Here is something a doctor sometimes has to say to two people who want a child. Not yet. Wait a few months.
There is usually a good reason. Perhaps one of them is taking a medicine that would harm a child conceived now, and has to come off it gradually. Perhaps there is an infection that will clear. The particular reason does not matter. What matters is the shape of the advice, because it is entirely reasonable and it contains a difficulty you will not see until the end of tonight. The doctor is saying: conceive now, and the child you have will carry something — a harm, a hard start, a condition it will live with. Wait, and the child will be born without it. Wait, and have a healthier baby.
And of course they wait. Anyone would. It would be reckless not to; to conceive now would be to choose, knowingly, to hand an avoidable harm to your own child. Better to wait and have the healthy one.
But consider the phrase the healthy one a little more slowly. It seems to name a single child — the one you protected from the condition by waiting. And yet, when we look for that child, for the person the kindness was meant to benefit, it is surprisingly hard to say who it means. I will leave that unresolved for the moment. The advice — wait and have a healthier baby — sits beside a question it does not answer: who, exactly, is better off for the waiting?
I am not going to state tonight, here at the start, what follows from that question, because the conclusion is the strangest thing in this whole series, and stated flat it is hard to credit. It is better built slowly, one step at a time, than asserted. So we will work towards it together.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required. This is the fourth of nine episodes on the most demanding question a person ever faces: should I have a child? Last time we raised the hardest objection on the child's side — that to make a person is to impose a whole life on them, every good and every harm it contains, the gravest decision there is, made on behalf of someone who cannot be consulted. And against that objection you held one reply that did not fall: I would only ever do it for the child's own good. You relied on it completely. Tonight we take that reply at its word. We take the phrase — good for the child — and we go looking, carefully, for the child the good is supposed to be good for. A piece of reasoning most people never encounter is going to do something to the word good that is hard to believe until you have done it yourself. So we will do it, rather than assert it.
So let us return to the doctor's room, more slowly this time, and look for the child we seem to have lost.
Two people are told to wait. I want to examine the waiting closely — the biology of it — because that is where the whole difficulty lies. When a child is conceived matters, biologically, down to the night. A child conceived in March comes from one particular cell, out of millions, meeting one particular other cell, on one particular evening. Wait until June, and it is a different evening, a different cell, a different other cell — and therefore a different child. Not the same child, later. A different child, in the way that your brother is not you born at another time but someone else entirely. The timing does not adjust the child; it determines which child there is. Change the timing and you have not altered a person, you have replaced one person with a different one.
Now run the doctor's advice through that fact. It changes. The doctor said: do not conceive the March child, who would carry the condition; wait, and have the June child, who will not. We heard that as spare your child the condition. But there is no single child running through both halves of the sentence to be spared anything. There is the March child, who would have the condition, and the June child, who is well, and they are two different people. Waiting does not lift the condition off a child. It declines to conceive the child who would have had it, and conceives a different, healthy child instead.
Return to the March child — the one it was sensible not to conceive. Suppose the couple had not waited. Suppose they had gone ahead, condition and all. Have they harmed that child? Apply the ordinary test for harm, the one we use everywhere else: you harm someone when you make things go worse for them than they would otherwise have gone. Worse than what, though? What was this child's alternative? Not the healthy June life; that life was never available to this child, it belongs to the other one. The March child's only alternative to being born with the condition was not being born at all. So, unless the life is so bad as to be worse than no life — and we are imagining a hard condition, not a life of torment; a life worth living, on the whole — then conceiving this child did not make things worse for them than their only alternative. Their only alternative was nothing. There was no better version of this child's life on offer.
See what that does to the phrase we began with. I will do what is good for the child. Good for the child means better for them rather than worse. But better for them requires two things to set side by side: this child's life, and this child's life otherwise. And the moment the choice is what decides which child exists, there is no this child otherwise. There is this child, or a different child, or no child. There is no second version of the same child's life to hold up against the first. The comparison we meant to make — am I making things go better or worse for them — reaches for a second figure that is not there.
Philosophers have a name for this, and I will give it once. It is called the non-identity problem, and it was set out by Derek Parfit, in his book Reasons and Persons, published in 1984. The point is this: when your choice determines who exists — not merely how someone's life goes, but whether they are the one who gets a life at all — then better or worse for them loses its grip, because there is no same person, otherwise, for them to be better or worse than.
