There is a kind of tiredness that can feel like a conclusion. After five weeks, that tiredness is understandable — which is the reason not to trust what it seems to be telling you.
It runs like this. Week after week, the reasons you reached for have been set aside, one by one. The easy yes went in the first episode. The sentence "I would only do it for the child's own good" was emptied, because there is no same child, otherwise, whose good could be weighed. The easy no was refused. And last week the strongest argument anyone has built for the no turned out to be one that no one can cleanly win and no one can cleanly defeat. So a thought arrives, and it arrives as a kind of relief. Perhaps there are simply no good reasons here. Perhaps this was never the sort of question that has reasons at all. Every answer falls apart the moment you lean on it — so stop leaning. Decide by a coin toss, or by instinct. Do whatever you were going to do anyway, and give up the idea that an argument was ever underneath it.
That thought deserves a name, because it is the third of its kind. The easy yes was the first thing this series set aside. The easy no was the second. This one — the shrug, the conclusion that it is all a wash and nothing is really at stake — is the third, and it is the most tempting of the three. It does not feel like adopting one answer. It feels like refusing all of them. It can feel like wisdom, like the mature response: stop overthinking, the clever people cancel each other out, get on with your life.
It is a mistake, and tonight I want to show why — by handing back something this series has spent five episodes taking away. A reason. A real one, defended in print by serious people. It passes straight through the argument that defeated everything else, untouched, with nothing to be said against it on that ground. The question is not a wash. Something is at stake, and I can show you exactly what.
There is a catch, and it is the whole of tonight. The reason that survives is not the one you would have chosen to keep. You wanted "for the child's own good" — the warm reason, the one about a particular person you would love. That reason is still gone, and we are not getting it back. What returns in its place is more detached: impersonal. It does not stand over a child and ask whether that child's life is good for them. It stands further back, and asks a different question — and that question has, for generations, been asked in some of the most troubling settings of the last hundred years. You may want to turn away from it. Not yet — because turning away would be a fourth easy exit, and we are not in the business of those.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required. This is the sixth of nine episodes on one of the hardest questions a person faces: should I have a child? Last time we set aside the easy no. We gave the real argument that coming into existence is always a harm, in its strongest form, then found the flaw in it, and named no winner. Tonight the pressure comes from the other direction. The reason you thought had died two episodes ago — in the piece of reasoning where you looked for the child your choice was for, and found no one there — was not defeated. It re-appeared in a different form. Tonight we find out where, and what that form is.
Let me be exact about what was defeated two episodes ago, because I think what you take yourself to have lost is larger than the thing that actually failed.
Take the most reasonable sentence available — I would only do it for the child's own good — and look for the child the good was meant to be for. There is no one there. Because the choice itself decides which child is born — a different child for a different choice — there is no single individual, waiting on the far side of the decision, whose life could be made to go better or worse than it otherwise would have gone. The comparison had nothing to compare. The sentence came up empty.
Now the step worth slowing down on, because it is the most useful thing this series has to offer, and the easiest to get wrong. When that sentence came up empty, what exactly failed? Not the claim that having a child is a good thing, or a bad thing — that was never touched. Not the claim that you can wrong a child by the life you hand them — that was left standing, damaged but still defended. Something much narrower failed. One kind of reason failed: the kind that points at a particular person and asks whether what you are doing is better, or worse, for them than their own alternative would have been. Call it the person-affecting reason — the reason that depends on one named individual and their own otherwise-life. That kind failed, because to create someone is to choose which someone, and a reason that has to weigh a person against their own otherwise-life has no otherwise-life to set against them.
But a reason about one particular person is not the only kind of reason there is. And here I want to ask for something you have done before, a few series back, in the episodes on free will and blame. You may remember the shape of it.
