SIO23: Is It Morally Acceptable to Have Children? with Travis Rieder

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode number 23, and I'm your host, Thomas Smith. All right, got a really fascinating episode for you today. An interview with philosopher Travis Rieder about population ethics and whether it's morally acceptable to reproduce. It's a weird thing we humans do. This is particularly relevant to me because as I sort of let drop in the last episode, I realized I hadn't made any sort of official announcement, not that I intend to make a big deal about it, but Lydia and I are due to have a baby August 20th. Very excited about it. And, actually, just for fun, the artwork for this episode that you may see, depending on, I don't know, your podcatcher or whatever, it seems like it's not always visible, that's actually our ultrasound, so, just for fun.

0:01:18 Thomas: I know it doesn't really, it all just looks like some weird alien skeleton thing, so there's no particular relevance to my ultrasound versus someone else's, but I thought we could do it, so why not, why not put it up, so. There you go. So anyway, very interesting interview and I'll just get right over to it.

0:01:44 Thomas: Joining me right now is Travis Rieder, bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University, and he's here today to talk to us about population ethics. How are you doing, Travis?

0:01:55 Travis: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on the show, Thomas.

0:01:57 Thomas: Hey, thanks so much for taking the time and coming on the show. I first heard about this, I field of, what, philosophy, I guess? We'll clarify later. But I heard about it on another podcast and it was so interesting to me, some of the problems involved and the questions involved. And I really knew, I had something I had never learned about. And I'm so glad you're here to talk to us about it because some ofthe questions are, really important questions and maybe in the future or maybe even even now. And I'm glad to have you on to explain them. So I suppose as a start, do you want to give us a little bit of background on you and what your work is and that kind of thing?

0:02:07 Travis: Yeah, sure. That's fine. So I am a faculty member at the Berman Institute of Bioethics and what we do here is research into all of the various subfields of bioethics, which might sound a bit esoteric, but it really, if I can give a nutshell, is basically ethics of us as embodied creatures, people who are born and get sick and die. The kind of ethics, as one of my old professors used to say, the kind of ethics that angels wouldn't have, right? Us rather sad, decrepit bodily creatures that we are.

0:03:10 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah.

0:03:14 Travis: So that's really quite broad. A lot of my colleagues spend their time doing clinical medical ethics. Some of them do public health. And I came into the field particularly interested in what I somewhat flippantly call the ethics of making babies, which is the title of a class that I teach regularly here at Hopkins. So the reason I like that description of the class is because it encompasses a really wide variety of subject matter. Classical bioethical questions and reproductive ethics wouldn't surprise you at all. Questions about abortion and moral status of fetus, right? So there's a well understood sense of ethics of making babies and kind of classical reproductive ethics. But I got interested in a much broader question, you might say, which is the question of whether we should make new people. And that is a very strange thing to ask, I recognize.

0:03:35 Thomas: Oh, yeah. Oh, could definitely see how people might react with a lot of emotion to that. But I have to tell you, okay, a couple confessions. First off, having a baby in August. So this is maybe a little too late. I should have scheduled this conversation earlier. But also, joke, this is something that I've kind of, in I suppose just a personal way, have thought a lot about because it's like with no guarantee of how, I don't know, horrible or good or whatever life can be. It's interesting that we just, without even really considering the question most of the time, bring new life into the world and bring new people who don't really have a chance. It is not like I can ask my future baby its permission. Do you want to be in this world or not? It is like you are in the world. That decision was made without your consent. It was something I thought a little bit about personally. That is interesting. I am I'm excited to hear about some of your thoughts on that question.

0:04:33 Travis: Right. Yeah, no, you're exactly right. It's a, it's the kind of thing that I think a lot of parents in this, you know, at some point in their lives have kind of, you know, nibble at their brain, but it's just kind of far too weird to entertain, especially in public. And so, you know, one of the things I often say to my students at the beginning of a semester, when we're going to talk about this is, like, in in order for you to get on board with my question, what you need to understand is how weird it is that we make new humans. I mean, you know, so, uh, confession to make you feel a little bit better. If you didn't already know, I actually have a daughter as well.

0:05:30 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Oh, good.

0:05:57 Travis: And that's, that's right. Um, so uh, but I will say my wife and I were married for 10 years before she got pregnant for the first time, so it was a very long process of reflection on whether we, we ought to do this and could do this with a clean conscience. Um, but I tell my students, you know, if, if you haven't really been intimately involved with someone who's, who's made a baby, I want you just, like, you know, pretend like you're in your dorm late at night, perhaps under the influence, and just kind of like let your head be exploded by the fact that you and a partner could be alone in your apartment, right, in your house, and it's just two of you, and then something happens, and over the course of, you know, 40 weeks or so, and good healthy normal cases, um, a new critter comes into existence inside one of the relevant party's

0:05:57 Thomas: We're all hypocrites around here. That's good. All right.

0:06:49 Thomas: Yeah.

0:06:49 Travis: Bodies, and then it comes out, and suddenly there, there are three of you in the house, right? So

0:06:54 Thomas: Right. It's like that sounds like alien or something when you describe it. Yeah. You put it that way.

0:06:55 Travis: Exactly. So, you know, when you said, right, you know I, I brought this person into existence without their permission. I mean, you are actually hitting on one of the strange making features here, which is, this is the one act that we engage in, in our lives in which the person most, uh, at stake in the action who, who will be benefited or harmed would be made well off or badly off, that person doesn't exist prior to the action, and that makes it philosophically really weird, so

0:07:07 Thomas: Yeah.

0:07:28 Thomas: Yeah. Now I'm nervous. Am I am I morally wrong for what I'm currently in the process of doing?

