In this paper, I respond to criticisms toward my account of the difference in moral status between fetuses and newborns. I show my critics have not adequately argued for their view that pregnant women participate in a parent-child relationship. While an important counterexample is raised against my account, this counterexample had already been dealt with in my original paper. Because the criticisms against my account lack argumentative support, they do not pose a problem for my account. I conclude the raised (...) criticisms do not amount to a strong philosophical case against my account. (shrink)

John Locke occupies a central place in the contemporary philosophical literature on parental authority, and his child-centered approach has inspired a number of recognizably Lockean theories of parenthood.2 But unlike the best historically informed scholarship on other aspects of Locke's thought, those interested in his account of parental rights have not yet tried to understand its connection to debates of the period or to Locke's broader theory of natural law. In particular, Locke's relation to the seventeenth-century conversation about the role (...) of generation in grounding 'paternal power' is not well-known. Understanding this background is interesting in itself, but more importantly, it can provide us with a .. (shrink)

There is much dispute about what we owe the children we are responsible for creating. Some argue that so long as we provide offspring with lives worth living we do no wrong. Others argue that our procreative obligations are weightier and oblige us to provide (or attempt to provide) our offspring with a reasonable opportunity to thrive, or meet some other standard beyond merely providing a life worth living. Our practices and intuitions on this matter are inconsistent. For example, gamete (...) donors who intentionally participate in the project of creating a child are thought to have few obligations to their offspring, but those who create a child accidentally are thought to have weighty obligations. Furthermore, a justification for why we are obliged to provide offspring with more than a life worth living has been elusive. To resolve this puzzle I argue that an under-theorized element of morality, the directed duty of care, explains why we owe our offspring more than a life worth living. (shrink)

Prabhpal Singh has recently defended a relational account of the difference in moral status between fetuses and newborns as a way of explaining why abortion is permissible and infanticide is not. He claims that only a newborn can stand in a parent–child relation, not a fetus, and this relation has a moral dimension that bestows moral value. We challenge Singh’s reasoning, arguing that the case he presents is unconvincing. We suggest that the parent–child relation is better understood as an extension (...) of an existing relationship formed during the gestational period. The change in this relation at birth is not sufficient to justify the radical change in moral status required to rule out infanticide while accepting the permissibility of abortion. Given that the moral status of orphans is also problematic under Singh’s account, we conclude that Singh has not shown that a newborn has greater moral worth than a fetus. (shrink)

This article casts light on the moral implications of the possibility of human extinction, with a specific focus on extinction caused by an interruption in human reproduction. In the first two paragraphs, I show that moral philosophy has not yet given promising explanations for the wrongness of this kind of extinction. Specifically, the second paragraph contains a detailed rejection of John Leslie’s main claims on the morality of extinction. In the third paragraph, I offer a demonstration of the fact that (...) a moral view which stresses the permissibility of some types of human extinction can be effectively constructed, while in the following paragraph I propose a prima facie defense of a new approach to the topic which is likely to provide us with reasons in favor of the wrongness of a premature departure of humankind. (shrink)

The introduction of in vitro fertilization (IVF) results in a separation of sex and reproduction which has generated enormous ethical debate (Lauritzen 1993). Surrogacy makes this situation more complicated by bringing a surrogate mother into reproduction. A surrogacy case may involve five individuals (in addition to the surrogate child). These are the commissioning couple, the gamete donors, and the surrogate mother. Hence, a surrogate child may have up to five parents, including biological parents, commissioning parents, and a gestational parent. The (...) question is which of these people should undertake parental duty? In terms of the acquisition of parental duty, there are three accounts. They are the biological connection account, the causal account, and the consent account. In this article, I try to argue that only the commissioning parents should undertake the parental duty for the surrogate child based on the latter two accounts. I do not apply the biological connection account because the biological connection account fails to explain one’s parental duty, which I will show in the following sections. (shrink)