There, the discipline was to take a single sharp finding and refuse to let it extend past its proper scope. The finding was about determinism — the possibility that your choices are fixed in advance by the physics, settled before you make them. The temptation was to let that one finding settle every question that follows from it: if everything is determined, then no one is really responsible, then blame is a fraud, then praise is a fraud, then nothing anyone does means anything. The discipline was to stop it at the first step. To say: this finding settles a narrow fact on one level — the level of physics, of causes and prior states — and it does not automatically settle a different question that belongs to a different level, the level on which we hold one another to account for what we do. A true verdict on the lower level does not get to decide the case on the higher one for free. You had to keep the two levels apart, and make each one answer its own question in its own terms.
Do the same here — and it is harder here, because the stakes are as high as they get: not levels in the abstract, but the decision whether to make a new person. The non-identity finding is real, and it is narrow. On the level of this particular child weighed against their own alternative life, the comparison fails. Granted. But refuse to let it spread further. There may be a reason that does not belong to that level at all — a reason that was never about a particular child measured against their own non-existence. If there is such a reason, then the non-identity finding, true as it is, passes it by and never touches it. The finding holds on the one level it actually covers, and no further.
So here is the question for tonight, and everything depends on it. Is there such a reason? Is there a real, weight-bearing reason in the neighbourhood of "give the child a good life" that does not take the failed comparative form — "better for this child than for this same child otherwise"? Or am I about to hand you the same failed reason, repackaged, and pass it off as a survivor?
There is one. It is about a hundred years old, and still defended in print today. And it survives the non-identity problem completely — not damaged, the way the repair you met two weeks ago was damaged, but untouched, because the problem was built for a different kind of reason, and this is not that kind. Let me show it to you — and then let me show you why you might wish it had not survived.
The philosopher is Julian Savulescu, and the idea has a slightly forbidding name — he calls it procreative beneficence — but the thing itself is almost embarrassingly ordinary, which is a large part of why it is so hard to dismiss. I will build it the way I built Benatar's argument last week: at full strength, in the form its defender would accept, before we raise a single objection.
Start with the reason that failed, so you can see the surviving one separate from it. The failed reason is directed at a person. It stands over a particular child — this one, the one who will actually be born — and asks whether what you are doing is good for that child, better for that child than the alternative would have been. And it finds nothing to hold on to, because there is no fixed person there: change the choice and you do not get a better-off version of the same child, you get a different child. The reason fails because there is no one standing still for it to be about.
Now step back. Do not stand over any particular child. Stand further back, at the point where you are still choosing, and consider the whole set of children who could result from this choice. Not one child against their own alternative. Several possible children, side by side, each of whom would come to exist if you chose one way rather than another. And ask a different question. Not "is this good for this one?" — that is the question with no answer. Ask: which one? Of all the children who could exist, which should be the one that does?
That question does not need the thing the non-identity problem removed. It never sets a child against their own alternative. It sets one possible child beside a different possible child and compares the two. And that comparison is entirely available. Nothing in the non-identity problem touches it, because all that problem ever established was that you cannot rank a person against their own non-existence. It said nothing at all about ranking two possible people against each other. That comparison is intact, as available as it ever was.
So here is Savulescu's claim, in one line. When you are choosing which of several possible children to bring into the world, you have a real moral reason to bring about the one who can be expected to have the best life. Not a duty owed to any of them — there is no one there yet to owe a duty to; the problem was right about that. A reason about the outcome. A reason that says: of these possible lives, let the best one be the one that is lived.
Make it concrete, because he means something concrete. Consider a couple using fertility treatment, with more than one embryo to choose between, and a test that reports something about each — one carries a gene for a serious illness that strikes early, the others do not. Same parents, same love waiting, same home. Savulescu says you have a reason to choose one of the healthy embryos. Not because you would be wronging the other child by passing it over — that child, had you chosen it, would have no other life to be compared against; the non-identity point protects you there just as before. The reason is not owed to anyone. It is the plain thought that, given a choice between bringing about a life expected to go well and a life expected to go badly, everything else held equal, the good life is the better one to bring into being. Of the possible children, bring about the one whose life is likely to go best.