0:07:29 Travis: Uh, Well, you know, spoiler alert, if you kind of read through all of my research, you find out that that I, in in fact, in all his particularities, defend a view on which you're not doing anything wrong, um, but it's it's an uncomfortable view because you could be doing something wrong if, for instance, uh, you and your partner didn't really have strong feelings about this, it was just kind of the the next thing that that life called for, and your parents were saying, give us grandbabies, right, um, or, you know, the worst case scenario, if the government was saying to you, you know, we need more soldiers for the battlefield or something, right, if if those were the reasons that you took upon yourself to create a new human, then I think that there probably would be something morally amiss that's really worth thinking hard about. I also think that it's totally unclear whether the fact that having a child might be morally permissible, whether that implies that you could have more than one child permissibly.

0:08:01 Thomas: Right. Right. Oh,

0:08:34 Travis: Because when you have that first kid, you go from being childless to being a parent, and this is a massive change in your identity and your entire life structure and all of your priorities, uh, and, you know, in the best circumstance, when you kind of take on the normative framework of parenting, um, but when you go from having one kid to two, or two to three, or three to four, or whatever, um, that change is not happening. Instead, you're just going from being a parent of one to being a parents of two, which is not to say that's inconsequential, but it is not kind of life faltering in the same way, where it just restructures everything about your existence, um, so

0:09:11 Thomas: But I was thinking of it in terms of the actual, you know, babies or whatever. I mean, either way, if you're a parent or not, I mean you're you you are considering another human that you're bringing into the world. So it's it's interesting that the problem could be maybe one answer when you have one kid. But if you're going to have 10 kids, does the, does the logic change at some point? And does that calculation change? Or if it's moral once, is it moral every time?

0:09:11 Travis: Exactly.

0:09:41 Travis: Yeah, so we skipped ahead, right, and we can backfill, we can blackfill the the actual arguments, but, um, you know, what we're presuming is that there are kind of, uh, serious moral reasons to be worried about having a kid. So will they have a good life, is climate change gonna, you know, totally disrupt the planet in their lifetimes, um, well, well, if it turns out that there are really good reasons, really good moral reasons not to have a kid, that doesn't mean that you automatically get obligation, because you have really good moral reasons to do lots of things. And sometimes you get to override that consideration, right?

0:09:43 Thomas: Oh, sure. Oh, we can, we, we Can go back. Yeah.

0:10:17 Thomas: Yeah.

0:10:18 Travis: So if it really is going to change the very nature of who you are, we tend to think, for instance, that you are not obligated to give your kidney to a stranger just because they need Right. So a certain level of demanding this can kind of trump what would otherwise otherwise be an obligation. So, yeah, having that first kid, that's a really good candidate for beating back moral considerations. It it gives you massive meaning. You know, if you're like a lot of people, the number of kids after that are are are different. So. But yes, we should back.

0:10:50 Thomas: But that's interesting that you're

0:10:52 Travis: Though.

0:10:52 Thomas: Still talking about it in terms of what it does for me or something as a parent, but, uh, I'm still, it's, I's, it still curious to me that I with no guarantee of a good outcome for the person. Maybe I'm still stuck back at that basic problem, or is it something that's too many books of arguments down I wonder, does that depend also on the state of the world? You referenced climate change. I mean, what if you are it could get really murky and I could imagine people having even more, you know, visceral reactions to to the argument if if one were to say, well, if you live in a third world country where things are terrible, if You live in Syria right now, you should not have a kid. Yeah, that is morally wrong to bring a baby into a world where there's bombs falling all the time.

0:11:40 Thomas: It's an awful situation. Is that something, a problem that you looked at in detail?

0:11:46 Travis: So that's, that's a really excellent question, because so yeah, you might think that how bad the world is changes whether or not you have reasons to have kids or not to have kids, um, but it would be really untasteful, to say the least, right to say that the poorest people in the world, whose, like, whose kids are, you know, going to have a bad start at life, they, they shouldn't have kids. That would be, that would feel really terrible to say. Now, philosophers are kind of uniquely comfortable considering horrible, horrible sounding thing. So maybe some people would defend that.

0:11:59 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Yeah, let's talk about some trolley problems after this. Push some obese people, but yeah.

0:12:18 Travis: Yeah. So, so let's do this. So let me give you a handful of categories of arguments against having a child and, and then you can kind of pick and choose which ones you want to hear more about. So this is, yeah, so this is where my my choose your own adventure, antenatalism, right?

0:12:21 Thomas: Oh, okay. Choose your own adventure. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

0:12:40 Travis: Um, so, uh, my current research is I've written some stuff on whether climate change gives us reason not to have kids in particular, and also whether the fact of, you know, orphans existing in the world who need parents give us reasons not to create new people, but to adopt instead.

Um, so what I'm trying to think about now is I'm to organize this debate in a way, because I think one of the things that becomes is really striking is when you stack up all of the arguments that seem to be pretty powerful in favor of not having a child, because we are all what philosophers will call pronatal. I mean, almost all of us, right?

We tend to think having kids is a good thing, right, so you said I am having a kid in a few months, and my initial response, like the very first thing that popped in my mind was, hey, congratulations, you know, I'm sure people are going to throw you parties, and you're really excited, right? Our existence is structured around the kind of goodness of making a new person. And this is really unsurprising if you think about the evolutionary forces, right.

0:13:28 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Hmm.

0:13:43 Travis: So we're very pronatal. And the arguments I'm about to describe are arguments for various degrees of what you can call antinatalism, or the view that having kids is morally problematic, or morally bad, or the strongest version, that we're obligated not to to have children. Right? So the structure is, I'm going to lay out a bunch of arguments, and you see, oh, wow, each one of these actually seems pretty strong. They all have the conclusion that there's something morally pretty problematic about having a kid. But we all think that having kids is good. And that's a kind of striking situation to find oneself in. So one way to organize this discussion is to think about kind of highly philosophical arguments against having having children, and then much more empirical arguments for not having children.

0:14:27 Thomas: Okay.

