Are there lives not worth living. When is it morally wrong to reproduce

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Are there lives not worth living? When is it
morally wrong to reproduce?
Rebecca Bennett and John Harris
Centre for Social Ethics and Policy, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
The idea that it might be a moral crime to have a baby, that it might be wrong to bring
a new human individual into the world is to many people simply bizarre. Having a
baby is a wonderful thing to do, it is usually regarded as the unproblematic choice
from the moral if not from the ‘social’ or medical point of view. It is only having an
abortion and perhaps also refraining from having children that is regarded as requir-
ing justiWcation . . . [T]he idea that one might be harmed or wronged by being brought
into existence in less than a satisfactory state is very important indeed, for, as we have
seen, it challenges many of our moral presumptions about having children. Moreover,
if the alleged wrong can give rise to legal actions for compensation, and perhaps also
to criminal liability then a number of further problems arise.
(Harris, 1998: pp. 99 and 101.)
In this chapter we attempt to investigate the possible wrongs and harms for
which people might be responsible in having or attempting to have children.
We start ‘together’, so to speak, but as the argument develops points of
diVerence arise. In charting both the points of agreement and those of
diVerence we hope to throw light on and diVuse heat from a debate that is so
often characterized by little of the former and a swelter of the latter.
Beginning together
The alleged wrong involved in bringing to birth a disabled child has been at
the centre of so-called ‘wrongful life’ law suits. In wrongful life suits those
brought to birth in a ‘disabled’ state seek compensation from allegedly
negligent physicians for this disability through the courts. The claim in a
wrongful life suit is not that the negligence of the health professional involved
caused the ‘disability’ but that the negligence involved was that of failing to
inform the patients adequately and thus being responsible for the birth of a
child in a less than satisfactory condition who would otherwise not have been

born. In such cases the physician is not held responsible for causing the
impairment in the child but of causing the impaired child to be born,
implying that the child would have been ‘better oV’ if he or she had never
been born. Thus in wrongful life suits we are not considering the diVerence
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between being born impaired rather than unimpaired but rather the diVer-
ence between being born and not being born – existing and not existing.
We will not go into detail here of such law suits; we are interested in the
philosophical issue at the heart of such cases, that is, is it morally wrong to
bring to birth a disabled child?
Worthwhile lives?
There is a strong obligation not to harm the future person or seriously
damage his or her welfare or other signiWcant needs or interests. There is
obviously a strong obligation not to damage a fetus in utero, for example by
taking drugs that would damage its hearing or stunt its growth. However, this
is not the issue in wrongful life suits. The individual is not suing for
negligence of the harm inXicted but for the wrong of being brought to birth
in a damaged state. The claim is, it seems that the wrong they are suVering is
the wrong of being brought to birth.
The answer given to the question ‘Would I, or anyone, wrong this child by
bringing it into being, in this condition?’ will depend greatly on the value
which is placed on life itself. If it is thought that being brought to birth and
thus enabled to have the experience of being alive is usually a valuable and
positive experience, then it would seem that the only plausible answer to this
question is this – unless the child’s condition is predicted to be so bad that it
would not have a worthwhile life, a life worth living, then it will always be in
that child’s interests to be brought into being. It is in the interests of any child
whose life will be likely worth living overall, that he or she is brought to birth.
It is, after all, that child’s only chance of existing at all. Unless the child is
likely to be born with a condition so severe that it is likely to cause suVering

so great as to outweigh the good of life then it is in the interests of the
individual to exist despite the possibility of a life compromised by disability
(Harris, 2000b).
It may be considered that this argument comparing existence to non-
existence is logically problematic. Bonnie Steinbock (1992: p. 117) explains
this diYculty:
This argument maintains that it is impossible for a person to be better oV never having
been born. For if I had never been born, then I never was; if I never was, then I cannot
be said to have been better oV. The problem can be put another way. To be harmed is
to be made worse oV; but no individual is made worse oV by coming to exist, for that
suggests that we can compare the person before he existed with the person after he
existed, which is absurd. Therefore, it is logically impossible that anyone is harmed by
coming to exist and wrongful life suits are both illogical and unfair in that they require
the defendant to compensate someone he has not harmed.
Even if it is deemed impossible to compare existence with non-existence in
322 R. Bennett and J. Harris
any meaningful way, it does seem reasonable to argue that as long as an
individual does not have a life so blighted by suVering that it outweighs any
pleasure gained by living, that individual has not been wronged by being
brought to birth. It may well be that it does not make sense to talk of someone
being made better or worse oV by being brought into existence, but it does
appear to make sense to talk about lives that are worth living and those that
are so blighted by suVering that they may be considered ‘unworthwhile’.
Where it is rational to judge that an individual would not only not have a
worthwhile life, but would have a life so bad that it would be a cruelty rather
than a kindness to bring it into existence, then we have not only powerful
reasons not to make such choices ourselves, but also powerful moral reasons
to object to those choices when made by others. Whether or not those
objections should extend to attempts to prevent others from doing so if we
can, by legislation or regulation if necessary, is a further and separate