Most people have the same response here, and that response is what drives the whole view. It is very hard to hear "you have a reason to choose the embryo without the early-death gene" and feel nothing at all. Some part of you agrees: yes, of course. If it costs nothing, if the love would be the same either way, then of course you would want the child who gets the longer, easier life rather than the one who gets the short, hard one. That flat "of course" is the surviving reason. It is a moral reason the non-identity problem left completely intact, and it holds precisely because it is not the failed kind. You did not reach for a particular child's good. You ranked two possible lives and preferred the better one. The problem has no hold on that at all.
So the question is not a wash, and the shrug does not stand. After everything that was taken — the easy yes, the easy no, the simple "for their good" — here is the one thing the non-identity problem cannot reach: even granting everything it proved, you still have a reason to care how the life you would bring about is likely to go. The choice has weight again. It has structure. Something is at stake, and it can be named precisely — not this child against their own non-existence, but this possible child against that one.
But read again the sentence you just agreed to, because it was built carefully, and the whole of what you agreed to matters. You agreed that, of the possible children, you have a reason to bring about the best-off one — and therefore, in the same breath, a reason not to bring about the worse-off one. Keep both halves in view. We are not setting the second aside. We will have to look straight at it, because that second half — the reason not to bring about the worse-off life — is where the difficulty lies. And that difficulty turns out to be the exact price of getting the reason back.
So far you have watched me do it. Now do it yourself, on the one case you cannot hold at arm's length, because the case is you.
Go back to before you were born. Your parents, at some point, came together at a particular time, in particular circumstances — young, perhaps, or short of money, or unsettled, or simply not yet where they later wished they had been when they started a family. And here is a question people ask all the time, lightly, never thinking it is philosophy: should they have waited? Should they have held off a few years, until they were steadier, better set up, more ready — and had a child then instead?
Run it the first way — the failed way, the person-affecting way. Should they have waited for your sake? Would you have been better off if they had waited? You already know the answer, because you met it two episodes ago, and this is the same shape, turned to face you. If they had waited, the child born a few years later would not have been you. Different time, different child. There is no version of you that gets the steadier start; there is only you, who exists because they did not wait — or some other person, who would have existed if they had. "Better for you if they had waited" is the failed reason again. It comes up empty, as before. You cannot be done a kindness by being skipped over and replaced with someone else.
Now run it the second way. Set aside your own good — you have just seen there is nothing to stand on there. Ask the impersonal question, the one that survives. Set aside who was actually born, and ask: of those two possible children — the one born early to unsettled parents, the one who would have come later to steadier ones — was there a reason to prefer that the second, the likely better-off one, be the child who existed? Not a reason for anybody. A reason about which life it would have been better to bring into the world.
This question does two things at once, and both matter, because they pull in opposite directions.
The first: it has an answer. It does not come up empty. You can actually weigh it — the later child probably gets the easier start, and there is at least some reason to think the world goes a little better if the easier life is the one that is lived. The impersonal question works on your own birth, where the person-affecting one could not even begin. There it is, in your own hands, not on my say-so: one question about your own existence comes up empty, and a different question about the very same choice comes up with something. Same facts. Two levels. One fails, one holds. You ran it yourself and saw the difference.
The second thing it does is the thing the warm reason would have spared you. Run impersonally, the reason has just said something unwelcome about you. It has said that there was a reason to prefer that a different, better-off child — not you — be the one who was born. It looked at the actual you, the person listening now, the one your parents have and love, set you beside a possible brother or sister who never came, and found a reason to have preferred the other. Not because anyone wronged you. Not because your life is not worth living — that is a separate question, and the answer is plainly that it is. Only because, measured impersonally, a smoother life would have been the better one to bring about, and yours was not it.
That is what the returning reason costs. The warm reason — for the child's own good — could never have said such a thing to you, because it always began from a particular child it was for, and you were that child, so it was always on your side. The impersonal reason is on no one's side. It does not begin from a person it cares about. It begins from the bare question of which life is best to bring about, and it answers in lives — comparable, rankable, graded against one another — including yours, including the lives that were never lived. It is as strong as Savulescu needs it to be. And it is exactly that impersonal.
That feature is about to become the whole of the problem. A reason that weighs you and prefers a candidate who never appeared is the small, private version of it. Multiply it by every person whose life the impersonal reason would rank low and pass over. That is the next part. That is what the surviving reason looks like when it leaves your own family and enters the world — the thing you wanted to turn away from at the start of tonight, before you even knew its name.
