Smacking your kids around drastically increases the odds of creating adults that smack their kids around and are happy to address most other problems in life by smacking someone or something around.

There is such a thing as not contributing to an ongoing cycle, and there is a possibility this is a noble thing. The decision to not have a child – or to smack that child around – does not exist in a frickin’ vacuum.

There are consequences for others in all actions. My decision to not engage in further child-bearing is a DIRECT result of confronting my own past abuse and the resulting decades of depression. If you haven’t experienced this, then perhaps you are merely dealing in theory about what an abused child thinks and feels and how that affects one as an adult.

Having largely conquered this depression, I may someday again reconsider child-bearing. But in the meantime, please be aware this is not just an interesting philosophical discussion to everyone.

I am fiercely pro-choice.

Why not then better to skip the parents who do not truly want children, and be born to ones who can give the love a child needs?

There are many ways to look at the universe.

Perhaps being alive and suffering is better than never having existed if you are certain that there is no alternative to non-existence. Seeing that we don’t know, I personally prefer to err on the side of caution and at least consider that quality of life is as important to the not-yet-reborn as it is to the living.

All manner of excuses for poor behavior can follow from the logic of “any suffering is better than being dead or never existing”.

I think we can do better than that.

Did you read the very next sentence after the part you copied and pasted? I am assuming here, for the sake of argument, that if you couldn’t treat your children badly, you’d choose not to have them. Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone, but it does apply to some people. Those are the people I’m calling “you” in this question. So yes, that does mean that’s the question he’s asking.

You are acting as if the question posed is whether A child should be bore to abusive parents or not at all. That question has not been asked of us by the author.

What has been asked is “How can it be okay to remain childless but not okay to have children and treat them badly—given that the children themselves would presumably prefer being treated badly to not being born at all?” (see that’s how cut and paste works).

What I pointed out is that nothing of value can be based on that presumption because that presumption is based on a fallacy. It is a conclusion based on an incomplete data-set. It is a political talking point based on a slanted poll.

It is semantically identical to this question: How can it be okay to have kids and never buy them toys and not okay to have kids and buy them lots of toys and also secretly sell naked pictures of them to pedophiles them – given that the children themselves would presumably prefer the option with toys.

Please just answer these three questions:
1->If I asked you whether you would rather have never been born at all or die young and you answered ‘die young’ would it be “okay” to kill you?

2->Is the question above about whether you would prefer to die young or not be born? or is it about whether it is okay to kill you based on your answer to that question?

3->How is my question different than the one asked by the good Professor?

(per your own guidelines please don’t try to introduce any new criteria to this decision making process — unless you concede that the process is flawed)

But, more to the point, the “utility monster” thought experiment is quite weak. It tries to show that we should reject consequentialism because our intuitions about the situation are contrary to consequentialism. But even if we should reject every theory that has counterintuitive implications (which I doubt, because some people’s sets of intuitions are incoherent), we should probably only trust our intuitions about situations we can imagine clearly. But we cannot imagine clearly a monster whose capacity for enjoyment and suffering massively dwarfs our own–by hypothesis, the utility monster’s experiences would have to be more or less unimaginable to us. (Parfit makes this point about thought experiments, Reasons and Persons sect. 131.)

@ the main question:
“How can it be okay to remain childless but not okay to have children and treat them badly—given that the children themselves would presumably prefer being treated badly to not being born at all? (I am assuming here, for the sake of argument, that if you couldn’t treat your children badly, you’d choose not to have them.[)]”

Since I’ve never heard of any kind of proof that moral philosophy CANNOT be sensible, I’ll give the moral theory overview. My own view is vaguely consequentialist, with some herbs and spices thrown in, but I take a number of rial views seriously. The challenge Landsburg poses is no problem for most of them.

The question does not pose a problem in principle to rule-, rights- or virtue-based theories. Most intuitive sets of rules permit abstinence, but forbid mistreatment of children. According to any version of the Categorical Imperative, abstinence is OK, but child abuse isn’t. Most rights-based theories will agree that only beings that do or will exist have rights. And, while virtue theories seem light on reasoning, most conceptions of virtue are compatible with childlessness, but not with child abuse.

So this is only a problem for theories that take their cue from the value of competing outcomes.
There is nothing paradoxical about the following:
Value of not having a child=0
Value of child’s life if mistreated is somewhere between -100 and -1.
The longer the child lives, the closer the value of the child’s life is to 0–hence, the longer the child lives, the better, but it would have been better the child never existed.
If the child prefers her mistreated life to never having existed, she might be making one of two mistakes; (a) thinking never-existing is like dying, which the child has good reason not to prefer; (b) failing to properly imagine never-existence. If people like Heidegger are right, it is absolutely impossible to imagine our own non-existence. Heidegger is usually wrong, but he might be right on this one.

(At the same time, I think some people, who find their lives overall burdensome, might be able to rationally prefer non-existence, even if they can’t properly imagine it. In that case, Freddie Mercury can coherently say “I don’t want to die/ but sometimes wish I’d never been born at all.”)

