Re: Cheating Destiny (book excerpt)
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Posted by klausen on 18:49:43 2006/07/12
In Reply to:
Re: Cheating Destiny (book excerpt) posted by rlruby
According to your logic, there is nothing immoral in a pregnant woman chain smoking, injecting drugs, practising risky sex with people she has strong reason to suspect have AIDS, not taking folic acid to avoid spina bifida in the child, and, generally, doing everything humanly possible to risk the future health of the child, because the child, as you say, does not yet exist and so cannot be the object of moral obligations!
Not only does moral philosophy disagree strongly with that position, but even the law does. Have a look at the famous Pullman Car Company case from 1890, which established that a fetus injured by someone's negligence when in the womb has a right to sue the person who injured it!
It is often said today that we have a moral obligation to future generations so we should protect the environment for them. But on your theory, we could have no obligation to them because they do not exist yet! Similarly, why don't we burn down all the great social institutions and industrial facilities in the world just before we die, because, after all, the future generation which would benefit from all this doesn't exist, so we can have no responsibility for their health and well-being!
No one here is recommending that existing disabled people be euthanized, such as the Nazis tried to make public policy in Germany in the 1930s, but failed to do because of public protest. Every human being, no matter how disabled, should be respected and well-treated, once the person exists.
But that does not mean that terrible diseases have a 'right' to continue to plague humanity from one generation to the next if we can avoid this by procedures, such as abortion or birth control, which our society already accepts as completely moral for any number of purposes. The fact that there exists a respectable and legal profession of genetic counseling would be unbelievable if it were not moral to decide not to have children where there is a high genetic risk of serious illness. Amiocentesis, Doppler Ultrasound, fetal genetic testing, etc., are all legal and widely accepted procedures in our culture, and these all only make sense if it is morally acceptable in our culture to prevent future generations from suffering from serious diseases whose likelihood we can determine in advance.
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