I want to be exact about the size of what has just happened, because it is easy to make it larger than it is, and the larger version is false. It has not been shown that the March child cannot be wronged at all. It has not been shown that nothing matters, or that one may do as one likes. One precise thing has been shown: that the simple version of for the child's good — the version meaning better for this child than this same child would otherwise have been — has nothing to compare. The comparative reading does not return a bad answer. It returns no answer, because there is nothing for it to measure.
That is the first result, and it is a narrow one; keep it narrow, because in a moment someone will argue that this is not the end of the matter — that there is a second way of accounting for the harm, and that it still works. But first, run the case once more, on your own, so that it is yours and not merely mine.
Here is a different case. This time I will set it out and then step back, because you can run it yourself now, and you should — it works better done than watched.
A girl of fourteen decides to have a child, and does. Because she is fourteen — not ready, without resources, a child herself — the child she has gets a hard start: less care than it needed, a rougher road than it would have had with a mother of thirty. This too is one of Parfit's cases. Most people, hearing it, have an immediate and clear response: she should have waited. She should not have had a child at fourteen. Something went wrong here that did not have to.
That response is a genuine one — I am not going to talk you out of it — and now look, in the way you have just learned, for the person who was wronged. The child, presumably; the child got the bad start. So: was the child made worse off? Worse off than what? Than the child she would have had at thirty. But — and here you can do it yourself — the child she would have had at thirty is not this child raised from a better start. It is a different person. A different night, different cells, fourteen years apart; about as different as two people can be. Had she waited, this child, the one she actually had at fourteen, would never have existed. So this child's alternatives were never a hard start versus a good start. They were a hard start, in a life worth living, versus never existing at all. And measured against never existing, the hard start is not worse for this child.
There. You have done it a second time, on a fresh case, and it comes out the same. The thing you were sure of — that she did something wrong — you still feel. But the obvious explanation of why — that she made things worse for her child — has no purchase, exactly as it had none in the doctor's room. Not because she did nothing questionable, but because the simple worse for the child reading needs a same child, otherwise, to point to, and her choosing when to have a child is precisely the choice that fixes which child there is. So there is no same child, otherwise, to point to. That is twice now. It is not a peculiarity of the first case. It is the shape of the thing.
Now set this beside last week, because the two results fit together, and it is worth seeing how.
Last week, the consent problem: you cannot ask the child, because at the moment of the decision there is no one yet to ask. That concerned permission — there is no one there to say yes. Tonight's result is the second half of the same difficulty, and it concerns measurement — there is no one there, otherwise, to come out better or worse. Put the two together against the sentence you carried in, the one you relied on completely: I would only do it for the child's own good. Last week we found you cannot get the child's agreement to the good you intend. Tonight you find you cannot even take the measurement — cannot say the good you do is better for them than otherwise — because your choice is what brings the person into being, and the choice that brings a person into being cannot also be better or worse for that person than not doing so. The reply you trusted asked to be checked against the child's life otherwise. There is no child's life otherwise.
I am not going to soften that or hurry you past it, because it is the centre of the episode. The single most reasonable thing you could say about this decision — I am doing it for them, for their good — in its plainest and first-reached-for sense, has nothing beneath it to weigh. That is not a small point. It was the ground you were standing on.
So stay with it a moment, with the comparison empty, before anyone arrives to help. Because someone is about to — and you need to have felt this clearly first, or you will not be able to tell whether the help is real or whether the difficulty is merely being covered over.
Here is the help. I will give it its full force, because it is a serious reply, and because the point of tonight is that no one is entitled to the easy version of anything.
The person who offers it is not trying to evade the non-identity problem. She grants it completely. Her name, for one version of the reply, is Elizabeth Harman, a philosopher at Princeton, in her paper "Harming as Causing Harm," published in 2009. What she says is, roughly: you are right that the comparison is broken — there is no same child, otherwise, to measure against; that whole way of accounting for harm has failed here. But look at the assumption that broke. You assumed that harm must be a comparison — that to harm someone simply means to make their life go worse than it otherwise would have. Drop that assumption, and ask whether it was ever true.
