism does most of the work here. It can take hold when we have run-ins with its plainest version in a direct sense, or when we run into the more ambiguously motivated ones, like mobilizing to bring about a legally imposed humility under deterrentist pretenses. That would be overreach. Nothing about calling it overreach spells letting mulish procreators off the moral hook, and it would behoove everyone to recognize this.

You might be wondering why I wrote “seemingly” in the above pardonable/unpardonable rulings. They are moral rulings, after all, disconnected from legal ones. Still, the “seemingly” stays put. While the role attributed to exposure is a major step towards paving a procedural lane for moral culpability, exposure is not always morally decisive. To get at decisiveness, we can't neglect what I’ll dub here as the individual wrongdoer’s developmental history. Mundanely, this intimates discovering difficult-to-discover things about the wrongdoer’s pre-intellectual life, i.e. how well or poorly their neurocognitive development went as a result of things like nutritional adequacies vs. deficiencies. Forces beyond one’s control.

The more these inputs weigh on a deliberator’s impressive or unimpressive moral convictions and actions, the less moral credit or discredit the sanest moral analyst is justified in giving them.

And so:

Cognitive underdevelopment or retardation in early life followed by procreative acts later in life = seemingly morally pardonable (however tragic).

Stellar cognitive development in early life followed by procreative acts later in life = seemingly morally unpardonable.

Beyond all this, and less mundanely, I fear the analyst must rifle through the thorny territory of epistemology, and perhaps virtue epistemology vs. naturalized epistemology, so as to uncover the moral agent’s epistemic history. We can expect a fair amount of spillover between an agent’s developmental history and their epistemic history, to be sure. But there is a sense in which the two histories can be teased out and analyzed apart (principally in ordinary cases consigned to the modern affluent world).

For agents adversely impacted in developmentally laden ways, the spillover is expected to be wider than for those whose development went smoothly or off-without-a-hitch. It is with the well-developed or perfectly-developed deliberators that epistemic history takes on a life of its own, separated from all other considerations. In their situations, the presence of epistemic accidentality will further shape our moral judgments.

What is meant by epistemic accidentality?

Just as accidental true belief goes some way in creating a defeater against positive epistemic appraisal –– in that an unjustified true belief is epistemically inferior to a justified true belief –– so do morally sound beliefs, when accidental, create defeaters against justifying praise for us and likeminded moral cohorts. The same would be true of the morally unsound beliefs and belief-bearers, acquired partly or entirely accidentally by factors beyond the deliberator’s own control. Such accidentality rightly halts any cautious moral analyst’s opprobrium of them.

These epistemic liabilities, in one way or another, figure into our moral thinking and blame-casting –– at least when the analysis behind the judgment is recognized as warranting procedural enhancement. And no, I will not be defending the warrant for this enhancement anywhere in this post. That can wait for another time. If you’re an analytic moral philosopher, or a vibrant observer of analytic philosophy, what’s the fuss anyway?

Epistemic happenstances, along with brute facts about neurocognitive developments and impairments, combined with the proper or improper ways the individual agent handles or reacts to all-things-exposure… jointly determine the procreative agent’s level of moral culpability.

This narrowing carries bold implications for moral rulings outside of procreative ethics, but I take it to be a somewhat weightier restrictor once procreation is the topic under discussion. For one, most people, through no fault of their own, go through life without being presented with an opportunity to meet the exposure standard. Forget having them meet and perform against a high-brow or middle-brow rendition of the exposure standard; nothing in their milieu anchors them towards even the low-brow renditions of it, which may be greater in number (i.e. Facebook-tier arguments and “childfree groups”). Low visibility, meanwhile, is no hindrance for a great number of conventionally contentious moral issues. Setting aside developmental and epistemic histories, but assuming a big fat zero in the way of avenues for exposure, can such parties really be held culpable?

