Abstract
In this paper, I make the case for risks and burdens of morality and meaning. Recognizing such risks and burdens would require many of us to expand how we think about the imposition of risks and burdens. As I take it, if such an expansion helps us make more sense of relevant cases and helps us clarify or resolve debates for which risks and burdens are relevant, then it is well-motivated. Accordingly, I will demonstrate the relevance of my proposed expansion to recent philosophical discussion on the ethics of procreation and provide a series of cases which my proposed expansion makes more sense of than an unexpanded account of risks and burdens and. Moreover, if adopted, I expect an expanded notion of risks and burdens will have implications far beyond procreative ethics.
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Notes
To give credit where due, these arguments are inspired by remarks made by Seana Shiffrin and Rivka Weinberg. But these arguments are merely inspired by such remarks and do not reflect the dialectical contexts in which these remarks were made nor the concerns which motivated them. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to be clearer on this point.
Shiffrin (1999), p. 124.
Shiffrin (1999), p. 127.
Ibid. p. 137. Here, and throughout the rest of the paper, I understand the kind of significance referred to in this principle as normative significance.
Weinberg (2015), p. 127. I read Weinberg as making a claim about the evidentiary relevance of a person’s evaluations. But we could read Weinberg as making a claim about a kind of a personal authority over what the value of an experience consists in. My arguments and conclusion are, mutatis mutandis, compatible with this second reading as well.
See Weinberg (2015), p. 129.
I set aside one complication for Personal Significance as an objection. Some people will find the risks and burdens imposed by their procreation significant. So, every procreator risks the imposition of significant risks and burdens. This strikes me as a morally important but orthogonal to my purposes here.
While I do not have an account of recognition to offer here, the truth of my claim can stand without any such account.
See Young (2001). This example is meant to illustrate how a child might be complicit in injustice. But my argument does not rely on Young’s as a premise.
Berners-Lee (2011), p. 149.
Wolf (2012), p. 1–6.
As such, this sense of ‘meaning’ is not what everyone has in mind when talking about meaning. For example, Camus takes a certain kind of meaningless life, a life spent in revolt against the absurd, to be choice-worthy. See Camus (1955).
Rosenthal (1975), p. 119.
See Davies, Klaassen, & Längle (2014).
This is not an uncontroversial claim. But it is an antecedent commitment of all those engaged in the anti-natalism debate. If the normative significance of morality was simply up to the discretion of the individual, then there’d be little point in debating the morality of procreation.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this kind of case and urging me to respond to it.
Benatar attempts to debunk optimism about how well off we are in (2006), Haybron argues that many of us unwittingly pursue unhappiness in (2008), and Himma takes seriously the risk of Hell in (2010) and (2016). Academic philosophers who lack of religiosity, which is most of them, ought to be especially guarded about discounting the magnitude of the threat of eternal suffering. We are prone to discount the magnitude of harms when we think they are unlikely (c.f. deniers’ attitudes towards climate change).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank David Faraci, Katia Vavova, James Harold, Nina Emery, Samuel Mitchell, Laura Sizer, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Wells, M. The Burdens of Life. Philosophia 47, 1613–1620 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-019-00061-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-019-00061-z