"When is it permissible to inflict
suffering on another individual without their consent?"
If the answer is "never" then
antinatalism follows. Apologists of pro-natalism face an awkward
balancing act of justifying the imposition of harm in some cases
while denying it in others. Thus if the question is not answered with
sufficient care then unintuitive consequences can arise. Perhaps for
some people there may not be any way to answer this question without
unknowingly violating some other principle they took for granted.
Most justifications of antinatalism use this fact to their advantage.
When this question is presented in the
context of antinatalism, answers are frequently given with the sole
intent to avoid the conclusion of the wrongness of procreation;
answers that wouldn't arise if the question was considered in
isolation.
For example, one might take issue with what precisely is the cause of harm inflicted on someone in the
morally relevant sense. Someone who has children might be absolved of
any hypothetical wrong doing if they weren't directly responsible for
the harms that befall their children. However, arguing along these
ontological lines is risky because it doesn't attempt to reconcile
the harms with any benefit so could just as well apply to a world
that contains only suffering.
Outside of the antinatalism specific
arguments, the primary responses to this question are the following:
1. In self defense.
2. For punishment.
3. When the individual's psychological
history suggests that consent would probably be supplied if it could
be obtained.
4. When the one suffering receives
something of sufficient compensation as determined by the past
beliefs of the individual.
5. For religious reasons.
6. When the infliction of harm serves some
greater good.
7. When the individual will probably
believe in hindsight that the suffering was beneficial or a necessary
evil i.e. retroactive consent.
8. When the suffering is outweighed by
some quantity of pleasure or another good of which that suffering is
a condition.
The first four don't concern
antinatalism. I have nothing to say on religion other than that it
can be used to justify anything and two people with different
religions aren't going to agree on everything. The case of greater
goods is like that of religion.
For retroactive consent, the question
of harms can be thought to reduce to one of technology or of cunning
psychological manipulation. We might phrase this in the form "what
can someone be made to believe?" for anyone with sufficient
technology can make anyone believe anything. Retroactive consent is
problematic for this reason.
For the last and most common response,
the goodness of something is tied to personal beliefs and is like the
case of retroactive consent.
The key to arguing antinatalism lies in
weaknesses of these responses but the whole issue is still very
murky. There are numerous subtle issues that I don't seem to be able to
conquer all simultaneously. However, I do see merit in the way the
question can be used to focus attention and to expose and clarify the
ways in which assumptions must be introduced (often artificially) to
avoid the conclusions of antinatalism.