(And, as others have pointed out, the child’s preferences may not even be the major issue; if the child’s life causes more harm than good, it might be best that the child never existed even if she prefers her mistreated existence to non-existence–the intrinsic value of her life might be outweighed by the extrinsic disvalue of her life; she might be a real jerk.)

So, theories that compare value alternatives only have a problem in cases where the child’s life really is more valuable than nonexistence. There is still no problem with those theories allowing a person to choose not to have children, and forbidding them to then mistreat the child. If the two decisions are considered separately, they fare differently; the choice to have children or not might be value-neutral (or so uncertain it might as well be), while the decision to mistreat a child is decidedly value-negative. So the problem only concerns the case in which someone chooses between not having a child, and having it but mistreating it, when the value of the mistreated life is greater than the value of not having the child.

Many value-based theories will also take motivation into account. Motive- or rule-utilitarian theories, for instance, say it’s alright for me to decide not to have children, even if my misbegotten spawn would have been, as it turns out, happy, because it is (suppose) generally best that people who do not want children refrain from having them. But that justification depends on my preference for a childless life being fairly innocent. If my motives for not having a child are as bad or worse than the motives I would have for mistreating my children, I should follow the motives that are better (or less bad.) So, it would be worse to refrain from having children if the reason I did so was to relish the thought of all the joys I was denying the unborn, or so that I could taunt the non-existent. (Even then, little harm is done when I heap scorn upon those who could have been, so the choice is worse only if it is an expression of a more general motivation to prevent valuable lives from coming into being.)

So the problem only concerns the case in which someone chooses between not having a child, and having it but mistreating it, when the value of the mistreated life is greater than the value of not having the child, and the theory takes only the actual or expected value of the choice into account in deciding what’s more or less moral. And on that point, I have little new to add. Some would say that the only value we should take into account is the value for people who do exist, or will exist, not the value for people who might or might not exist depending on our decision. Others think the value of possible lives should be included in the tally. Parfit argues that the latter leads to a “Repugnant Conclusion”: for any given state of affairs S1, we should prefer some state of affairs, S2, in which everyone’s life is just barely worth living, because the number of people with barely-worth-living lives in S2 is enough greater than the number of people alive in S1 that the total value of S2 is greater, just spread around more people. For those interested in the Repugnant Conclusion, and various strategies for avoiding it, see
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/

I don’t read Benkyou’s answer that way, and I don’t agree that it’s a question not worth answering. This isn’t a “trolley” question having to do with a scenario you’ll never be in. We actually *do* have to decide how many kids to have. That’s a meaningful question. Part of Benkyou’s answer is “well, that kid should be born to someone else” — talk about answers to meaningless questions! Or alternatively, that the child would rather be very happy than just barely preferring existence, which is of course true but kind of misses the question.

I think we may be more in agreement than not. Like you, I say “there is no ‘there’ there”. There is no reason a priori to assume that morality will make sense. And it doesn’t, indeed it cannot (fsvo sense).

But this *doesn’t matter*. It doesn’t mean we have to do without morality, which is good because we cannot, it just means we can’t systematise it. And in practice we can get along perfectly fine without a consistent moral philosophy. Heck, we get along fine without an *agreed* moral philosophy. Some might say better than we would with one.

As I read it Benkyou is essentially saying that to be useful, moral philosophy doesn’t have to be able to cope with problems which don’t occur in practice. Or even problems that are rare. Therefore to your question, he is saying:

“That’s a dumb question to which you have no reason to expect a sensible answer. Here is a related, but better, question, which does have an answer.”

Which is a perfectly legitimate response, if that is what he means.

My point about consequentialist morality is that, if it is universally applicable, it always has unacceptable conclusions. I.e. it doesn’t make sense for any value of “sense” that I recognise. All purely consequentialist systems of moral philosophy suffer from the utility monster or an equivalent problem.

That’s not to say that some moral philosophers haven’t taken the view that having adopted utilitarianism (or whatever), they are then morally obliged to feed the utility monster – for they have! – and what is more a new crop of them comes along ever generation.

All that shows is that people can become so intoxicated by ideas that they lose track of reality.

But we knew that.

THere could be a way to resolve this be looking into the capacity issue.

Basically, we can say that mistreated children do not actually have the mental capacity to decide whether they would be better off not having been born at all. To me having a miserable childhood sounds worse than not having one at all, but that might only be because I actually had a good one.

Therefore, when children claim that they prefer having a miserable life to not having a life at all, they do not necessarily have the capacity to make an informed statement. And they certainly do not have any knowledge of the latter alternative (well, no one does really). Therefore, they might be wrong when they claim that they would not be better off not having been born. And then it does make sense that not having kids is fine, whereas having them and treating them badly is not.

So I’d say that it is indeed a paradox if we assume that children can actually soundly decide whether they would be better off not having been born, but you can easily reconcile it if you accept that assumption with the capacity qualification.

To me, it does sound plausible that some children would be better off not being born at all since some parents treat them in too heinous a way.