• Ethics

With heartfelt thanks to the journal and my critics in this forum, I turn to the nearly impossible task of replying—however incompletely—to four commentaries within 1000 words.

Regarding the non-identity problem in the context of reproductive choices, Leslie Francis asserts that “for disability rights advocates, [DeGrazia's analysis] is profoundly disturbing.1 It assumes that the world is a better place if it lacks an individual with a significant disability and instead contains a different individual [who lacks this disability but is otherwise similar],” although both have full moral status and, presumably, lives worth living. In my view, the procreative decisions in question—explaining the apparent wrongness of which constitutes the non-identity problem in this context—are morally comparable with cases in which parents knowingly or negligently allow an already-existing child to acquire a significant disability (eg, blindness, paraplegia) that she did not already have, which is surely wrong. Without a compelling argument against the claim of comparability between the two types of choices, my critic seems much less well positioned than I am to make evaluative sense of these cases. I stand by my position. A significant disability does not necessarily make an individual's life go worse than it otherwise would, especially where social structures and accommodations are appropriately arranged. But to …