0:14:28 Travis: And so we might not want to get into the highly philosophical ones. They're, they're brain teasers and they're really weird, but they really stem from this point that I made right off the bat, that you have to think about how strange it is that we make new humans. And,

0:14:41 Thomas: Well, I wouldn't, I wouldn't mind one brain teaser if you want to throw it at us, but,

0:14:44 Travis: Sure. Let's do a brain teaser. So I'm a big believer in something that, that we tend to call the procreative asymmetry. And that's just jargon. Um, but it, it's really understandable if you give me a minute. So what this means, what the procreative asymmetry means is that we tends to believe two things, uh, that seem to be in tension with one another. And the first one is if you were to find out, so, you know, rewind your life before you and your partner decided to have the child that's on the way. Right. Um. And you're just, you're you're making the decision. Should we in fact create a new human? If you were to find out that if you did it this month, that child would have a devastating abnormality, um, which is to say that, you know, it would come into the world and, you Know, kind of massive suffering and then die shortly thereafter. I'm sorry, this is a really dark conversation to

0:14:56 Thomas: Right. Sure. No,

0:15:30 Travis: Have with you.

0:15:31 Thomas: No problem. No problem.

0:15:32 Travis: Um, but if that were the case, here's a really common belief. You shouldn't get pregnant this month. Right. You shouldn't create. Right. If you knew that that would be the outcome, we would say you shouldn't create that person. And the reason is really straightforward. The badness of the quality of that life is good reason not to create it. Does that make sense?

0:15:38 Thomas: Right.

0:15:53 Travis: Okay. So now flip it the other way. Most of us, probably you, probably me, I know me, most of my students, all of my colleagues, we are so privileged by kind of historical and global standards that if you think that the goodness of a potential life gave you reason to create someone, then we should all just constantly be making babies, right? And that seems manifestly false. So the fact that, you know, my wife is a research scientist, I'm a faculty member in philosophy of bioethics, by all kind of reasonable standards, I mean, you don't know, maybe I'm horribly ugly and that counts against it. It. But you know, by like the standards

0:15:52 Thomas: Of course you got a

0:16:33 Travis: Of fortune, exactly for podcasting.

0:16:34 Thomas: Face for radio. So we're yeah, exactly.

0:16:38 Travis: But the general idea is we don't think that just because our kids are likely to do well, that we should make them. And so when you combine these two claims that I just suggested, you end up with what's called the asymmetry. And it's a bit of a puzzle. It says that the badness of a potential life gives you reason not to create that life, but the goodness

0:16:59 Thomas: Hold on. Let me real quick though. The goodness part. Cause I I have heard, and maybe this is not, I think it'll still be an asymmetry, but you do hear when you hear like two amazingly good looking celebrities get together, you're like, oh man, people will be like, man, I can't wait till they have kids. They ought to have kids, you know, that, that kind of thing. That, that I think that's a, a, check mark on the, uh other side of the ledger there.

0:17:00 Travis: Sure. Sure.

0:17:22 Thomas: When, when people are, when we think we see two people we really like for some reason, and like they're really good looking and really smart, we want them to like procreate.

0:17:31 Travis: So, Well, So maybe we want them to, but but you know, my students always bring this up too and I call baloney. I used to use Brangelina as the the example how you

0:17:36 Thomas: Yeah, I was about to I was like, wait, dude, are they together? I can't remember. I'm a little too out of it on the pop culture

0:17:38 Travis: Yeah Um, exactly um, So yeah, so I call bologna on this one. And the reason is, I don't think we actually think that they have a reason to create a baby. So, you know, we might kind of selfishly be like, oh, we love gorgeous people who are in the limelight, right? But the claim here is actually a moral one. What we're trying to figure out is whether the goodness of that life actually creates, you a moral reason. It gives them a justification for making that person. And the claim of the asymmetry that I'm briefly defending is that they don't get that reason at all. So the fact that their life would probably be charmed gives them no reason to create this child. And if you think, well, maybe it gives them little reason. I mean, they'd be beautiful and rich and probably smart. I say, well, no, it probably doesn't give them any reason.

0:17:44 Thomas: Okay.

0:18:31 Travis: And here's why. Why? Because moral reasons have a really powerful, um, status. If you have a bunch of moral reasons and they stack up and then we don't have any good reasons on the other side, we tend to think that those moral reasons add up to really strong claims like oughts or maybe even obligations, right? So if you had really strong reasons that all stacked up on the side of you should have a baby, and then the only reason you had for not having the baby was, "I don't wanna," right? Well, normally, "I don't wanna" is not a very good response to powerful moral reasons. And so if we really thought that the potential goodness of a life gave us reason to create that life, then we would probably have to concede that the most fortunate of us, you know, really ought to make a bunch of babies.

0:19:18 Travis: Maybe we're even obligated to make a bunch of babies, because on the side of not making a bunch would only be, well, I really want to travel and it would get too expensive when I have that many kids, or I cherish my free time and having more than one or two is going to eat into that. And that just sounds selfish if what's up on the other side is actual moral reasons, right?

0:19:39 Thomas: Okay.

0:19:39 Travis: So I don't know if that convinces you, but that's the basic argument. The basic argument is it's not a bad thing that there aren't a bunch of extra worlds around the universe populated with with potentially good lives, right? The lack of those good lives isn't a negative strike right, because the world isn't missing anything. Um, the David Benatar, a very famous antinatalist, says, you know, that that every nook and cranny in the universe isn't populated with, you know, moderately happy lives is not a bad-making feature of the universe. Um, so okay, so if you believe all of that, then what you're stuck with is an asymmetry, and the asymmetry says, um, the harms of a potential life give you a reason not to create that life, whereas the benefits of a potential life give you no reason to create that life. And if you follow the logic through, if the asymmetry is true, well, everyone who exists is going to have some harm in their life. A bunch of us are going to have terrible harms in our life.

