This is so because if we limit moral and legal criticism only to those acts which can be said to negatively affect the interests of some particular entity, it turns out that our reproductive decisions will, in many cases, have little or no moral content, despite our intuitions to the contrary.
She then observes, however-in recognising the conclusions of the non-identity problem, as have many before her, including ourselves (see, for example, )-that this approach seems to offer very few of the benefits it provides in cases of harms to extant persons in the context of reproduction.
She thus suggests that because of this more empirical focus, harm based approaches ‘may be a useful interface between morality and legislation’. This can be found, she suggests, in the fact that a focus on the harms our choices may impose on others are more identifiable and less subjective than a focus on deontological principles or impersonal and free-floating harms. She notes, for example, that although she does not subscribe to the belief ‘that harm to offspring is the sole focus of moral concern in reproductive decisions’, there is something to be said for a harm-based approach to legislation and morality. Smajdor begins her attack on the harm threshold in reproductive decision making by noting the benefits that are often associated with harm-based, person-affecting accounts of morality and the proper limits of legislation. After this, we note that although a threshold account of prenatal harm may not be compatible with comparative accounts of harm, the logical inconsistencies Smajdor associates with this account do not occur on non-comparative accounts of harm, such as the one championed by one of us, John Harris, in his book Wonderwoman and Superman.ĭoing away with the harm threshold: reconstructing, summarising, explaining, and situating Smajdor’s position in relation to our own We then question whether Smajdor’s use of Derek Parfit’s arguments in her own is a charitable one that truly captures the spirit in which they were made. We thus begin our commentary by providing a reconstruction of the major components of the arguments contained within Smajdor’s article. We aim to settle some tenacious misunderstandings of the logic of this corner of moral discourse by exploring and explaining the difference between the use of comparative and non-comparative accounts of harm in non-identity cases and the problems that occur when such accounts are conflated. Our arguments are, however, more than mere commentary. We have in mind cases in which a foetus or embryo is likely to become an individual whose life is variously described in the philosophical literature as ‘empty of all the things that make life worth living’, ‘dominated by pain and suffering’, ‘intractably miserable’, ‘not worth living’, or ‘worse than no life at all’. In this commentary, we defend the claim that despite the conclusions of the non-identity problem, there are good moral reasons, based upon consideration of the suffering that would be experienced by the individual concerned, not to decide to bring him or her to birth. Thus, her article, although she does not choose to characterize it in this way, actually constitutes the suggestion that those who subscribe to a harm based and person affecting account of morality (or of the limits of law) must acknowledge that, in holding this view, they are also required 1 to accept the conclusions of a remarkably strong version of a problem in philosophy, known as the ‘non-identity problem’. In short, her argument is based on the following simple claim: there does not exist a ‘logical connection between the assertion that some lives are not worth living, and the claim that such people are harmed by being conceived’. For if, in accordance with this literature, she suggests, existence should not be considered to be a ‘real’ predicate-that is, if existence cannot be considered an attribute of an object and thus fails to add to the concept of a thing-no entity can be harmed or benefited by being born. Smajdor comes to this conclusion by appealing to a well-known literature that supports the notion that the act of creation cannot be identical with the acts of harming and benefiting. She claims-after outlining the concept of the harm threshold in reproductive decision making, noting its many proponents in the philosophical community, and observing its inclusion in legal and policy documents related to reproduction-that no entity can be harmed by being brought into existence, regardless of the extent to which they will suffer once born. Has the time come to put to bed the concept of a harm threshold when discussing the ethics of reproductive decision making and the legal limits that should be placed upon it? This is the question asked by Anna Smajdor in her article in this issue.
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