question. Certainly in such cases there must be a presumption that it would
be morally right to prevent such cruelty if we can, but there are of course
independent reasons why attempts to implement preventive measures by
whatever means may themselves be problematic – for example, because they
involve invasions of privacy, violations of bodily integrity or interferences
with civil liberties which might be as or more morally problematic than the
cruelty they are designed to prevent.
However, where we judge the circumstances of a future person to be less
than ideal, but not so bad as to deprive that individual of a worthwhile
existence, then we certainly lack the moral justiWcation to impose our ideals
on others (Harris, 1998: ch. 4).
Morally wrong worthwhile lives?
If it is morally wrong to bring to birth a child who will have a life blighted by
suVering, it is morally wrong because we have created an individual to have
an overwhelmingly negative experience which will not improve. It has been
suggested (Feinberg, 1984; Harris, 1992: ch. 4) that not only is it morally
wrong to bring such extreme cases to birth, but that it is also morally wrong
to bring to birth children who, while expected to have ‘worthwhile’ lives, will
be born with some kind of physical or mental impairment. As bringing to
birth impaired children with worthwhile lives cannot be considered morally
wrong based on the reasoning that their experience will be overwhelmingly
negative, what if anything is morally wrong about bringing into existence an
impaired but worthwhile life?
323Are there lives not worth living?
Beginning to diverge
We will present two diVerent ways of thinking about what, if anything, is
morally wrong about bringing into existence an impaired but worthwhile life.
The chapter will proceed in the form of a commentary by Bennett on Harris
and rejoinders by Harris. We end with a summary designed to point ways
forward in the light of disagreement.

Harris argues that ‘to deliberately make a reproductive choice knowing
that the resulting child will be signiWcantly disabled is morally problematic
and often morally wrong’ (Harris, 2000a: p. 96). For Harris the mother has
not wronged her child by bringing it to birth. Far from it, he argues (Harris,
1998: p. 117) that:
It [the resulting child] has a life worth living because of her choice. The idea that she
might have an obligation to compensate her child for beneWting him is nonsense. In
such circumstances wrongful life cases are simply misconceived. Not because the life
in question has not been impaired, not because the individuals are not suVering, not
because they have not been harmed; it has, they are, and they have: rather because it is
not plausible to regard them as being wronged.
But if the child has not been wronged by his mother’s choice to bring him to
birth, what sense can be made of the claim that the mother’s choice to do so is
morally questionable or even wrong?
Harris considers the example of a congenitally deaf couple who, after
undergoing IVF (in vitro fertilization), are faced with a choice of embryos to
implant. We are asked to suppose that pre-implantation screening has shown
that among the embryos available for implantation are two congenitally
‘deaf’ embryos. Harris claims that to choose to implant the ‘deaf’ embryos
rather than the ‘healthy’ embryos would be morally wrong. He argues
(Harris, 2000a: p. 97) that:
In a case like this the parents have wronged no one, but have harmed some children
unnecessarily, but those who were harmed had no complaint because for them the
alternative was non-existence.
Harris argues that if it is possible for a parent to have a child who is not
disabled, and that parent chooses to bring to birth a disabled child, the parent
is choosing to bring disability into the world. He argues that it is morally
wrong in such a situation to choose to bring a disabled child to birth. This
wrong might be classiWed as ‘the wrong of bringing avoidable suVering into
the world’ (Harris, 1998: p. 111). The wrong done by those who ‘choose’, in

this sense, to bring a disabled child to birth is not the wrong of creating a life
of overall negative experience but of creating lives that are likely to have more
suVering than other possible lives.
324 R. Bennett and J. Harris
What counts as suffering?
Harris argues that it may be morally wrong to ‘choose’ to bring to birth an
individual with any impairment, however slight, if a healthy individual could
be brought to birth instead. He argues (Harris, 1998: p. 109) that the im-
paired child has been harmed:
[T]o be harmed is to be put in a condition that is harmful. A condition that is
harmful, . . . is one in which the individual is disabled or suVering in some way or in
which his interests or rights are frustrated. The disability or suVering may be slight,
just as harms may be trivial . . . I would want to claim that a harmed condition obtains
whenever someone is in a disabling or hurtful condition, even though that condition
is only marginally disabling and even though it is not possible for that particular
individual to avoid the condition in question.
Thus, for Harris, to be born with any impairment that one could have a
rational preference to be born without, even something as slight as being
born without a little Wnger, is to be born in a harmed state. Bringing to birth a
child in a ‘harmed state’, in Harris’s sense, rather than in an ‘unharmed’ state,
is to make the world a worse place than it need have been and is thus morally
wrong proportionately to the degree of gratuitous harm created. If the
disabling condition is relatively trivial, e.g. the loss of a Wnger, the moral
wrong done is relatively trivial.
Who suffers?
For Harris the choice to bring to birth a ‘disabled’ child is partly wrongful
because it causes a child to be born in a ‘harmed’ condition and partly
wrongful because it creates a world which needlessly contains more suVering,
hardship or disability than would have been created by an alternative choice.
There is clearly a strong moral obligation to avoid harming others and to

attempt to minimize suVering. Is it plausible to suppose that bringing to birth
children who, while ‘disabled’ have worthwhile lives, can be considered as
harming these children, and in what sense does a choice to give birth to a
disabled child create more suVering in the world?
Harris claims that to choose to have a deaf child is analogous to not curing
curable deafness in a child. Just as the deaf child denied the cure is harmed by
this decision, so the child with incurable deafness is harmed by the choice to
bring him to birth. Harris (2000a: p. 97) argues:
[A] cure for this congenital deafness is discovered, it is risk-free and there are no side
eVects. Would the parents, in this case, be right to withhold this cure for deafness from
their child? Would the child have any legitimate complaint if they did not remove the
deafness? Could this child say to its parents: ‘I could have enjoyed Mozart and
Beethoven and dance music and the sound of the wind in the trees and the waves on
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Are there lives not worth living?