You know, when we're little, we're going to feel jaded and harmed by our parents' capricious decision-making. And then we're gonna get sick and we might suffer serious injuries, and a bunch of us will get cancer. And, you know, we spend a lot of our lives hungry and, um, you know, we get bored and uh, then we die, and a lot of times our deaths are long and strung out and painful. So I'm painting a really beautiful picture, I know. Um, but what that says is all of those harms give you really good reason not to create a life, and there are no benefits that

0:19:58 Thomas: Sure. Yeah.

0:21:08 Travis: Give us countervailing reason to create. And what that means is I've just given you a kind of highly philosophical reason, a philosophical argument, uh, that the weight of reasons is always going to be against procreation, right?

0:21:21 Thomas: I actually agree with that. That's what's been in my back, the back of my mind this whole time through this process, but it's still, but anyway, I'll let you continue in. You, yeah.

0:21:23 Travis: Okay.

0:21:32 Travis: Well, so the rest won't take as long to explain. Um, so that's a kind of paradigmatic philosophical reason, but then we also have a bunch of contingent reasons, right? It's not new to us to wonder whether we ought to inflict the world on our progeny. Um, you know, cynics and misanthropes for a very long time have thought, you know, this world is too cruel to bring a new person into. Well, now we kind of have new ammo for this, right? We live on a planet with 7.4 billion people and fast dwindling resources. We've got catastrophic climate change looming on the horizon and seemingly no effort to counteract that. Massive inequalities, the threats of, you know, increasing war over natural resources as they dwindle, you know. Nuclear proliferation, new AI and robotics dangers, super bugs, right? You know, pick your favorite existential threat. I always focus on climate change because that's my area of research.

But pick your favourite existential threat and you can make a case for today being a kind of particularly scary time to bring a child. And so this is the person who you will predictably love the most in the world, right, and then expose them to all of this harm that you don't have to expose them too.

0:21:58 Thomas: Yeah.

0:22:49 Travis: And call that the contingent argument or the empirical argument not to inflict the world on your kid. But there's a flip argument then, which is that you ought not to inflict your kid on the world. And so this is one that I focus a lot on because humans are a main driver of all of our sustainability crises. It's just kind of there in the very math, right? Resource use times the The number of users equals the total resource usage. And so when I focus on climate change, you can think about this in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, but it's all tied into everything else. Severe water stress, which is being exacerbated all the time. Land water, severe water stress, food availability, right? All of these things, all of these resource problems are partially a function of the number of humans needing access to those resources. And so I'm in a particularly bad position here. I assume that you are too, which is that not only are we going to inflict our child onto the world as another resource user, another mouth to feed, right? But we're going to have especially rich kids.

And I don't mean that in a braggy way that you and I are kind of rich by our friend's standards. It's that by global standards, our kids are going to be massive greenhouse gas emitters. They're goingto be massive food consumers. They'regoing to get the lion's share of clean clean water. Right. And so they're doing two different things when someone like us has a child and that is they're adding another mouth to feed metaphorically, another, you know, per another capita in the per capita equation.

0:24:31 Travis: And it's a really, really large capita, which might make you think that it's kind of particularly unfair, right? Because insofar as you kind of understand how unsustainably the global population is living right now, that we are in what the ecologists call an overshoot. So we're using more resources than the earth can replenish every year. Well, so we're already eating into the capital of the planet. And my kid is going to take a much larger share of that capital than a whole bunch of kids, most of the kids born, right? So it might, I strike you as kind of unfair in addition to contributing to the problem, that she is going to live a life that's incompatible with all children living that kind of life.

0:25:17 Travis: So that's the majority of the cases. And then the one last one, which actually was my entrance into this field, a couple of philosophers started making an argument about the time that I was finishing my PhD, that perhaps we have an obligation to adopt existing people who are orphans, who have had one or both parents either killed.

0:25:35 Thomas: I was gonna ask about that, yeah, yeah.

0:25:37 Travis: Exactly, yeah. So my friend and colleague Tina Rulli out at the University of California, she wrote a dissertation on this topic and then published several really great papers. Another philosopher, Daniel Friedrich, made a similar argument. I wrote wrote a paper in response, but really supporting the power of this argument, which is all of those other considerations aside, when we create a person, we're presumably taking a spot in our family that we could have offered to someone who already needs parents.

And if you have a strong view as Tina Rulli, then you think that each of us who intends to be a parent, so each of of us who are potential parents, actually have an obligation to adopt, um, and that's a really strong claim, right, but Even if you thought that that we didn't want to say something quite that strong, you could at least say, well, look, any of us whose primary project in becoming a parent is is doing the parenting, right, well, we can do the parenting for a kid who already exists. Now some people have a different desire, a different project, which is to procreate, um, so they want to create the kid that they're going to parent.

And and Tina worries that a lot of our desires along that line, um, are problematic in some way, but a bunch of us just want to do the parenting. And so if you only have parenting desires and no procreative desires, but then you create a child rather than rescuing a child, and and she does qualify these as rescues, because so many of these kids will have their, um, their lives diminished in severe ways if they're

0:26:23 Thomas: Yeah.

0:27:09 Travis: Left in orphanages around the world, um, so to to create a new human rather than rescuing one is to do something that's morally wrong. And I think that's also a really compelling argument. It's especially compelling if you add it up with all these others, you know, so we could create a new child and inflict that child on the world, inflict the world on the child, uh, worry that we've done something bad to the child because of the asymmetry, or we could, we could bypass all of those worries and adopt an existing orphan who desperately needs parents, and you have independent rescue reasons.

0:27:39 Thomas: Yes. Someone else has already Been immoral and made a human, an extra human, yeah.

0:27:47 Travis: Exactly. Yes. Although, yeah, we probably think that a lot of people aren't immoral because they have much less procreative choice than we do, for instance. But yeah, exactly right. The decision has been made. And so the harm has been inflicted on the world. Any harm that was going to be inflicted on the child has been inflicted, uh, so yeah, you know, they need massive amounts of help, they need parenting resource, which is a unique kind of resource, and you have that resource and want to give it, so why create a new person who also needs that resource when you could just adopt someone who needs it who's already existing, it's

0:27:53 Thomas: Yeah. True. Yeah.