Consider what we ordinarily mean by harming someone. If I cause you pain, or sickness, or injury, I have harmed you. Not: I have made you worse off than in some other version of your life. I have put you into a bad state. The badness is there, in the condition itself, in the pain itself; you do not have to compare it against a parallel life to see it. Harm, on this account, is non-comparative: it is the causing of a bad state, and that is all. And if that is what harm is — or even if it is one genuine kind of harm alongside the comparative kind — then the wrong becomes available again. You can harm the March child after all. Not by making their life go worse than their otherwise-life; that comparison is genuinely gone. But by causing them to exist in a harmed condition — by being the reason there is a person here in pain, or carrying the hard condition, when you could have brought about no such person, or a different, well one. The wrong is not worse for them than otherwise. The wrong is: you brought a person into a bad state, deliberately, when you did not have to. No second figure is needed, no same person otherwise.
A second philosopher stands in the same place: Melinda Roberts, who has written at length on precisely the intuition that will not go away here — the persistent sense that someone's interests are engaged when we make a person, that the choice is not morally weightless simply because the simple comparison failed. The response is the same. The non-identity problem broke one way of thinking about wronging the child. It did not prove there is no such thing as wronging the child. It showed that if there is, it must run on a different basis — a non-comparative one, which registers the badness in the condition itself rather than the gap between two lives.
So here is what has happened to for the child's good, and I want to be exact, because the exactness is the whole episode. It is not dead. I said the simple version has nothing to measure, and that stands; I am not taking it back. But the simple version was only ever the easiest one — better for this child than this same child otherwise. A harder version survives: you can do right or wrong by the child you make, in the making, through the state you make them in. And that version never needed the second figure the non-identity problem removed. The phrase you carried in is not finished. It has lost its simple reading and kept a more demanding one.
Notice what this does to the question you have been circling all series — whether there is anyone there at all to be wronged, whether a not-yet-existing person has the moral standing to be done right or wrong by. The non-identity problem looked, for a moment, as though it answered that with a no: no one there, no measurement, nothing owed. This reply says: not so fast. Perhaps the standing survives. Perhaps you can wrong the one you make, only not in the accounting way you first tried. Whether the child you would make has the moral standing to be wronged in the making is still open, still live — and it is now the real question, the one the easy reading let you skip.
I want to be plain that I have not, in this stretch, defeated this reply. I am not setting it up in order to knock it down. As far as tonight goes, it stands. The person who says the non-identity problem broke only the comparative form, and that a non-comparative wrong survives it, has not been answered by me, and you should leave holding that they may simply be right. May. Because there is one more person to hear from, who has worked this problem as hard as anyone, and who does not think the reply holds at all.
His name is David Boonin, a philosopher at the University of Colorado, and he wrote a whole book working the problem from every angle: The Non-Identity Problem and the Ethics of Future People, published in 2014. Boonin begins where you would want an honest person to begin. He takes the cases seriously — the doctor's room, the young mother — and he agrees that they feel wrong. He wants them to be wrong. He goes looking, as hard as anyone has, for the account that would make them wrong: the non-comparative harm, the surviving interest, every reply on the table, including the one I have just handed you. He examines each in turn. And one by one, he argues, they fail. Every attempt to say but you have still wronged the child either smuggles the broken comparison back in, or proves too much, or stops being about the child and becomes about something else. He cannot make any of them hold.
So Boonin does the thing few have the stomach for. He follows the argument where it actually leads, rather than where he would like it to lead. If the cases feel wrong, and every account of why they are wrong fails, then — he concludes — it is the feeling that must be given up, not the argument. The act is not, in the end, morally wrong. He calls this the Implausible Conclusion, and he means the name; it is implausible, and he holds it anyway, because he judges the alternative — pretending that one of the failed replies works — to be worse, and less honest. He accepts the unwelcome conclusion deliberately, and in full view.
Now hold both positions at once, because this is the actual situation tonight, and I am not going to tidy it away. On one side: the reply. The non-identity problem broke only the simple comparison; a non-comparative wrong survives; for the child's good keeps a harder meaning. On the other side: Boonin, who checked that reply, and the others, more carefully than you or I ever will, found them empty, and concluded that we must accept the very thing the reply was designed to spare us. And I cannot tell you which is correct. I am not being coy — and let me make a promise I will keep for the rest of this series: when I am holding back a verdict I could give, I will say so plainly. This is not one of those times. No one has the verdict. The most capable people who have worked on this stand on both sides, and the field has not settled it. The reply is not a settled position where you can stop thinking. It is a contested one — genuinely defended by serious philosophers, and challenged just as hard by someone who thinks it does not work.
