Procreative reasons-relevance: on the moral significance of why we have children.
Advances in reproductive technologies - in particular in genetic screening and selection - have occasioned renewed interest in the moral justifiability of the reasons that motivate the decision to have a child. The capacity to select for desired blood and tissue compatibilities has led to the much discussed 'saviour sibling' cases in which parents seek to 'have one child to save another'. Heightened interest in procreative reasons is to be welcomed, since it prompts a more general philosophical interrogation of the grounds for moral appraisal of reasons-to-parent, and of the extent to which such reasons are relevant to the moral assessment of procreation itself. I start by rejecting the idea that we can use a distinction between 'other-regarding' and 'future-child-regarding' reasons as a basis on which to distinguish good from bad procreative reasons. I then offer and evaluate three potential grounds for elucidating and establishing a relationship between procreative motivation and the rightness/wrongness of procreative conduct: the predictiveness, the verdictiveness, and the expressiveness of procreative reasons.
Lotz
Mianna
M
Department of Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Mianna.Lotz@scmp.mq.edu.au
D016026:Bone Marrow Transplantation / Q000941:ethics; D002648:Child; D002651:Child Advocacy / Q000941:ethics; D036101:Cord Blood Stem Cell Transplantation / Q000941:ethics; D003657:Decision Making / Q000941:ethics; D034462:Dissent and Disputes; D026689:Ethical Analysis; D028663:Ethical Theory; D005307:Fertilization in Vitro / Q000941:ethics; D006650:Histocompatibility Testing / Q000941:ethics; D006801:Humans; D019545:Intuition / Q000941:ethics; D028681:Moral Obligations; D009042:Motivation; D010290:Parents / Q000523:psychology*; D019836:Preimplantation Diagnosis / Q000941:ethics; D012098:Reproduction / Q000941:ethics*; D035781:Siblings; D012935:Social Justice; D012945:Social Values