0:28:19 Thomas: I, you know, I find these arguments compelling, uh, yeah.

0:28:25 Travis: Distressing, I I Will have to say, yeah.

0:28:25 Thomas: No. I Worry, I don't know where you want to go next, but, I, one thing I do worry about is that a lot of this kind of thing, and a lot of, I don't know, human life, is knowing things or being able to find the arguments that for things that are probably morally wrong, but we have such an emotional desire to keep doing it that we'll find ways to justify it. And, and also I wonder, another thing I was going to ask you about, is does this all depend on a sort of utilitarian morality? Morality. I don't know if this is getting kind of too, I don't know, too deep into it, but does this change if you're somebody who thinks in terms of rights, like, well, no, I just have a right to have a child. It doesn't really matter, you know, the external stuff. Like I have a ride as a parent or something like that, versus utilitarian outlook, Which would be like looking at the pros and cons and the, and the overall good that's going to be done. Does that change the arguments at all? Does it depend on that?

0:28:27 Travis: Yes.

0:29:24 Travis: So I think it's a really good question, so none of us, well, for the most part, most of us who are writing, who who have real moral concerns about creating a new child are not in fact kind of full-blooded utilitarians, uh, Tina Rulli's argument for adoption is probably the closest, um, it's got a very utilitarian flair to it, so the the idea that you're obligated to rescue is very easy to come by if you're utilitarian, right, um, but she, she employs that in a non-utilitarian conceptual space, which is that she thinks we do get to block good-making obligations, utilitarian obligations.

We get some moral choice sometimes. And then the question for her is whether creating a child rather than adopting is one of the times where we get an option, what philosophers sometimes call moral option. So none of us are in fact utilitarians. I'm quite quite not A utilitarian, but I still think the question is good because we do do sound utilitarian because they employ kind of centrally the concepts of harms and benefits. But there are other things going on, right? So I, in particular, reject the utilitarian framework. And I think that that there's a big conversation to be had about what sort of integrity agents get to have. And that's an anti-utilitarian concept. The conversation goes back to a guy named Bernard Williams. And

0:30:17 Thomas: No.

0:30:51 Thomas: I have used consequentialist

0:30:52 Travis: No, yeah,

0:30:53 Thomas: Instead, because I I, maybe that's, is that, is utilitarian, I Feel like people are not, are shying away from that because there's too much baggage, but then ultimately they're still kind of consequentialist, but that's a topic for another day, I guess. Oh.

0:31:06 Travis: No, I was just reading you as saying consequentialist generally. That's what most people mean. But yeah, so the idea being that the consequences are strictly what determines the permissibility of an act. And so someone who's really concerned with the integrity of agents in a way that I'll spell out, rejects that view. So Bernard Williams, very famously a British philosopher from the 20th century, very famously said, if, if you were to believe that Utilitarianism or consequentialism is the true moral theory, then you would constantly be required to just produce the most happiness, you would, you would be reduced to a cog in the happiness production machine.

And so if you are a pacifist monk your entire life, if that was one of your central projects, projects of life, and then one day it turned out that killing another human being just happened to produce the most happiness by, by, you know, a slim margin, then all of a sudden you're required to kill another human being, despite the fact that this is one of your, like, most central life projects. And so Bernard Williams says, uh, very convincingly, I think, that's, that's, um, that's a a deal breaker for moral theories, moral.

0:31:09 Thomas: Okay, sure. Uh, So what you're Saying is, what are you saying is the consequences of of living in, with a worldview like that would be too devastating to everybody. This is what I can never get over with this debate, it's still consequences, it's just looking at different consequences, but anyway, that's totally different topic, something I really, one day I want to figure this out for just for myself, like I don't get it, it still seems like consequences to me, but anyway. Anyway,

0:32:39 Travis: Well, There There are views where it is just consequences, but sure, we'll Have that conversation another time. Okay, so Um, so the basic view here is that we have to have some protected space for our projects, so you can call this normative protection, you have to have a kind of sufficiently sized bubble around you, um, in which you're allowed to pursue otherwise permissible, you know, you don't get to pursue the project of becoming the best torturer, right, but otherwise permissable projects that are really meaningful, that have a huge amount of value, you know, cash this out however you want. And so, uh, I argue in my first paper on adoption, a really obvious candidate for a normatively protected project is the project of creating

0:32:46 Thomas: I would love to.

0:33:25 Thomas: Sure.

0:33:26 Travis: A human life and becoming a parent, right? Um, now some people don't actually experience, experience it that way. You know, like I said, some people just want to be a parent and they don't actually care about the creation. Some women, in fact, will say to me you know, I teach classes, and so some women in my class will actually say, "No, no, there's actually like the, there's a downfall to that part.

You know, I'm going to like get fat, or, you know, I'm gonna have to give up my body and it's going to hurt my career. So not only do I not want the creative part, I would prefer to do the parenting part without having to go through all of that." The whole pregnancy thing can be pretty scary, pretty intense. And so if you're one of those people, well, then that value wouldn't ground any kind of exemption. So even on my view where you get some kind of protection, normative protection so that you have integrity as an agent, even on that view, if you don't have any sort of meaningful project for procreation, then you probably really ought to, say, adopt and parent an adopted kid.

0:33:58 Thomas: Yeah.

0:34:24 Thomas: Yeah. No, that that that argument makes sense to me.

0:34:26 Travis: That doesn't do is it doesn't tell us whether, you know, we're all kind of all of a sudden off the hook for all of the moral reasons. Right. So I published one paper that said, look, I actually think it's permissible if you have a certain set of projects, you you know, meaningful projects to create a child in order to parent them. But that doesn't mean like all of these reasons go away, right?

0:34:52 Thomas: Yeah.