So look at it directly. The surviving reason says: of the lives you could bring about, prefer the one expected to go best. State that as a practice — as something people actually do now, with tests and clinics — and it becomes: prefer not to bring about the lives expected to go worse. And the lives our societies have most often expected to go worse — the lives the tests are most often designed to detect — are the lives of disabled people. So the impersonal reason, followed out to where it actually operates in the world, says something close to this: there is a reason to screen out the disabled life and bring about the non-disabled one in its place. And that places you exactly where I said at the start we would end up — among the kind of decisions about one another that human beings have made, over generations, in some of the most troubling ways.
I will not hand you the cheap form of this objection, the one that names the worst historical parallel and considers the matter closed. You have earned the real one, and it comes in two parts, both strong.
The first part concerns the measurement. The whole reason runs on one phrase — "expected to have the best life" — and that phrase ranks possible lives by how well they are expected to go. But ranked by whom, and on what scale? Disability-rights philosophers have questioned for decades an assumption hidden inside that ranking: that a disabled life simply goes worse — sits lower on the scale, is less good to bring about. And they ask where the lowness actually comes from. Much of the hardship in a disabled life — perhaps most of it — is not the body at all. It is the world built closely around a different body: the stairs where a ramp could have been, the school that would not take the child, the employer who would not adjust anything, the stranger's assumption that the whole life must be a tragedy. Change the world and much of the "worse" disappears — which means it was never a fact about the life in the first place. It was a fact about a society arranged against it. And if that is right, then "expected to go worse" has folded in a judgement that says far more about our arrangements than about the life — and the impersonal reason has been grading lives by a measure that was distorted before it was ever applied.
The second part is harder, and it holds even if you grant, for the sake of argument, that some lives really do go harder. It concerns what the act of choosing says. The philosopher Adrienne Asch spent much of her working life on this — on disability and on prenatal testing — and her argument runs roughly as follows. When a society organises itself to detect a kind of life in advance and select against it, the act carries a message, whatever any individual chooser privately intends. It says, to every person already living that kind of life: you are the thing we test for, in order to avoid it; the world would prefer the version of this that is not you. The parent at the clinic may feel nothing but love and care for the child they hope to have — that does not matter, Asch says. The practice itself, the standing arrangement of screening and selecting, expresses a judgement about whole kinds of people, and that judgement reaches the living, who hear it clearly. You can wrong a group of people not by what you feel toward them, but by what your choices, taken together, announce about them.
Put those two together, and the surviving reason is in serious difficulty. Its strength came from being impersonal — from grading lives rather than serving a person — and that same impersonality is what lets it say, evenly, "this kind of life, less; that kind, more," within earshot of the people it is ranking.
But I will not let you accept that conclusion either — and you can feel the pull to, because it would come as a relief: the impersonal reason is monstrous, discard it, and the difficulty is over. That is the easy dismissal. It is the mirror image of the easy no from last week — seizing the comfortable conclusion because it lets you stop working. Savulescu has replies, and they are not foolish.
He says the reason ranks expected lives, all things considered — so if a disadvantage really is only the stairs and the closed school, then a society that fixes those has, by that very act, changed the expectation, and the reason no longer points away from that life at all. The objection about the social world is not a refutation of his principle; it is an instruction to it, telling it what to count. He says a reason is not a command: "you have a reason to prefer the better-off life" licenses no one to force anything, ban anything, or touch a single person already born — it is one consideration a free parent weighs among all the others, and any of them can outweigh it. And he says the expressivist objection proves too much — because if choosing the healthy embryo announces that disabled lives are unwanted, then so does taking folic acid, so does treating an infection during pregnancy, so does any ordinary thing a parent does to spare a future child a hard start; and we plainly do not think a pregnant woman looking after her health is sending a message of contempt to disabled people. Somewhere the expressivist objection has to draw a line, and it has not yet drawn one.