So do not do the tempting thing, which is to pick the side that lets you relax. If you seize the reply because it hands back for the child's good, you have declared it the winner, and Boonin is there to say you have not earned that. If you seize Boonin because the non-identity problem was so clean and it would be a relief to say the whole worry dissolves, you have declared him the winner — and walked straight into the easy version of nothing-matters that this entire series exists to refuse. Both positions are held by capable people. Leave them both standing.
And here, before we stop, is the one thing the non-identity problem does settle — narrowly, and it is worth getting the size exactly right, because there is a temptation to let it settle far more than it does. It settles a fact: when your choice is what brings the person into being, the comparative better or worse for them has nothing to weigh. On that much everyone agrees — Harman, Roberts, Boonin, all of them. That is the settled part. But notice everything it does not settle. It does not settle whether you can wrong the child in some other way; that is the live dispute between the two positions. It does not settle whether you should have the child. And it certainly does not settle that no one is there, that nothing is owed, that you are released. One narrow fact, about one kind of measurement, was established tonight, and the people who established it are the first to insist how narrow it is. The whole weight of the question — is it wrong, should you, on what ground — is still resting on you, undischarged. One kind of measurement has been ruled out. The question itself is untouched.
So let us take stock — and tonight it is a different kind of stock-taking, because nothing was added and nothing was removed. Tonight one of the things you were already holding broke while you held it.
Here is what you take away, and it is an odd thing to hold. The sentence itself — I would only do it for the child's own good — you still have; not a word of it is gone. But you took it into the doctor's room and the young mother's life, and you found that the simplest thing it could mean — better for this child than this same child would otherwise have been — has nothing to measure, because your choice is what decides which child there is, and such a choice cannot be better or worse for a person than not making them. You did not take my word for it. You ran it twice, coldly, and the comparison came up empty both times. That is the first thing you hold: the easy reading of the most reasonable sentence you own has nothing beneath it.
And here is the second thing, held in the same hand, because it would be dishonest to drop it: not everything dissolved. The easy reading failed; the harder one did not. There may still be a wrong in making a person in a bad state — a wrong that never needed the comparison the non-identity problem removed — and serious philosophers defend it, and tonight I did not defeat them. There is also someone on the other side, who has tried harder than anyone to defeat them, and who says they do not hold, and that we must accept the conclusion the rest of us flinch from. Two positions. I have not declared a winner, and neither has the field. So you do not get to leave saying the worry is dead, and you do not get to leave saying it has been answered. You leave holding both, and holding that the real question — can you wrong the one you would make, in the making — is now open beneath you in a way it was not this morning, when you assumed for their good plainly covered it.
That is where you are: the fourth of nine, and the basis you most relied on is the one that has given way. Not into despair, but into work. You have ruled out one way of measuring tonight. You have not answered the question — and the question is heavier now, not lighter, because the easy way of answering it is the one that just failed.
And I know where you will want to go next, so let me name it and then ask you to wait. With the simple for their good reading broken, a tempting conclusion becomes available, one that looks like relief. It says: very well — then the people who told you not to were right all along. The planet, the cost, the whole case against having children. Refusing to have them was the honest conclusion after all. Do not. That conclusion is available now, and it is the easy no, and it is exactly as cheap as the easy yes we cleared away in the first episode. Next week we take it up — slowly, whole, the actual argument rather than the slogan — because the serious case for never having children turns out to be stranger and harder than the familiar one, and it has almost nothing to do with the planet or the cost. I am not going to let you bank the no cheaply, any more than I let you bank the yes. You will have to earn it or refuse it. Next week.
For tonight, carry the question, because it is yours now, and it does not only arise in the nursery. The next time anyone reasons about doing right by a person who does not yet exist — a child, a future generation, anyone whose very existence depends on the choice being made — watch for the same pattern. Ask whether the choice on the table makes that person's life go better, or whether it decides which person there is. Because if it decides which person there is, then the kind and obvious I am doing it for their good is reaching for a comparison that is not there — and you have learned, by doing it yourself, to notice when the comparison has nothing to measure, and to recognise that the silence is the beginning of the hard part, not the end of it.
You are holding a decision with the first of its measures broken. Do not pretend it is not broken, and do not pretend the break has decided anything for you. It has not. It has only removed the easiest way to deceive yourself about which ground you are really standing on.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.