0:34:52 Travis: My kid is still, in fact, my daughter, my three-year-old daughter is in fact going to be like a little earth destroyer, right, like she's got this huge carbon footprint just by virtue of, you know growing up in Maryland in the United States and we're going to do things to try to offset her impact but she is going to have an impact on the world and Those reasons didn't go away. So now we have a new question, right? My partner and I got to have this project and we got to Have a Kid, we think permissibly. But does that mean that we get to have another one if we want? I think maybe the answer is no. No.

0:35:21 Thomas: Yeah. You're I see now what you said earlier, because when you're looking at it from that perspective, from the perspective of the reason it's permissible is because you're allowed to have this project, then, yeah, it doesn't really make sense to to have another one. But if it I wasn't sure, I guess I thought you were going to justify it in terms of the human itself that you're bringing into the world, which I think would would shed a different light on the question, depending on what your answer was there. But now I see why you were coming at it that way.

0:35:56 Travis: Yeah, exactly. I mean, as a matter of fact, if you are very convinced by the kind of philosophical asymmetry argument, you might even think it's a cost to the human that you create. Right. So not only are you not justifying it on behalf of the human you create, you actually think that there's like a moral cost to your child that you created them. Now, what you might also think is that, you know, given our desires to protect our children and the resources that we'll expend in order to protect them and our hopes for them, that they're going to end up believing that their life was overall good and they're glad to have existed. It and so, you know, hopefully that kind of mitigates any worries that you have of the asymmetry, but it doesn't change the fact, right, that they're going to experience harms that they wouldn't have experienced if you hadn't created them.

0:36:44 Thomas: Yeah, man, I'm too convinced the other way. I don't know. I'm convinced that we shouldn't be having kids. I don'T know. Oh, man. You

0:36:49 Travis: Yeah. And In that case you're in trouble, my Friend.

0:36:53 Thomas: I know. I know. Um, you know, I'll just have to try to raise somebody. Yeah. My kids, I'm sure we'll solve this whole climate change thing. So it'll be, have been a net benefit to everybody. Yeah,

0:37:04 Travis: Right, that's I call this the, um, I call all this the pass the buck and hope objection. Actually, I actually I say I call it that, I pick that up from a philosopher in the literature. But yeah, whenever my students say, "Oh, come on, you know, I'm smart, I'm well off, like my kids have a better than average chance of solving the world's problems," I'm like, yeah, pass the bucket, hope. Yeah.

0:37:08 Thomas: Yeah, right. Right. Yeah um you know I'm wondering does anyone ever A question that occurred to me when we started talking about this, and maybe it's just because, you know, sometimes I argue with conservatives on this show, is if there's moral questions for this prospective human one way, why don't those same arguments apply to being pro-choice or not? And you referenced that you do a little bit of work on these arguments, right? Yeah.

0:37:52 Travis: Absolutely.

0:37:52 Thomas: So so is that a valid question that we could look at?

0:37:53 Travis: Oh, It's totally valid, um, and I, and I do think about this, and and there are actually lots of interesting directions to go. Um, so, for for instance, I have heard antinatalists give talks in philosophy conferences, um, where they're arguing, you know, that for one reason or another, we shouldn't have kids or we shouldn't have kids, you know, in context, a whatever.

Um, and I've had the experience where someone from the audience asks the person, you know, does that mean that if you get pregnant by accident, you are obligated to have an abortion? And I have seen philosophers who, as I said, are very good at like thinking through super weird claims, you know, rigorously. Um, so I've, I've had people say on the stage, like, yeah, I think you'd be obligated to have an abortion. Now, the reason I say that that's strange, you know, even as someone who's very comfortable saying that I'm pro-choice is that an obligation to have an abortion is an intensely strong moral claim, Right?

Um, I mean, we talked about how strong the moral claim would be if you're obligated not to have a child or obligated to adopt instead of having a child, while obligating someone to have an abortion, especially when there's, um, reasoned disagreements about the moral value of abortion, uh, is an intensely strong claim to make and defend. So, so there are a few things that I think are really interesting about the conversation we've been having. Um, so there's the context of abortion, which is to say, um, if you think that there can can be good reasons not to create particular children, or not to create a lot of children, in fact, does that give you reason to abort a fetus along the way?

0:38:51 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:39:37 Travis: I think that's a totally reasonable question to ask that we should think through. And then there's another one, and this is one I've actually started working on and I've got a paper that will be published later this year on it, which is in the US in particular, we have a very intense debate on how aggressively we should push the limits of NICU medicine, neonatal ICU medicine, because we've gotten incredibly good at rescuing infants that are born really early. And so that's exactly right.

0:40:05 Thomas: Then, That pushes back, like, the viability line? Yeah. Yeah.

0:40:15 Travis: So we currently, not every day, not in every hospital, but we regularly, in some broad sense, resuscitate infants who have gestated 22, 23, 24 weeks. And, you know, yeah, so these infants have been gestated, you know, barely more than half the normal time.

0:40:26 Thomas: It's So crazy. I Think We're like 16 or 17 weeks right now, and I could not imagine, five weeks from now, that is just so crazy. Yeah.

0:40:35 Travis: And yes, I mean, these kids are born at about one pound at about, you know, 500 grams very often if they're closer to that to 22 week timeline. And we really aggressively resuscitate, because when they're born, they'll die without resuscitation. So we really aggressively resucitate these micro preemies, these very early human lives. And so in the same way that you might think that, you know, should we be creating people has implications for abortion? Well, micro preemies depending on where you live and what the law is, are infants that were they still in the mother's womb might be legally abortable.

0:41:21 Thomas: Yeah.

0:41:21 Travis: Right? Because they might still be in the second, the tail end of the second trimester. So this might also have ramifications for whether or not we should resuscitate as aggressively, or at least whether or not we should continue to push NICU medicine in the direction of earlier and earlier revival of infants. So these are really hard, really intimate, really sensitive sorts of questions. And I'm not going to give you a soundbite sort of conclusion. But the reasoning that made you ask the question is is exactly the logical reasoning, which is, um, if we think that you get reasons not to create babies because you think they might be harmed, for instance, right, well then if you find out at 16 weeks that your, uh, future child, the fetus, um, has some, you know, serious anomaly that could make its life much worse off than you would have wished for your, your child, does that give you additional reason to abort?

