The Value in Procreation: A Pro-tanto Case for a Limited and Conditional Right to Procreate
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The Value in Procreation: A Pro‑tanto Case for a Limited and Conditional Right to Procreate Tim Meijers1
© The Author(s) 2020
1 Introduction Having children is an important aspect of peoples’ lives. I will take the intuition that there is something valuable about procreation as a starting point, and asks whether we can appeal to the value of procreation when engaged in liberal justification. This is an important question philosophically speaking, but it also has important implications. There is a lively debate, both in philosophy and society at large, about constraints on the right to procreate as well as about government family policies. The strength and the nature of the interest people have in procreation has implications for both of these debates. We cannot take a position, for example, on the permissibility of procreation in the light of sustainability issues, without a view on the value in procreation. In this paper I offer such an account. The aim of this paper is limited. First, this paper is about intentional voluntary procreation, not about cases where people are forced (by persons or circumstances) to procreate, or cases where people procreate unintentionally. Second, the view is incomplete. The view offered here does not offer conclusive arguments about whether procreation is all-things-considered (im)permissible. It offers one side of the story: an account of what makes procreation valuable, which will need to figure in any judgement about what is, all things considered, permissible. Nor does the paper address questions about the harm or benefit of coming into existence, which also has to figure in all things considered judgements.1 1 This last caveat is particularly significant. Some argue that it is always wrong to bring people into existence, at least pro-tanto. See David DeGrazia, Creation Ethics. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Seana Shiffrin, “Wrongful life, procreative responsibility, and the significance of harm”, Legal Theory, Vol. 5, No. 2. (1999): 117-148. Others argue it is wrong full stop, see David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004). In order for procreation to be all things considered permissible – in general or in a particular case – one would have to at least show that the latter positions is incorrect.
* Tim Meijers [email protected] 1
Institute for Philosophy, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
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One clarification is in order. By procreator(s)’, I mean the person(s) whose desire to create a new life leads to the procreative act, now or in the future. Usually these are the biological procreators. In cases of for example surrogacy, the future parents are the procreators – not the doctor or the surrogate. This definition allows for more or less than two procreators, and a biological link (gestational or biological) between procreators and the child is neither necessary nor sufficient. Genetic gestational procreation is one way to procreate. This paper will proceed as fol
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