I would offer more discussion on fetuses/future children buying the right to be born. Why not assign parents the right to the future income streams of their children? Benevolent parents could waive the right, but some parents would go ahead and have the kid to get the money; a Pareto improvement.
This is a reductio ad absurdum of various interesting theses:
1) the moral relation between parent and child is like the moral relation between two strangers freely entering into a contract
2) any arrangement that is a pareto improvement is morally permissible (is it really obvious that the child wouldn’t prefer never having been born to slavery?–not that it matters, it’s a reductio for those children who do prefer slavery)
3) it’s always permissible for an agent to charge ‘what the market will bear’ (or what the market would bear, if the buyer could enter into contracts) for an action or inaction that is within her rights
Of course it is just a thought experiment. But the rate is not 100 percent. The kid already pays to the government. Greedy parents would choose the Laffer revenue-maximizing rate on top of that, which probably means levels of taxation not too far from Western European levels, all in return for life…
The problem is that there is no moral agency on the part of the child, and without this foundational feature, contractual relations are rendered meaningless or absurd.
The more interesting question is why are parents not legally indebted to their offspring for the duration of their lives, since no child is responsible for their own existence, while the parents, in most instances, clearly are.
But mulling too deeply over the fundamental question of existential agency in parent-child relations is dangerous business; it has led me to the impossible – but rational – conclusion that procreation is itself ethically indefensible.
Don’t we already have this to a limited extent on a collective basis thanks to Social Security?
This seems to me to be rehashing a 400+ ykear old argument. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal..
I don’t know that we can choose between existence and non-existence in any rational matter. Non-existence isn’t the zeroing of benefits because those benefits don’t simply become worthless, they fail to denote anything at all.
Isn’t that more or less the situation in undeveloped agricultural societies? You have children for the express purpose of having them work in the fields and support you when you’re old. The more the better, since they’re going to become stronger, harder workers than you are.
In an article on intergenerational justice, Philip van Parijs mentioned that the French in North Africa once instituted a political equivalent of this. Until majority, a father would hold his children’s votes in trust, so a man with five children would be able to emit six votes at election time. I can’t recall if only the male children’s votes counted, or if the system had any effect on birth-rates.
Not a good idea. Allowing a third person to assign an income stream from a person incompetent to contract
is also known as “involuntary servitude,” i.e. slavery. I don’t think people want to return to that.
Happy Martin Luther King day!
Abortion is a serious matter and nowadays future parents should think very well about making a baby and then changing their mind or the so called accidents… A legislation that would promote severe punishment for such issues would make people think twice about certain “child” problems… UK birth certificate
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