0:42:20 Travis: And it's a really, really hard question, but it makes sense in the context of what we've been talking about, right? Um, and they're countervailing reasons to, you know, um, the disability rights community is very concerned about that sort of conversation. Um, but It's, it's one that, that the reasoning we've been having makes, makes really live. So the same thing with the NICU preemies, uh, anyone, anyone who's born as early as, you know, before 25 weeks, uh, the epidemiological data around that sort of baby is pretty rough, that, you know, those kids die at a very high rate, when they survive they suffer, and they do have a long time in the hospital. Um, so do the harms that this preemie could experience count against resuscitation? Really hard question.

0:42:35 Thomas: Yeah.

0:43:07 Thomas: That's another emotionally fraught question too, but I mean, Even though so I'm somebody that is kind of going through this now, sort of. I still hold on to the conviction that if I found out that our baby was going to have some devastating condition or something that would make quality of life terrible, I still think we would abort. But I do think it's such a personal question that I wouldn't criticize someone either way. But it's a really intense series of problems, but it's also really fascinating because I think the most important work maybe in philosophy would be real life issues that people are so emotional about, with good reason, not that they shouldn't be, that it's really hard to think objectively about them. Uh, so.

0:43:12 Travis: Exactly.

0:44:02 Travis: No,

0:44:02 Thomas: I that that's a really fascinating field, but I wonder, um, you had asked a bit of a question that I was... I didn't poke in with an answer, but maybe I'll try now. Like, you're somebody who thinks that it's kind of immoral to have children because of the potential future harm to that life, or whatever, the bad quality of life, whatever it is. If you are someone who is convinced by those arguments, you asked, does that mean you have some sort of obligation to abort? Abort. And I was wondering then, does the question hinge on whether or not you think the fetus is any sort of person, like, what the status of the fetuses, because if at 10 weeks or something you think that it's just a clump of cells or whatever, it's no matter how formed it might be, it's still not a person, I would think then, yes, you you would have an obligation to abort, because because it's morally are you doing anything different than, like, contraceptive?

0:45:00 Thomas: I just wonder if I know yet another sensitive area, but I wonder if you have any thoughts on that until

0:45:05 Travis: It's a really good question. So the classic abortion debate really did center around this question of whether or not the fetus or the embryo or the blastocyte was a person. And person here is what a famous philosopher called a forensic term, right? It's not just a human being, it's a human thing. It's just a person, that's a person, right. So a person here is an agent, someone who has the right to life, basically. For a long time, that was the discussion. And that made the dividing lines really clear. So people, oh, look at you. Yeah, look, it's you with the philosophy.

0:45:39 Thomas: Like Judith Jarvis Thompson, are going to bring that up? Yeah.

0:45:44 Travis: Yeah. So I mean, she wasn't the only one. Yes. But Judith Jarvis Thompson very famously said that doesn't matter. On the other side, a philosopher named Don Marquis said that we don't have to talk about personhood and agency. We can say, you know, anything that has a future like like ours, deserves not to be killed for the exact same reason that I deserve not to be killed.

But the person who I always invoke, probably in a biased way, because she was my teacher in graduate school, but Maggie Little, who's quite well known for her work on abortion, is a professor at Georgetown University. She wrote a series of really, really influential essays on, where she kind of flipped the narrative a little bit. Um, she asked whether a woman has a duty to gestate, basically, and So the idea being, you know, we we shouldn't always talk about, you know, whether the embryo or the fetus has a right to life, but we could also ask whether the woman who's going to undergo, you know, a very invasive, um, you know, development and creation process, uh, whether she has an obligation to gestation, to continue creation. And so she has really nice insightful things to say here, and so she would actually maybe push back against where you said, you know, if a 10 week fetus is just a clump of cells, then sure, you can have an obligation to abort it. She actually would resist and say you never have an obligation. Well, you basically never have an obligation to abort.

0:46:26 Thomas: Yeah.

0:47:09 Thomas: Well, I would say, but given the conclusion that you think it's immoral, that you have a moral duty not to have kids like that, I, I wouldn't say that. I would, I'd say under those circumstances.

0:47:10 Travis: Yeah.

0:47:19 Travis: So she would still resist. I think I'm trying to channel my old mentor here, but she wants to say a couple of things. So one, she wants to say the fact that a 10-week fetus is very, very early in development doesn't mean that it's the same thing as a clump of cells. It's burgeoning human life, and burgeonning human life has a kind of unique value, but it doesn't have the same value as an infant or an adult. Results, right? So one of the ways that you might appropriately respond to the value of burgeoning human life is to abort it if you think that it would live a bad life, right. So, so she says, look, the fact that it's, you know, 10 weeks doesn't mean it's a clump of cells in a way that that allows you to kind of push it aside. It does have value, but we should think carefully about what that value entails.

0:47:20 Thomas: Okay. Sure.

0:48:11 Travis: Now, why would we still not end up with an obligation? She has a really really cool story to tell. And she says, look, there are just some acts that are so intimate that you are not obligated, um, to engage in those acts, right? These are first order intimacies. And so, um, to, to justify, kind of by analog, her conclusion about gestation. So gestation is too intimate. It's not the kind of thing that you could be obligated to do, but abortion also then is too intimate. It is not the thing that would be obligate to do. She says, think about about marriage, think about sex. Right? Even if your marriage to some particular person would have huge great benefits for all sorts of people, uh, that does not mean that you're then obligated to marry that person, right?

0:48:54 Thomas: Right. Right.

