The gift of life

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 36, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 245-266

  Velleman, J David ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 52749090264     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2008.00139_2.x     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. As Matthew Hanser pointed out, no one can act with the intention of bringing a particular person into existence ("Harming Future People," Philosophy & Public Affairs 19 [1990]: 47-70, at p. 61).
2. For a different defense of the same position, see Rivka Weinberg, "The Moral Complexity of Sperm Donation" (forthcoming in Bioethics).
3. Seana Valentine Shiffrin, "Wrongful Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Significance of Harm," Legal Theory 5 (1999): 117-48. Brad Inwood has directed me to Seneca's De Beneficiis, Book 3, Sections 29-38. For example: "[I]t is a pretty trivial benefit for a father and mother to sleep together unless there are additional benefits to follow up on this initial gift and to consolidate it with additional services to the child. It is not living which is the good, but living well. And I do live well. But I could have lived badly" [Section 38, Inwood's translation].
4. That the goods and ills of existence are in some sense asymmetric is an intuition discussed by several philosophers. See, e.g., Trudy Govier, "What Should We Do About Future People?" American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979): 105-13
5. David Benatar, "Why It Is Better Never to Come Into Existence," American Philosophical Quarterly 34 (1997): 345-55
6. Michael Tooley, "Value, Obligation and the Asymmetry Question," Bioethics 12 (1998): 111-24.
7. The issue is discussed by Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 391.
8. For this account of suffering, see Eric J. Cassell, "Recognizing Suffering," Hastings Center Report 21 (1991): 24-31.
9. See also Kathy Charmaz, "Loss of Self: A Fundamental Form of Suffering in the Chronically Ill," Sociology of Health and Illness 5 (1983): 168-95.
10. Because coping is an exercise of the will, it requires choice on the part of the subject. That's why we can sometimes think that people have chosen to suffer, although we're never quite sure. There is no clear line between inability and unwillingness to cope, but there certainly are cases in which someone could cope but chooses not to; or maybe he cannot choose to cope.
11. 'Well-being' and 'flourishing' are not precise equivalents for Aristotle's eudaimonia, since they can be achieved at a particular time, whereas eudaimonia can be achieved only over the course of an entire life.
12. Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1990).
13. Jeff Sebo has directed me to Sidgwick's remarks on the subject: "This... we might partly classify under... duties arising out of special needs: For no doubt children are naturally objects of compassion, on account of their helplessness, to others besides their parents. On the latter they have a claim of a different kind, springing from the universally recognized duty of not causing pain or any harm to other human beings, directly or indirectly, except in the way of deserved punishment: For the parent, being the cause of the child's existing in a helpless condition, would be indirectly the cause of the suffering and death that would result to it if neglected. Still this does not seem an adequate explanation of parental duty, as recognised by Common Sense. For we commonly blame a parent who leaves his children entirely to the care of others, even if he makes ample provision for their being nourished and trained up to the time at which they can support themselves by their own labour. We think that he owes them affection (as far as this can be said to be a duty) and the tender and watchful care that naturally springs from affection: And, if he can afford it, somewhat more than the necessary minimum of food, clothing, and education" (The Methods of Ethics [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1981], p. 249).
14. My discussion of donor conception will be confined to the typical case of anonymous donation between strangers. Cases of donation within families, or of "open" donation, are significantly different in respects that would call for different treatment.
15. For a similar view, see Rahul Kumar, "Who Can Be Wronged?" Philosophy & Public Affairs 31 (2003): 99-118.
16. The Convention is posted at 〈http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/ k2crc.htm〉.
17. See Eric Blyth and Abigail Farrand, "Anonymity in Donor-Assisted Conception and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child," International Journal of Children's Rights 12 (2004): 89-104.
18. The Implementation Handbook for the Convention on the Rights of the Child makes clear that the term 'parents' in this clause includes biological parents in the first instance, and that the Convention therefore militates against the practice of anonymous gamete donation (Rachel Hodgkin and Peter Newell, Implementation Handbook for the Convention on the Rights of the Child [UNICEF, revised edition 2002], pp. 117-19).
19. For some social-scientific and legal perspectives, with further references, see Michael Freeman, "The New Birth Right? Identity and the Child of the Reproductive Revolution," The International Journal of Children's Rights 4 (1996): 273-97
20. Amanda J. Turner and Adrian Coyle, "What Does It Mean to Be a Donor Offspring? The Identity Experiences of Adults Conceived by Donor Insemination and the Implications for Counselling and Therapy," Human Reproduction 15 (2000): 2041-51
21. Lucy Frith, "Gamete Donation and Anonymity," Human Reproduction 16 (2001): 818-24
22. Truth and the Child: A Contribution to the Debate on the Warnock Report, ed. N. Bruce, A. Mitchell, and K. Priestley (Edinburgh: Family Care, 1988)
23. Truth and the Child 10 Years On: Information Exchange inDonor Assisted Conception, ed. Eric Blyth, Marilyn Crawshaw, and Jennifer Speirs (Birmingham: British Association of Social Workers, 1998). The material cited here argues that donor-conceived offspring should have access to information about their biological parents. In this part I argue for a stronger conclusion - that donor conception as usually practiced is wrong. In my view, the reasons for concluding that children should have access to information about their biological parents support the stronger conclusion that, other things being equal, children should be reared by their biological parents. For many children already born, other things are not at all equal, and adoption is therefore desirable; but as I argue below, other things are indeed equal for children who have not yet been conceived.
