The dominant framework for addressing procreative ethics has revolved around the notion of harm, largely due to Derek Parfit’s famous non-identity problem. Focusing exclusively on the question of harm treats what procreators owe their offspring as akin to what they would owe strangers (if they owe them anything at all). Procreators, however, usually expect (and are expected) to parent the persons they create, so we cannot understand what procreators owe their offspring without also appealing to their role as prospective parents. (...) I argue that prospective parents can wrong their future children just by failing to act well in their role as parents, whether or not their offspring are ultimately harmed or benefitted by their creation. Their obligations as prospective parents bear on the motivations behind their reproductive choices, including the choice to select for some genetic trait in their offspring. Even when procreators’ motivations aren’t malicious, or purely selfish, they can still fail to recognize and act for the end of the parental role. Procreators can wrong their offspring by selecting for some genetic trait, then, when doing so would violate their obligations as prospective parents, or when their motivation for doing so is antithetical to the end of the parental role. (shrink)

Many accounts of the morality of abortion assume that early fetuses must all have or lack moral status in virtue of developmental features that they share. Our actual attitudes toward early fetuses don’t reflect this all-or-nothing assumption: early fetuses can elicit feelings of joy, love, indifference, or distress. If we start with the assumption that our attitudes toward fetuses reflect a real difference in their moral status, then we need an account of fetal moral status that can explain that difference. (...) I argue that we can have or lack relational obligations to early fetuses in light of our own activities or choices, independent of the fetus’s own features or properties. Those relational obligations make the early fetus morally considerable to the persons who stand in a moral relation to it. Pregnant persons (and other participants in the procreative process) can come to have relational obligations to an early fetus just in virtue of their own decision to create a person, either by intentionally getting pregnant or by deciding to continue a pregnancy. That decision not only makes it appropriate for them to care about the fetus, but it also generates obligations to the fetus that they didn’t have before that decision. (shrink)

The procreative justice debate asks whether justice, and in particular, whether a principle of fair play, requires that non-parents share in the costs of procreation and child-rearing. The principle of fair play demands that persons who benefit from the cooperative labor of others share in the burdens of producing that benefit. Non-parents should share in the costs of procreation and child-rearing if reproductive and parental labor count as cooperative labor, but they are not obligated to share in those costs if (...) parents incur them as part of a personal project. I argue that parental labor counts as cooperative labor because becoming a parent involves knowingly assuming a social role whereby one incurs new moral and legal obligations. Even if parents are ultimately motived by personal reasons, they nevertheless constrain their liberty in order to comply with the rules of a cooperative scheme, and, in doing so, their labor plausibly counts as cooperative. Parents have a claim of justice on others, then, to consider whether the benefits and burdens of procreating and child-rearing are fairly distributed. (shrink)

Underlying Derek Parfit’s non-identity problem is the idea that we can only wrong our offspring if our procreative actions harm them, or make them worse off. For Parfit, the surprising conclusion is that a person cannot be wronged by their own creation, because being created cannot make someone worse off. I appeal to Kant’s moral philosophy to develop a non-harm-based moral framework for procreation that allows us to explain how a person can be wronged by their creation even if they (...) have not been harmed by it. I argue that Kant’s moral framework is uniquely suited to capture our moral obligations to future persons, because his framework locates moral obligations in the will of the actor rather than in the existence of the moral patient or recipient. The morality of procreative choices depends on how well the procreator wills, not on the outcome for their offspring’s wellbeing. My account does not solve the non- identity problem; rather, I argue that if we look at procreation as an imputable action of persons that puts them in a special relation of duty to their offspring, then the moral relevance of their future offspring’s indeterminate genetic identity falls away. (shrink)