Making People: The Fairness to Future Persons Principle
Friday, October 13, 2023
8:00 AM – 9:15 AM ET
Location: Atlantic (Third Floor)
While there is (appropriate) widespread agreement about the ethical importance of respect for reproductive autonomy, efforts to describe and apply considerations related to future people and/or others who might be affected by decisions have largely foundered on philosophical grounds. As a result, commonly-held intuitions about the obligations of those who decide to bring a new human being into the world appear difficult to justify. In this paper, I argue that decisions regarding the choice to procreate, the methods of reproduction, and the raising of children should be evaluated in part based on whether they meet requirements of fairness to the adults they will eventually become. Thinking about fairness in the context of having and rearing offspring can round out such analyses, filling an important gap in the scholarly debate in these areas. The Fairness to Future Persons principle (FFP) combines insights about the relevance of fairness and the appropriateness of focusing on future adults rather than children to highlight a previously under-recognized ethical consideration for decision making along the timeline from when a person is recognized as a possibility to the time they become an adult. It holds that a progenitors’ decision to create a person who will eventually be responsible for crafting a successful life for themselves entails an justice-based obligation to give them the tools necessary to do so. This paper describes the FFP and shows how its inclusion improves ethical analyses in various cases.