24. As Sophia Moreau has pointed out to me, there are cultures in which one's identity is largely dictated by social convention. Even within these cultures, however, the individual remains responsible for a significant degree of self-definition. From our cultural distance, the nineteenth-century British housemaid seems to have been stamped with a prefabricated identity; below stairs, however, that housemaid may have been no less self-defined than we are today.
25. My argument does not rest on any particular quantitativemeasures of heritability. I cite these statistics only for the sake of suggesting a rough order of magnitude to which psychological traits are probably heritable. In considering the statistics, keep in mind that what accounts for variance among individuals does not necessarily account for variance among groups. For example, individual variance in skin color is largely heritable, but the variance between lifeguards and coal miners is almost entirely due to environment. The statistics cited here are drawn from Thomas J. Bouchard Jr., "Genetic Influence on Human Psychological Traits: A Survey," Current Directions in Psychological Science 13 (2004): 148-51.
26. On the heritability of values and religious attitudes, see Laura B. Koenig and Thomas J. Bouchard Jr., "Genetic and Environmental Influences on the Traditional Moral Values Triad - Authoritarianism, Conservatism, and Religiousness - as Assessed by Quantitative Behavior Genetic Methods," in Where God and Science Meet; How Brain and Evolutionary Studies Alter Our Understanding of Religion, Volume I: Evolution, Genes, and the Religious Brain, ed. Patrick McNamara (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2006), pp. 31-60.
27. My arguments in Part I imply that the benefit in question consisted, not in a counterfactual life-history that would have been preferable, but rather in an improvement that could have been brought about in your actual future prospects. Of course, if your parents conceived you with the intention of transferring their parental obligations to others, then this benefit may have been ruled out before you existed, hence before you had any future prospects to be improved. As I explain at the end of this part, however, it would have been wrong of your parents to conceive a child with the intention of refusing to provide the relevant benefit when it became possible to provide it.
28. I discussed this phenomenon in Part I, and I have discussed it before in "Self to Self" and "So It Goes."
29. A recent literature review concludes: "Following conservative estimates of more recent studies in countries with open records policies, about 50% of all adopted persons will, at some point in their life, search for their birth parents" (Ulrich Müller and Barbara Perry, "Adopted Persons' Search for and Contact With Their Birth Parents I: Who Searches and Why?" Adoption Quarterly 4 (2001): 5-34, at p. 8). These numbers have recently been increasing (p. 9), perhaps in response to greater awareness and acceptance of such searches.
30. See, for example, the Donor Sibling Registry (http://www.donorsiblingregistry.com/)
31. the Donor Offspring/Parents Registry and Search Page (http://www.amfor.net/DonorOffspring/)
32. the "Donor Offspring" page of the Donor Conception Support Group of Australia (http://www.dcsg.org.au/); the UK Voluntary Information Exchange and Contact Register (http://www.ukdonorlink.org.uk)
33. and New Zealand's Human Assisted Reproductive Technology (HART) Register (http://www.dia.govt.nz/pubforms.nsf/URL/HARTbrochure.pdf/$file/ HARTbrochure.pdf).
34. A series by David Plotz in the online magazine Slate resulted in many inquiries from donor offspring seeking their biological families (http://slate.msn.com/id/98084/)
35. Plotz discusses these inquiries, and many other aspects of donor conception, in The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank (New York: Random House, 2005).
36. See also an op-ed entitled "Give Me My Own History" by David Gollancz (The Guardian, May 20, 2002, http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,718666,00.html)
37. and a series of slides from the Oprah Winfrey Show (http://www.oprah.com/ relationships/slide/20080208/rel_20080208_101.jhtml).
38. On the similarities between donor conception and adoption, see Eric Blyth, Marilyn Crawshaw, Jean Haase, and Jennifer Speirs, "The Implications of Adoption for Donor Offpsring Following Donor-Assisted Conception," Child and Family Social Work 6 (2001): 295-304.
39. See David M. Brodzinsky, "A Stress and Coping Model of Adoption Adjustment," in The Psychology of Adoption, ed. David M. Brodzinsky and Marshall D. Schechter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)
40. Steven L. Nickman, "Retroactive Loss in Adopted Persons," in Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief, ed. Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven L. Nickman (Washington, D.C.: Taylor and Francis, 1996), pp. 257-72.
41. See Robin Jeshion, "Acquaintanceless De Re Belief," in Meaning and Truth: Investigations in Philosophical Semantics, ed. Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke, and David Shier (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2002), pp. 53-78. I am grateful to Jeshion for suggesting this way of expressing what was a vague intuition on my part.
42. Again, see Jeshion, "Acquaintanceless De Re Belief."