0:48:54 Travis: Um, and if you having sex, you know, with this group of soldiers before they go off on, you know, a suicide mission, would, you know, give them a great last night on earth and, um, would enhance their probability of being alive at the end of this because it would give them some hope. And you love having sex with strangers, right? Even if all those things are true, you are not obligated to have sex because it's just not the proper target of a positive obligation.

0:48:54 Thomas: Right.

0:49:20 Travis: So if you think all of that's kind of plausible, then you probably think that Gestation, abortion, and, you know, similar sorts of first order intimacies aren't the sort of thing that you're obligated to do. Yeah.

0:49:24 Thomas: Yeah, that makes sense.

0:49:33 Thomas: Is that your primary? Because you mentioned you're comfortably pro-choice. Is that your primarily reasoning behind being pro- choice is that argument? Because I haven't heard it put in quite those terms. And I think it makes a lot of sense.

0:49:47 Travis: I mean, I think I'm kind of over determinedly pro-choice, right? So I think fairly classical arguments still get a real grip on me, you know, you mentioned Judith Jarvis Thompson, and and that was a kind of precursor to Maggie's work, um, but yeah, I don't think that um a traditionally empowered group of people, i.e. men, get to tell a traditionally disproportionately disempowered group of people, i.e. women, what they are required to do with their bodies. Right. So good old fashioned, straightforwardly feminist reasons. But yeah, I think that this argument here seals the deal that they're just, you're just never obligated to gestate somebody.

0:50:26 Thomas: Right? But then the counter is always, well, the empowered person, which is the mother, doesn't have the right to tell the fetus what to do with its body. There's always that conservative counter counterargument.

0:50:36 Travis: Oh, yes, that's right. Yeah.

0:50:38 Thomas: But yeah, that's interesting. I think one of the most interesting things about the, I suppose, pro-life, pro choice kind of debate thing and the law behind it, because I actually do another podcast called Opening Arguments and with a lawyer, and we've talked about the history of Roe v. Wade and all that stuff. And what I think is so interesting, interesting about it is there's all this great philosophy on it, and almost none of the great philosophy is what's fueling the law or people's choices in general, I think.

0:51:12 Travis: Right?

0:51:12 Thomas: It's so, it's not what I would have thought. Like, I thought, because he took us through the history of Roe v. Wade, and I thought, oh, there's going to be all this discussion on like, is it a person, is it not a person, all this stuff. I was like, there's gonna be, you know, people that would have gotten experts to testify, and and they would, none of that happen. Like, it's all based on like some balancing of privacy rights. And they thought like the third trimester would be this, and then the second trimester with it. And it's so fascinating that for such a heated issue, I think people have kind of an amalgamation of ideas in their heads about it. And ultimately it all combines into what the reality of it is. But it's so funny that it's not, I kind of wish it weren't that way. I kind of wish the law were based on like some sound philosophy, but I just, it's not. It's kind of an accident that things are how they are.

0:51:22 Travis: Yeah, It is strange. And my students are, are always surprised to learn that, you know, the motivating value is privacy, right? Like, that just doesn't make any sense on kind of first reflection at all, but uh, yeah.

0:52:11 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. I suppose we're probably getting to around the time that I'll feel guilty for keeping you longer, But is, all right. Well, we can leave it there. That was a really interesting discussion. I have so many more questions I would love to ask. Maybe I'll, maybe I'll. Would you be opposed to coming back on the show sometime? Time?

0:52:18 Travis: Oh.

0:52:30 Travis: Wouldn't, I would not be, be opposed, I have done it before, my, my calendar is not that full. I'm a philosopher, how many people really want to talk to philosophers? So. Excellent.

0:52:36 Thomas: Yeah. This guy does, who has two thumbs and wants to talk to a philosopher? Uh, yeah, no, I really do. I, I think this is a perfect uh kind of discussion, and this is, this is really exactly the kind of thing I want to be talking about on, on the show. So thank you so much for coming on, Travis Rieder. Again, is there, oh, is there anything you'd want to point people to, any work, online publication, Twitter, anything? Oh.

0:52:42 Travis: Oh.

0:53:00 Travis: Sure, um, I mean, for anyone who's interested in this, I, I've made my work fairly accessible in a couple of ways. You know, I've written about it for the popular media, um, so there was an in-depth NPR profile of my work by Jennifer Ludden, um. And uh, after that I got enough hate mail and nasty blog write-ups that I wrote a response, um, for The Conversation, and they got picked up by New Republic and, um, some other big publications. So there's, there's a story, um, out there, uh, that I think is very interesting, which is kind of more targeted than what we talked about, can the threat of climate change give us, us, good reason not to have babies. So that kind of more targeted, you know, one of the reasons we discussed, and that's where a lot of my research is. But I also have an Academia.edu page. And so my academic writings for journals are available there. And I've got a short book out with Springer called Toward a Small Family Ethic.

0:53:14 Thomas: Wow.

0:53:59 Travis: Kind of defending the larger view that we discussed, um, you probably have a right to have one child, uh, it would be very invasive to say that you're obligated to remain childless, but the sorts of reasons that we discussed are pretty powerful, and uh, it's hard to imagine that that we kind of escape morality's grasp, you know, to have whatever family size we want, basically.

0:54:24 Thomas: That. That sounds fascinating. I want to read all that. And then maybe after that, I'll have lots more questions for you if you want to come back on. But again, thank you for your time. Really interesting questions, really important questions, especially real life stuff for me. Too late late now probably, but, but yeah, Travis Rieder, thanks for coming on the show. All

0:54:38 Travis: That's right. Yeah. All right. Thanks so much, Thomas. Take care.

0:55:08 Thomas: I feel like there's so much more we could talk about with that, I do want to try to have Travis back, maybe on another topic, who knows, but really, really interesting guy, interesting topic, and gives me a lot to think about. I have some thoughts, maybe I'll share them on Thursday's episode, but thanks for listening as always, thanks for supporting the show over on patreon.com/seriouspod and and I will see you on Thursday.