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• Häyry's three questions
  Peter Herissone-Kelly
  Published on: 23 March 2006
• Three questions about the Principle of Acceptable Outlook
  Matti Häyry
  Published on: 8 March 2006

• Published on: 23 March 2006

  Häyry's three questions

  • Peter Herissone-Kelly, Lecturer in Philosophy

  Dear Editor,

  I would like to thank Professor Häyry for his complimentary remarks on my paper, and for his three (characteristically) incisive questions. In what follows, I will attempt to answer each of those questions in turn.

  (i) Häyry asks how I can consistently maintain the conjunction of the following three propositions:

  (a) taken together, the external and internal perspectives exhaust...

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  Dear Editor,

  I would like to thank Professor Häyry for his complimentary remarks on my paper, and for his three (characteristically) incisive questions. In what follows, I will attempt to answer each of those questions in turn.

  (i) Häyry asks how I can consistently maintain the conjunction of the following three propositions:

  (a) taken together, the external and internal perspectives exhaust the standpoints available to a prospective parent in thinking about the lives of her possible future children; (b) it is morally inapproriate for a prospective parent to take up the external perspective; but (c) it is not obligatory for a prospective parent to take up the internal perspective.

  Häyry's thought here is that, if it is morally inappropriate for a prospective parent to take up the external perspective, and if the internal perspective is the only other available, then it must surely be obligatory for her to take up the internal. Häyry has clearly detected that I simultaneously feel both tempted and reluctant to take the hard-line position that adoption of the internal perspective is a strict duty for prospective parents! But while I admit that my intuitions pull me in two directions here, I am not convinced that this causes me to fudge the issue.

  That is, the opposite of "morally inappropriate" does not seem to me to be "obligatory", but rather "morally appropriate". In saying that a prospective parent does something morally inappropriate in adoting the external perspective, I am not suggesting that she is thereby contravening a duty. Rather, I am saying that she is not, as it were, being the prospective parent she might be, since she is not taking up the perspective that is appropriate for her qua prospective parent. Now, doubtless it is trivially true that we should do what it is morally appropriate for us to do, but it seems to me that this claim makes use of a weaker sense of "should" than attaches to statements of strict obligation. Importantly for my argument in the paper, however, what does follow from the claim that the external perspective is morally inappropriate for prospective parents, is that prospective parents cannot be obliged to follow any principle (such as that of procreative beneficence) that is rooted in that perspective.

  (ii) As Häyry goes on to note, I state in my paper that the external perspective is the proper one for political decision makers to adopt, when choosing policies that will affect which people are born, and the expected quality of the lives those people will lead (as in Parfit's conservation/depletion example, cited in my paper). Given this, Häyry asks what is to be done about the apparent clash between the perspectives fitting for parents and for policy makers, and between the actions that will result from the adoption of those perspectives. My answer is that political decision makers will be obliged not to interfere with decisions that ought to be the sole preserve of prospective parents. I take it that the choice of a conservation or a depletion policy is not such a decision, whereas whether to choose a better life embryo or a worse life embryo is. Häyry's point does me the service of drawing my attention to the fact that I ought not to have said that "adoption of the external perspective ... is obligatory for political decision makers ...", but rather that it is prima facie obligatory. I am grateful to him for this.

  (iii) Towards the end of my paper, I introduce a principle of acceptable outlook (PAO), which I maintain ought to guide prospective parents' decisions about which children to produce, in place of Savulescu's principle of procreative beneficence (PPB). PAO, I say, will take a form similar to "'I will not allow any child of mine to have a quality of life below L', where L is a level of acceptable outlook ... PAO will typically find expression in such attitudes as 'I do not want any child of mine to suffer unacceptably' ...". I also claim that no definite answer can be given to the question of where exactly L (the level of acceptable outlook) should be fixed, and rather imply that it may differ from prospective parent to prospective parent (although I do say that a life not worth living will fall below any plausible candidate for L).

  Now, given this last point, Häyry asks what is stop a proponent of PPB from setting L at "the standard suggested by procreative beneficence", and holding that prospective parents either could or should hold a principle of the form "I do not want any child of mine to have a life that is worse than the best life a child of mine could have had". This, as Häyry notes, would involve the collapse of the distinction between PAO and PPB.

  But that such a collapse would occur ought to give us pause. That is, if any prospective parent employed PAO in this fashion, she would, in doing so, be making an external perspective judgement about the lives of her possible future children. Such a judgement is, my paper argues, morally inappropriate for a prospective parent, and it is precisely this fact that prevents our being able legitimately to flesh out PAO in the way Häyry mentions.

