ArticleIP_2038.txt

   
   
      
         
            Who Shall Inherit the Earth?

            Surely you've known couples
like this: They have two children, and are undecided about having a third. They
lean one way and then the other; they weigh the pros and cons; and finally,
they decide to go ahead. Then from the instant that third child is born, the
parents love it so deeply that they'd gladly sacrifice all their assets to
preserve its life.

            Compare
that with the way people shop for appliances or furniture or compact discs.
Generally speaking, if you know you're going to treasure something, you don't
hesitate to buy it. By contrast, the CDs you waver over, though sometimes
surprisingly good, are often unsurprisingly forgettable--and on average
unlikely to be cherished. Why, then, are children so different?

            One of my colleagues maintains that there's no real
inconsistency here. He says it's wrong to think of a baby as the equivalent of
a microwave oven; instead, you should think of it as the equivalent of an
addictive drug. People hesitate about whether to try heroin, but once they try
it, they become addicted and can't give it up. Likewise with babies.

            But that,
I think, is a very bad analogy, because heroin addicts tend to be people who
believed at the outset that they could escape addiction. Perhaps that's because
they're foolish, or perhaps it's because they're high-stakes gamblers, but that
is what they were thinking. (Why else would we hear so many addicts recounting
their experiences with the phrase "if only I had known ..."?) That's not true
of parents. Parents know in advance, and with near certainty, that they will be
addicted to their children. They choose their addiction with eyes wide open,
just like a customer choosing a microwave oven.

            
Moreover--and here is the key difference
between parents and heroin addicts--parents know in advance, with near
certainty, that they won't want to break their addiction. If you've already got
two kids and are wavering over a third, then you've already got a pretty good
idea of what parenthood is like, and you already know that, unlike the addict
who despises his addiction, you're going to treasure your attachment to your
children. When you know you're going to love something that much after you've
got it, how can you hesitate about getting it in the first place?

            But as
the parent of an only child, I can verify that people do behave that way. I
know that my unconceived children would be my most valuable "possessions" if I
brought them to fruition, yet I've chosen to leave them unconceived.

            Iam inclined to conclude that nobody--including me--has a
coherent way of thinking about how to make decisions that appropriately reflect
emotional and moral attachments to people who are not yet born. The resulting
confusion makes it almost impossible to resolve important questions of public
policy.

            For
example, the following question seems to me to be of both supreme importance
and supreme difficulty: Do living people have any moral obligation to the
trillions of potential people who will never have the opportunity to live
unless we conceive them?

            
The answer is surely either "yes" or "no," but
either answer leads to troubling conclusions. If the answer is "yes," then it
seems to follow that we are morally obliged to have more children than we
really want. The unconceived are like prisoners being held in a sort of limbo,
unable to break through into the world of the living. If they have rights, then
surely we are required to help some of them escape.

            (In an
earlier Slate column, "Be Fruitful and Multiply," I argued that we should reproduce more
quickly because it would improve living standards for existing people. Here I
am raising the entirely separate question of whether we should reproduce more
quickly in order to give life to potential people.)

            But if the answer is "no"--if we have no obligations to
those imprisoned souls--then it seems there can be no moral objection to our
trashing Earth, to the point where there will be no future generations. (That's
not to say that we'd necessarily want to trash Earth; we might have selfish
reasons for preserving it. I mean to say only that if we ever did want to trash
Earth, it would be morally permissible.) If we prevent future generations from
being conceived in the first place, and if the unconceived don't count as moral
entities, then our crimes have no victims, so they're not true crimes.

            So if the unconceived have
rights, we should massively subsidize population growth; and if they don't have
rights, we should feel free to destroy Earth. Either conclusion is disturbing,
but what's most disturbing of all is that if we reject one, it seems we are
forced to accept the other. Perhaps there's a third way, and that's just to
admit that we're incapable of being logically rigorous about issues involving
the unconceived.

            Ted Baxter, the anchorman on
The Mary Tyler Moore 
               Show , planned to have six children in the
hopes that one of them would grow up to be a creative genius who could solve
the population problem. Right now, I'd settle for a creative genius who could
teach us how to think about the population problem. I hope the next generation
is large enough to include that person.