Thinking about Possible People: A Comment on Tooley and Rachels

Most people believe it would be wrong to bring a child into the world if in all likelihood its life would be miserable. But if pain and suffering count against bringing someone into existence, why do pleasure and happiness not count in favour of bringing them into existence? Recently in this journal Michael Tooley has re‐affirmed his rights‐based explanation for this asymmetry. In a nutshell: to create an individual whose life is not worth living would be to wrong that individual – to create an obligation that cannot be fulfilled – but it is not possible to wrong an individual who is not brought into existence. In the same issue of this journal, in an article covering a range of arguments for and against the claim that it would be good for additional people to exist, Stuart Rachels objects to Tooley’s account on the ground that it has counterintuitive implications. His most interesting argument involves a Parfit‐style counterexample: a woman is about to take a fertility pill that will result in twins, one of whom will be healthy and the other of whom will not. Does it make a difference, morally speaking, if the woman knows which of the twins will be healthy and which will not? In this paper I argue that both Rachels’ criticism of Tooley’s rights‐based account, and Tooley’s own defence of it, are unsuccessful due to their failure to come to grips with the semantics of names for possible individuals. Both of them implicitly assume that it is possible to have a potential person in mind, in a way that misleads them about the fairness of actions that involve possible people. The significance of this extends to other areas such as abortion, population policy, and embryo experimentation, where examples involving possible people are common.