Can self-generated introspection –– on what so many intuit as a biologically-binding or “natural therefore good” matter –– be fairly expected of people? Most of the time, it would appear that this is too strong an expectation. Introspection must be generated externally. Most of the time…

Atypical Cases

Meet Tres:

For all my talk about the prominence of exposure, I suspect the mother of this child is morally culpable, with or without it. Her culpability didn’t crystallize at the time of birth, or before, or in the direct aftermath. It took hold somewhere along the way, as her moral experience –– staring tragedy in the face, every day, for years –– gave her no cause for pause, or no substantive pause. Her willingness to appear in this video and massage the Existentially Correct messages of this channel is a tell that her moral sensibilities, or whatever shred of moral sensibleness she may have had to start with, have been compromised by the horridness occasioned by her procreative decision(s). This is such a profoundly calamitous case, and it may well be one for which the exposure standards canvassed above are made non-binding.

Then again, who’s to say that the form of exposure I invoked earlier –– dryly argumentative or dialectical exposure –– is the only one that counts? Surely an alternative exposure; a lived-tragedy exposure, or an otherwise non-dialectic version, ought to count for something too! And there, she is not without credentials. What she likely lacks in impersonal exposure credentials, she easily makes up for in first-person exposure credentials. Is that enough to pass the bar? On moral sentimentalist accounts, the latter understandings of exposure actually count for more than the impersonal ones. For sentimentalists, lived experience is bound up with moral knowledge acquisition, and I don’t see why the justificatory standards wouldn't follow too. On non-sentimentalist (i.e. rationalist) accounts, it’s the other way around. Sentimentalist arguments have their appeal, but there is no need to quibble over any of that right now. Both may ground our standards and thresholds for relevant-exposure, making it a multi-varied affair.

The point is, despite her auxiliary exposure spanning for years and years, she exhibits no guilt or shame for what has transpired by her hand. She aches for her son and his condition and no doubt tends to his needs night and day, but this wanes in significance when you consider that she is manifestly glad that she had him. She not only affirms his existence (qua existence), but also stands by her procreative choice in affirming it. She has no regrets, after everything. I am reminded of the supposed asymmetry, between parents and non-parents, for inflicting momentary pain on a minor. The pain is inflicted out of a genuine belief, held by both the parent and the stranger, that certain short-lived throbs of pain stand a good chance of engendering some category of long-term payoff for the minor. The parent is right to inflict the pain and is admirable for it, whereas the stranger is a moral criminal (or a legal one) for it.

This asymmetric philosophical treatment of what is roughly the same motive for other-regarding beneficence seems relevant now, on the heels of this video. For all that has been waxed about deeply-felt parental love being a suitable disqualifier or tamer of parental wrongings, it is peculiar how in this case, it’s precisely the mother’s undying love for her botched son that does in her moral scruples. The source of her moral perversity lies not in the procreative act as such, but in her resolved denial of accountability, as well as in her (apparent) absence of remorse (apparent because we are only privy to what is in the video). It is possible that these absences are no absences at all, and are a masterfully convincing performative cope (i.e. pride-preserving). But even then, what does it say of a wrongdoer who loves the person they’ve wronged so much that they cannot be brought to admit to themselves –– and to the world –– that they are even partly at fault for the harms in motion? It says a lot, to me. Certainly enough to get our moral examination of her at below zero, and to throw shade at the cretinous asymmetric treatments of parental vs. non-parental attempts at beneficence with minors as beneficiaries.

Unbeknownst to us are the potential neurocognitive shortfalls she may be burdened by, going back decades. Judging by the video however, she has dodged the usual bullets, at least in terms of retardation, and plausibly in relation to non-retarding underdevelopment too.

Then there is the question of her epistemic history. We have next-to-nothing to go on here. Since we can do nothing but speculate, the most we can reasonably do is assign a one-third “unpardonable” ruling alongside an “unknown” ruling for the remaining two-thirds, pushing her out of the neutral zone and into the wrongish zone, nearer to the overall-unpardonable ruling.

As for the guy who co-created and runs the “Special Books For Special Kids” channel, he’s even worse, even though he has not contributed to any wrongful births himself through direct insemination (I think). He is worse than her because he sees what she sees all the time too, except he sees it in a diversified group of severely botched and bungled innocent children. Seeing them has not deterred him. Despite what we might call a more panoramic overview of procreative disaster, exposure has only worsened his sensibilities. He is morally unglued. The way he runs the channel, it is no stretch to say that he thinks his calling in life consists in whitewashing the badness of all these grievous lives, and by necessity, the wrongness of the procreative acts. Either he is genuinely convinced by the declarative utterances he makes, records and uploads for the world to hear, in which case he is dangerously deluded, or it’s all an act (or some foggy amalgam).

