Procreative Justice: Balancing the Interests of Parents, Children, and Society [Hardcover]

Introduction? 1. The Right to Procreate? 2. The Childs Right to a Decent Start? 3. Procreation and Parental Rights? 4. Procreation and Parental Obligations? 5. Distributing the Cost of Procreation? 6. Procreation and Adoption? 7. Procreation and the Environment

Erik Magnusson is a political philosopher based at the University of Manitoba, where he serves as a research facilitator in the Faculty of Education, a sessional instructor in the Departments of Political Studies and Philosophy, and an Associate of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics.

This book explores how considerations of justice apply to procreative decision-making.

Despite its immense personal significance, procreation is an inherently other-regarding endeavor. By its very nature, the decision to procreate is the decision to bring into existence another morally considerable being, one who will be exposed to the full range of harms, benefits, and risks that accompany a typical human life, and one who cannot by its nature ever consent to being born. Moreover, when this decision is undertaken in a community of persons, it is also a decision to affect the lives of others in a host of profound if often underappreciated ways, from its effects on population size and environmental sustainability to its consequences for a communitys distribution of resources. In many ways, of course, these interests coincide: adults need children for their parenting projects, societies need citizens for the maintenance of their institutions, and children themselves are often happy to have been brought into existence. However, as the book demonstrates, the various interests that are implicated by procreative decision-making can also come into conflict as well and in ways that raise basic questions of justice. Through a systematic examination of six of these questions, the author argues that taking adequate stock of the conflicting interelc‰