So where does that leave you? Exactly where this series keeps leaving you, and I will not dress it up. The surviving reason is real — you ran it yourself, on your own birth; it is not a word-game; the question is not a wash. And the surviving reason is dangerous — it buys its strength with an impersonality that can grade whole kinds of people, and can be overheard doing so. And the defence and the objection are both still standing. I cannot hand you the verdict, and the people who work on this for a living have not reached one; it is live, right now, in the journals and in the clinics at once. There is a later series in this show that goes all the way into that question — what we owe disabled lives, and whether the measure of a good life is ever as clear as the ranking needs it to be — and I am not going to do that badly, in ten rushed minutes, tonight. For now I only need you to hold the shape of it: the choice has its weight back, and the one thing strong enough to give it that weight is a reason you cannot bring yourself to fully trust.
So let me add up what has changed, because tonight, for the first time in a while, you are handed something rather than stripped of it — and what you are handed needs to be held carefully, or it will do you harm.
The shrug — no reasons here, it is a wash, toss a coin — was the third easy exit, and the first thing tonight did was take it away, as the earlier episodes took the easy yes and the easy no. It rests on a mistake, and you can now name the mistake exactly: it confused one kind of reason failing with every reason failing. The non-identity problem defeated the person-affecting reason — the one that reaches for a particular child and asks whether the choice is good for them. It never touched the impersonal one — the one that steps back and asks which of the possible lives is best to bring into the world. One level failed. The other was never in question. And you ran that yourself, on your own birth: "would it have been better for me if they had waited" comes up empty, while "would it have been better to bring about the steadier life" comes up with something real. Same facts. Two levels. You have to go to each one and make it answer in its own terms.
That is what you take away, and it is worth far more than this one decision. Stated plainly: when an argument seems to destroy a reason, stop, and ask which reason — on which level — it actually defeated. A decisive result on one level can leave a reason on another level completely intact. And if you let the result extend past its scope, you will throw away something solid and congratulate yourself on your rigour for doing it. You did this once with determinism and blame. You did it again tonight, with the non-identity problem and the impersonal reason that outlived it. And you will do it many more times, because this is one of the commonest ways a genuinely good argument is misused: it proves a narrow thing, and is then applied to a wide one. Find the level. Make every reason answer for itself.
But take the rest of it with you too, because I will not let you leave lighter than you should. The reason that survived is not the one you wanted. You wanted the warm one back — the one that is for your child, on their side, the one that lets "I would only do it for their good" mean something simple again. That reason is still gone; we did not recover it tonight. What you have instead is impersonal. It grades lives — including the one you are living, including the ones never lived — and it can stand in a clinic and say "this kind, less" loudly enough for the living to hear. It gives the choice its weight back. It also carries a danger that serious people are still, right now, arguing over, and I did not settle that argument tonight, and neither has anyone else. So you hold both at once: the choice is not a wash, there is a real reason inside it — and the most solid reason inside it is one you would be a fool to trust all the way.
And here is where we go next, because there is one place I have kept you out of all evening, and you may have noticed me keeping the way to it closed. Every reason we have weighed — six episodes of them now — has tried to ground this choice in the child: first in whether it would be good for this child, and tonight in which child it is best to bring about. We keep going to the child to find the reason. But perhaps the reason was never in the child at all. Perhaps it lies behind you and ahead of you — a debt. To the people who made you and are now gone. To the long line you happen to stand in. To a future that continues only if someone keeps saying yes. There are people who will tell you that you owe this — not to the child, but to the world. And there is a government, right now, in more than one country, that has decided you owe it to them, and is using the power of the state to collect. Next time we go to the oldest reason there is to have a child, and the newest reason to distrust it, and we try to tell the two apart.
For tonight, take the impersonal reason with you — and take with it the knowledge that it is impersonal. The next time someone proves to you that a reason is dead, do not accept the loss yet. Ask which reason died, and on what level, and then check whether its harder, more impersonal relative is still standing on another level. It usually is. And then you are left with the real work, the work this whole series is about: deciding what to do with a reason you can neither love nor dismiss — which is, I am sorry to say, what most of the true ones turn out to be.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.