An Initial Absurdity That Becomes Interesting

 

Sometimes economist logic takes us to funny places. Here’s an example. Consider this question: Why do we think it’s fine for a couple to choose not to have children, but not fine for them to have children and periodically treat them badly? It’s quite easy to elicit an intuitive response, something along the lines of: “The two situations are very different. If you choose not to have children, that’s your right. But once you have a child, your responsibilities change, and you are compelled to look after that child and treat them well.”

Everyone can relate to that answer, and I do think it’s right. But it doesn’t entirely settle the matter – because, given the astronomically low probability of any individual being born, I assume most children would prefer to be born and be periodically treated badly than not be born at all. Suppose there is a 14 year old boy called Tom, who is quite unhappy at being mistreated by his parents, Jack and Jill, but still glad he has been born, compared with the alternative of never having been born. Given Tom’s preference, it would be worse for him to have never been born, and Jack and Jill remained childless, than it would to be born and treated badly by Jack and Jill. Yet a childless Jack and Jill would receive no criticism, even though not having Tom is worse for potential Tom than having him and mistreating him.

It’s quite easy to elicit a further intuitive response, something along the lines of: “Yes, but a childless Jack and Jill face no moral charge, because they don’t know about the hypothetical Tom that never got born – so no situation where it’s a worse option for Tom actually exists”.

This is also true – Tom’s non-existence isn’t a worse option for him if he’s not alive to recognise it thus. But it’s not a wholly satisfactory closure either, and does show a strange paradoxical nature (although not quite a paradox in this case), whereby a negative moral judgement is conferred upon a less bad outcome for an agent, and a neutral judgement is conferred upon a worse outcome for an agent, even though we can all follow both logical paths very easily.

This isn’t really one of those linguistic peculiarities, such that I covered in this blog How To Make Sense Of Language Paradoxes; I think it’s more in keeping with the kind of economic considerations that are fun to explore in blog posts like The Absurdity Of Quota-Based Discrimination.