No.
this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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It depends. Is it wrong to abort a child with mild autism? (Assuming we could test for that)
I'd say very much so. (assuming the child was otherwise wanted)
But if it's a disability where they (or people around them) were to live a life full of (mental) pain it would be a different story.
So there is a line somewhere. But drawing a line between "desirables" and "undesirables" is frowned upon.
If you are not one of the bilionairs in the world your child will suffer, the difference is just if more or less. Why have children at all? So they can work like slaves until they are too old? Don't do that to your kid
I don't think so. I have 2 disabled kiddos and they aren't suffering, but they don't have it as easy as their peers - which can be heartbreaking to watch.
I've said this many, many times: If abortion is a viable option, it is the only option worthy of consideration.
Depends on the level of disability we are talking about. Slightly hard of hearing, have the kids.
Blind, dead, mute, and numb to most sense of being touched. That's just cruel.
But I guess are we talking aborting the fetus, or do you mean something else?
You’ll have to think through a few other philosophical questions first.
What about ailments that either cannot be detected prior to birth or which take onset after birth? By going forward with these uncertainties, you take a nonzero chance of subjecting the hypothetical potential progeny to the same fate.
Even without any chronic ailments inseparable from a person’s body or psyche, there are still external hazards. Is it not ok to force someone to suffer a stubbed toe, yet ok to force an offspring to be born to suffer the eventual certainty of stubbing their toe? I think it would be impossible to find a sentient life that did not experience even a modicum of suffering. What percentage of an offspring’s life do you consider acceptable to force them to suffer through and to what magnitude of suffering? Can you guarantee that these criteria are met throughout their life?
Who do you intend to benefit from making a child? Yourself, your partner, your parents, your religious leaders, your nation’s work force? I don’t expect people to answer “The child”, yet the child is the one who is most involved and the one who must live that life through. The child would not notice any detriment relative to birth if they were not born, and suffering can only be noticed by those who are born (which I would say is certain to happen), so in what way does it benefit any child to be born and shift from zero suffering to some suffering? To what extent does the boon for others that would be exploited from the child’s birth justify the non-zero suffering that the child would experience?
One could make the argument that suffering is more or less the opposite of happiness, and so that if you give the kid a good enough life, that cancels out the suffering and then some, but a lot depends on how exactly you define those things I guess.
That's literally true, but the simple counterargument is that the happiness/suffering conversion coefficient is a matter of one's values and not particularly up for debate - so there's nothing incoherent about, say, the position that your child living a happy fullfilling life for a thousand years but stubbing their toe once is enough suffering to make their life net negative.
Indeed, it's not incoherent, at some level though I'd argue that morality is at it's core simply a tool for deciding what actions one should take, and a system that both follows a utilitarian model and makes it extremely easy for someone's life to be negative carries the implication that the world would be happier were you to just kill off the huge segment of the population who end up on the negative side. As this is completely contrary to our instincts about what we want morality to be, and completely impractical to act on, it is no longer a very useful tool if one assumes that.
I do tend towards a variant of utilitarianism myself as it has a useful ability to weigh options that are both bad or both good, but for the reason above I tend to define "zero" as a complete lack of happiness/maximum of suffering, and being unhappy as having low happiness rather than negative (making a negative value impossible), though that carries it's own implications that I know not everyone would agree with.
carries the implication that the world would be happier were you to just kill off the huge segment of the population who end up on the negative side.
Not necessarily. Someone dying isn't the same as someone not existing at all.* It does imply that the world would be better off if it stopped existing, and under some assumptions implies it'd be moral to, say, instantly end all of humanity. I'm not sure that these conclusions are necessarily "contrary to our instincts".
*one reason why this has to be true, is that if we didn't distinguish between those, then if an average life had positive value, it'd be immoral not to have as many children as possible, until the marginal value of an extra life fell to zero once again (kind of like how Malthus thought societies worked, except as a supposedly moral thing to do). That conclusion is something I do consider very contrary to my instincts.
I do tend towards a variant of utilitarianism myself as it has a useful ability to weigh options that are both bad or both good, but for the reason above I tend to define “zero” as a complete lack of happiness/maximum of suffering, and being unhappy as having low happiness rather than negative (making a negative value impossible), though that carries it’s own implications that I know not everyone would agree with.
I too am an utilitarianist, sure. I'm not sure I can possibly buy "maximum suffering and no happiness" being the zero point. I very strongly feel that there are plenty of lives that would be way worse than dying (and than never having existed, too). It's a coherent position I think, just a very alien one to me.
I don't think it's immoral, and I also don't think it's immoral to have the child. It's more complicated than "disability" or "ability", if you can handle the job and give that kid the best life they could have had, short or long, love them and see it through, that is not immoral. If you know you cannot, and it would wreck your life or be very detrimental to your already born kids, it's certainly not immoral to abort the fetus and focus on what you can do.
That is a hell of a moral question that I don't think I or anybody else can answer for another individual.
Edit: I have no idea one direction or the other but I assume you asked this as it's something that's come up. If so I feel for you, genuinely, I cannot comprehend the pain such a situation would mount on an individual and the weight such a decision would have.
No.
Everyone has their own opinion about it but I don't think that there is any eternal consequence to it.
It's just a really shitty thing that people have to go through sometimes, either shitty that they prevent the child from being born and then have to live with their own guilt about it, or shitty that they let the child be born regardless of their feelings and then have to deal with the consequences.
It's a bad roll of the die anyway you look at it
Please be more specific about the actions that are to decide, when you say generally "to not have a disabled child". IMHO the whole ethical discussion, or any ethical answers are not possible without being completely clear on these specifics.
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No.
People are all okay with it until the disabled child grows up and they have to spend two or three times the amount to tend to that child. And have to pay more. And have to go through so many obstacles just to support and keep that child going.
Every disabled child I've ever seen in my life, whether it's from down syndrome types to ones stuck in a chair for the rest of their life with abnormalities. I can't help but feel absolute pity and wonder exactly what they'd be thinking if their brains were normal enough to have them speak. I don't think they'd be wishing to continue living. They'd either want to die or have a different life where they're normal like everyone else.
And I think it's absolutely cruel for parents to keep them living like that.
People already question if putting a child into this world of suffering and misery is right. If more people asked themselves the question and seriously tried to find an answer to it, the world would look quite different.
As the father in a family where this decision had to be made once; It is not wrong to decide not to have a child. The reason why is the business of the mother and maybe the father, and nobody else.
A species producing babies (when that species overpopulation has lead to mass extinction of other species) is immoral.