If it’s purely an act, and it went some way in making the kids feel better, or tangibly improved their quality of life, we might file it under the noble lie loophole and call it a day. But this is not what’s happening here; most of the kids visited by him do not comprehend the basics of his “I’m here to be your pal!” gesture-heavy communication. The ones comprehending it are benefited momentarily and not lengthily. The project is mostly in vain. No one can contest that the project makes the non-botched and non-bungled involved participants feel better about themselves, but that’s no justification when you counter in the harmfulness (and possible deceitfulness) of the wider messaging.

I’ve been calling it existential correctness, and if that’s morally uninteresting, then good old political correctness must be morally uninteresting too. But both are eminently interesting. Both are deserving of impolite pushback (my jam), and both match at least one relevant standard for blameworthiness.

As harsh as I’ve been on this guy (and I’ve been harsher elsewhere), he is not a philosopher or any kind of serious moral thinker. As with mommy, two-thirds of what’s needed to cast a truly juicy verdict is missing. This is not to say that local anti-natalists are obligated to cut him slack in total or in near-totalizing ways. Remember, we have one-third “boos” to go on. The other two-thirds are not absolved just because their current status sits at “unknown”.

Moreover, once the cognitive-developmental third is cast as a spectrum rather than a binary, it would appear that we do have knowledge of it as well, in that neither mommy nor the channel-runner succumbed to mental retardation (or anything close). Whatever cognitive negative they may have suffered during their developmental stages lands them in the “underdeveloped” pile and not the “cognitively disabled” pile. As such, we may boost our “known” range to ~50%. Not too shabby.

Where Do Philosophers Fit?

If atypical Tres-like cases are duly extractive of the preventionist's moral ire in ways ordinary cases aren't, along some dimensions, then legions of moral philosophers –– with all their impersonal and first-personal run-ins with my exposure standards –– have qualified for much more than a measly one-third negative ruling.

Are all post-exposed moral philosophers implicated equally? Not quite. Some of these people manage lengthy careers in academic philosophy, while infrequently (if ever) taking a firm position on procreative ethics in public. They are as unpracticed in “Extinction is the worst possible outcome” frenzies as they are uninterested in touching on procreation. Such avoiders would obviously need to be excluded from our remonstrative baselines. It might be true that no such philosophers exist, and that I only posit the contrary because I cannot possibly acquaint myself with all the goings-on. It could be that all or nearly all of them have commented on procreative matters, in passing, and have done so in predictably disappointing and blame-inducing ways, but I never found out about it because it happened during interviews I have not seen, or in books they’ve authored which I have not heard of and will never get around to reading. If so, then sure, all moral philosophers suck.

Still, the sucky players may not be implicated evenly, as some discuss the relevant themes far more often than others, and with greater emphasis on their monstrously bad and wrong conclusions than others. Conclusions include anything from custom views on procreative ethics, to medical ethics (chunks of it tangled up with procreative ethics), to population puzzles, to existential risk (obnoxiously intertwined with “Catastrophic Risk” courtesy some EAs), to Latent Extinction Risk, and even to the applied knowledge wasteland that is the “Parental Advice” or “Guide To Modern Parenting” industry, which some philosophers have dipped their toes in (sloppily of course).

But among those, who are the worst offenders? Contenders to keep in mind, based on their storied histories with one or more of these topics and disturbing conclusions, are as follows: Toby Ord, Will MacAskill, Hillary Greaves, Nick Bostrom, Michael Huemer, Sam Harris, Gustaf Arrhenius, Torbjörn Tännsjo, Peter Singer [2] and others I'll name later as I recall them and update this post.

