Abstract
If the arguments of Chap. 2 are on track, then we likely do not have any procreation-limiting obligations grounded in the consequences of our reproductive behaviors; although creating a new human being is significant relative to our non-procreative activities, it is not absolutely significant in terms of its contribution to the harms of climate change. However, it also seems like we are sometimes obligated to refrain from actions in light of their relation to a moral problem, even if those actions don’t make a significant difference to that moral problem. But what could be the explanation for such an obligation? The goal of this chapter is to propose an answer to precisely this question. I will do this by presenting three moral principles that would seem, given the facts about our climate and the global population, to have some implication for our procreative practices. The precise content of our procreative duties, however, will be a live question. If any of the proposed principles is valid, then there seems to be good reason to believe that we ought to restrict our procreative behaviors; but does that mean that each of us is obligated to have no children? Or simply not too many (whatever that might mean)? Although I do not believe that there is an obviously correct answer to this question, I will suggest a sort of ‘limit’ to an acceptable answer.
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Notes
- 1.
Recall that this is how Broome actually gets to his conclusion that each of us is required to be a ‘net-zero’ emitter.
- 2.
Increased atmospheric CO2 has led to oceans becoming about 30 % more acidic than they were prior to the Industrial Revolution. According to business as usual predictions, we may see a further 150 % rise in acidity by the year 2100, which would bring oceans to a pH level not seen in more than 20 million years (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, n.d.)
- 3.
- 4.
Literally ‘on its face’, the language of prima facie was adopted by philosophers to denote the provisional character of duties that have not yet been weighed against the competing goods of the actual world. A prima facie duty, then, is one that I am required to follow, if it is not outweighed by some other consideration. Prima facie duties are contrasted with all-things-considered duties, which emerge at the end of the weighting and balancing process among the various, relevant goods and reason s, and which tells us what we must, in the end, do. While some prima facie duties seem to always imply an all-things-considered duty (“do not murder,” for instance), others are so all-encompassing that they regularly admit of trade-offs (“promote the good,” perhaps). What we seem to be learning at this point is that the duty not to contribute to massive harms seems to be more like the latter than the former, and so discussion of its relative justificatory burden is important.
- 5.
We should be careful to recall from the introduction, that there are many resource-related reason s to be concerned with overpopulation, and I have chosen to focus on only one of them—climate change. So it could be argued that the poor residents of the world who have five, six or seven children are still contributing more to overpopulation than most Americans are, even if that overpopulation isn’t as relevant to the particular problem with climate change. However, all of the problems with overpopulation have a similar structure as the one I am dealing with here: it is not the sheer number of people that is problematic, it is the number of people given the limited availability of some resources (clean water, food, energy, etc.). And so it is actually quite difficult to argue that the high-fertility-rate poor population is contributing to the problems of overpopulation in any way, since they consume so few of the available resources. Thus, while I deal explicitly in the main text only with the case of climate change, the reader may choose to pursue another issue of resource shortage on her own, in order to see whether the populations of, say, the poorest countries in West Africa, might really be contributing to the problems of overpopulation, given these peoples’ lack of access to resources.
- 6.
This is the structure of Derek Parfit’s oft-cited discussion in (Parfit, 1984). There, Parfit was concerned primarily with what he called the ‘non-identity problem’; however, in setting up the problem, he noted that it doesn’t seem we can harm a child by creating it, unless its life would be not worth living. The non-identity problem, then, is the tension between our belief that one perhaps ought to wait to have a child, if doing so would result in a healthier child, and the fact that such advice is surprisingly difficult to justify. By changing the time of conception, one changes the identity of the child. And so long as the first child would have a life worth living, then creating that child would not harm it. So it becomes surprisingly difficult to justify the intuitive claim that, say, a 15 year old girl ought to wait until she is older to get pregnant, as doing so ‘would be better for the child’.
- 7.
The strongest argument to be made on the basis of this sort of consideration would look like that of the philosopher David Benatar, who holds that, for each of us, it would be better never to have been born, and so we are each obligated not to impose life on anyone else. The morally best world, then, is one in which the human species goes extinct (Benatar, 2006). Although there is much philosophically interesting to discuss in this proposal, it has convinced very few philosophers. For present purposes, we may simply note it as a ‘book-end’—the most radical position that one could take on the basis of some sort of procreative asymmetry; but I, instead, will suggest that one need not accept such a contentious view in order to be driven towards the conclusion that we each have procreation-limiting obligation s.
- 8.
Note that this need not imply that the justificatory burden could not be met. Physicians who work for Doctors Without Borders presumably have a large carbon footprint as a result of their international travel; I would think that their relatively large contribution to climate change is justifiable in the way that flying from New York to Paris for a fancy lunch would not be.
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Rieder, T.N. (2016). Individual Obligation. In: Toward a Small Family Ethic. SpringerBriefs in Public Health(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33871-2_3
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