  Of course, it may be that a prospective parent locates L at a standard that, so to speak, just turns out to equal that of the best life a child of hers could have. This might seem a curiously high standard to set, but so long as it is not chosen just because it is the level of the best life a child of hers could have, it would involve no external perspective judgement, and so no illegitimate application of PAO.

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  Conflict of Interest:
  None declared.

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• Published on: 8 March 2006

  Three questions about the Principle of Acceptable Outlook

  • Matti Häyry, Professor of Bioethics and Philosophy of Law
  • Other Contributors:
    • The University of Manchester

  Dear Editor,

  Peter Herissone-Kelly[1] makes the case that it would be morally inappropriate for prospective parents to select their children based on comparative judgments about their life quality. This view is in stark contradiction with the view, advanced by Julian Savulescu [2], that parents have a moral obligation to select the best possible children they can have.

  Herissone-Kelly argues that futu...

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  Dear Editor,

  Peter Herissone-Kelly[1] makes the case that it would be morally inappropriate for prospective parents to select their children based on comparative judgments about their life quality. This view is in stark contradiction with the view, advanced by Julian Savulescu [2], that parents have a moral obligation to select the best possible children they can have.

  Herissone-Kelly argues that future lives can be assessed from two mutually exclusive viewpoints: the external and the internal. The external perspective, assumed by Savulescu in his Principle of Procreative Beneficence, is according to Herissone-Kelly (pp. 167-168), "obligatory for political decision makers selecting social policies that will indirectly affect both who will come into existence in the future, and the quality of those future persons' lives." It would, however, be (p. 168), "unfitting ... for prospective parents to take up the external perspective", indeed, "it would be morally inappropriate for them to do so."

  The use of the internal perspective in parental decision making leads, Herissone-Kelly maintains, to the rejection of the Principle of Procreative Beneficence, and to the assumption of an alternative axiom, the Principle of Acceptable Outlook. This stipulates that possible children are not compared with one another – the fact that child A could have a better life than child B is not a fitting (or at least not a binding) parental reason for choosing A. It also stipulates that parents are not obliged to have children whose life quality would be at a level that the parents deem to be unacceptably low.

  Herissone-Kelly's principle is in many respects intuitively more acceptable than Savulescu's. It states that as long as all our potential children would have a reasonably good life, we may choose any one of them. (Savulescu would insist that the best must be selected.) It also allows us not to have children at all, if none of our potential offspring can be expected to have an acceptable life quality. (Savulescu's principle would morally oblige us to have a child with a truly miserable life, if there are no better options).

  The claim is interesting and skilfully defended, and the author has made a considerable contribution to the current discussion on the use of technology in reproduction. I have three questions concerning the Principle of Acceptable Outcome, its implications, and its applications.

  (i) Herissone-Kelly hovers in the paper between the view that it is prima facie obligatory for parents to adopt his principle and the view that it is merely admirable and permissible for them to do so. He is explicitly (p. 168) "inclined to say that it is not" obligatory, but he also says that "it would be morally inappropriate" for the parents to take up the external perspective.

  My question is this. If the external and internal perspectives are the only options available, and if it is morally inappropriate to assume the external perspective, how can it not be obligatory to take up the internal view? The logic of moral sentences seems to be that if one of only two alternatives is wrong, then the one remaining is right in the strong sense of being a moral duty.

  (ii) If what I have said is correct, what are the social and political implications? Herissone-Kelly states that political decision makers have an obligation to take up the external view, and in the present context this means that they should aim for the "best" future population they can, probably by using all available genetic and medical technologies in the choice of prospective citizens. The parents, on the other hand, have an obligation to adopt the internal view, which implies that they should resist at least some of the authorities' attempts to influence their reproductive choices. How can this potential tension be handled?

  (iii) In the internal assessment of the life quality of possible children, Herissone-Kelly allows the parents to consider whether their offspring would suffer unacceptably. He goes on to say that (p. 169) "what counts as unacceptable suffering, or precisely where the level of acceptable outlook ought to be fixed, are not questions to which any very definite answer can be supplied."

  If this is so, what prevents a proponent of Savulescu's principle from arguing that the acceptable level should be set higher, to the standard suggested by procreative beneficence? Parents could (or should?) arguably have the attitude that "I do not want any child of mine to have a life that is worse than the best life a child of mine could have had". In this case, the difference between the principles would seem to evaporate.

  References

  [1] Herissone-Kelly P. Procreative beneficence and the prospective parent. J Med Ethics 2006;32:166-169. [2] Savulescu J. Procreative beneficence: why we should select the best children. Bioethics 2001;15:413-426.

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  Conflict of Interest:
  None declared.

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