All of them come across like they could, if awakened from a deep slumber right before dawn, recite the best objections against The Repugnant Conclusion and similar woes. They are doubtless capable of spot-on recitations of many other powerful arguments stressing the weight of the impersonal bad and prioritizing its reduction or prevention over the promotion or maximization of the impersonal good. They are as knowledgable of this as they are intimately familiar with their own psychologies, yet they remain unfazed by the force of the arguments, or are content to appear in public as though they are unfazed by them. To hell with these people. Screw their “X-Risk” frenzies. Screw their utopia-mongering. Whether they’ve had children of their own, or whether they've ever considered having any, stands nowhere near the top of any guardedly standardized wrongness list. We have Huemer in particular to thank for the existence of a paper titled "In Defense Of Repugnance". One hopes he endures but a morsel of the harms he confidently believes can be counterbalanced by proportionally sized benefits accruing to merely possible persons. I hope that they all do, for as long as they continue to share in one or another form of utopia-mongering (distant-future-utopia-striving). 

Conversely, there are philosophers, authors and commentators concerned chiefly with S-Risks (Suffering Risks). These include Tobias Baumann, the crew at FRI, but notably Brian Tomasik for his independent work and David Pearce for his independent work, all the folks doing research on welfare biology, Ole Martin Moen, Ben Davidow, Magnus Vinding, Max Daniel and many others I’ll point to as I recall them and update this post. All else being equal, these promoters of S-Risks are morally praiseworthy.

Typical Cases

…Looks like I’ll have to reserve Typical Cases for the next post, to avoid having this one be (even more) brutally long. My track-record on multi-part posts is shoddy to say the least, but I don’t foresee any issues cropping up this time.

[1] It's hard to know whether majorities in the childfree movement relativize “no thanks” responses when the stakes are ecological / neo-Malthusian / environmental, post-exposure. I only know the movement’s majorities to be bankable in relativizing “no thanks” when the dispute at hand is ethical in the relevant sense (for my ends). It would appear that many stumble upon the movement after becoming embroiled in environmentalism, where collective action problems rule the roost. Absent any involvement with environmentalism, they would never have discovered the "joys of being proudly childfree" in public. But today's environmentalism is dominated by concerns over Climate Change, meaning concerns over future generations qua merely possible persons, including merely possible welfare-subjects (animals). Whereas I'm only concerned with the already-extant plus definitive-future persons and welfare-subjects. It wouldn’t surprise me if they held listeners to a stricter standard once you exclude the specific moral ends I focused on, given the non-individuated nature of eco-adjusted baselines for what’s morally pardonable and unpardonable. They’ll accept a “live and let live” non-judgmentalism in just the areas where I won’t, and I can be expected to accept it in just the areas where they won't, since I'm not sold on their top-ranked collective action problems (due to frighteningly unpredictable long-term costs/payoffs, which I've complained about many times before).

[2] Peter Singer deserves to be singled out too. When asked by Ezra Klein whether procreation is morally neutral or upright (softball much?), Singer didn't mince words; having kids is a moral thing to do, in that it adds value to the world. This level of inconsistency bumps his moral imbecility ahead of even Huemer's. To explain: The untold number of interviews Singer has done over the last decade retelling The Drowning Child analogy to any bingo hall audience willing to listen, is suggestive of his deep commitment to maximizing duties of beneficence. Not satisficing ones, not scalar ones; thoroughly maximizing ones. How on earth does any maximization-confined theory muster a "hurrah" on new lives, given the state of the world?! That is; given the countless children who are drowning at all times. On this backdrop, Singer shouldn't be able to get away with even a "neutral" reply to Ezra's question, because it's not neutral; not for the post-exposed audiences now acquainted with his Shallow Pond extrapolations.

For all his influence, Singer argues like someone who has never asked himself the basics: What's the difference between a couple effectively declining to save lives because they prefer to consume ample junk with their disposable income, versus them effectively declining to save lives because they want a kid of their own on whom they'll have to spend equal or higher amounts of their once-disposable income (and milk the treasury too)? If we understand Singer correctly, a couple letting child after child drown in shallow ponds, and excusing it because their newly bought attire is too immaculate to soil, is morally unpardonable. But a couple letting child after child drown in shallow ponds because they'd like to get home ASAP while she's ovulating, conceive, and redirect an estimated $227,000 to raising a child of their own  –– who was not drowning in any pond prior to the conception –– is not only morally neutral and pardonable, but is the morally right act?!!

Think it over. For any counterpoint to the demandingness objection to make a dint of sense, just think it over.