Research

My current research focuses on problems in normative ethics, bioethics, and social and political philosophy that involve procreation. I am particularly interested in the obligations we have to the persons we create that constrain how we may create them and the ways we can wrong someone in selecting for her genetic traits.

The philosophical literature on procreation often treats what procreators owe their offspring as akin to what they would owe strangers (if they owe them anything at all). Procreation, however, is unlike anything else we do to other persons – it results not only in the creation of a new person, but also in the creation of a distinct moral relation between procreators and their offspring. My work begins by treating this relation as central to the morality of procreation. Procreators and their offspring are not strangers. Procreators usually expect (and are expected to) parent the persons they create, so we cannot understand what procreators owe their offspring without also appealing to their role as prospective parents. Underlying my account of procreators’ parental obligations is the basic Kantian principle that we must constrain our treatment of other persons – including their creation – in light of their moral status as ends in themselves. The challenge in applying Kant’s framework is explaining how a person’s prospective moral status could regulate the process by which she comes to have that status in the future.

I’m interested in procreation not only because it is an important and morally serious part of our lives, but because the case of procreation illuminates broader issues in normative ethics about how you can wrong someone without harming her, the relevance of motives to directed or personal wronging, and how the relations we stand in to other persons can generate special obligations for both individuals and our wider social and political institutions.

Publications

“A Non-Solution to the Non-Identity Problem,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (forthcoming)

Underlying Derek Parfit’s non-identity problem is the idea that we can only wrong our offspring if our procreative actions make them worse off. For Parfit, the surprising conclusion is that a person cannot be wronged by their own creation, because being created cannot make someone worse off. I appeal to Kant’s moral philosophy to develop a non-harm-based moral framework for procreation that allows us to explain how a person can be wronged by their creation even if they have not been harmed by it. I argue that Kant’s moral framework is uniquely suited to capture our moral obligations to future persons, because his framework locates moral obligations in the will of the actor rather than in the existence of the moral patient or recipient. The morality of procreative choices depends on how well the procreator wills, not on the outcome for their offspring’s wellbeing. My account does not solve the non- identity problem; rather, I argue that if we look at procreation as an imputable action of persons that puts them in a special relation of duty to their offspring, then the moral relevance of their future offspring’s indeterminate genetic identity falls away. (Download from PhilArchive)

“Parental Labor as Cooperative Labor,” Journal of Applied Philosophy (forthcoming)

The procreative justice debate asks whether justice, and in particular, whether a principle of fair play, requires that non-parents share in the costs of procreation and child-rearing. The principle of fair play demands that persons who benefit from the cooperative labor of others share in the burdens of producing that benefit. Non-parents should share in the costs of procreation and child-rearing if reproductive and parental labor count as cooperative labor, but they are not obligated to share in those costs if parents incur those costs as part of a personal project. I argue that parental labor counts as cooperative labor because becoming a parent involves knowingly assuming a social role whereby one incurs new moral and legal obligations. Even if parents are ultimately motived by personal reasons, they nevertheless constrain their liberty in order to comply with the rules of a cooperative scheme, and, in doing so, their labor plausibly counts as cooperative. Parents have a claim of justice on others, then, to consider whether the benefits and burdens of procreating and child-rearing are fairly distributed. (Download from PhilArchive)

“It’s Complicated: What our attitudes toward pregnancy, abortion and miscarriage tell us about the moral status of early fetuses,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50, no. 8:950-965.

Many accounts of the morality of abortion assume that early fetuses must all have or lack moral status in virtue of developmental features that they share. Our actual attitudes toward early fetuses don’t reflect this all-or-nothing assumption: early fetuses can elicit feelings of joy, love, indifference, or distress. If we start with the assumption that our attitudes toward fetuses reflect a real difference in their moral status, then we need an account of fetal moral status that can explain that difference. I argue that we can have or lack relational obligations to early fetuses in light of our own activities or choices, independent of the fetus’s own features or properties. Those relational obligations make the early fetus morally considerable to the persons who stand in a moral relation to it. Pregnant persons (and other participants in the procreative process) can come to have relational obligations to an early fetus just in virtue of their own decision to create a person, either by intentionally getting pregnant or by deciding to continue a pregnancy. That decision not only makes it appropriate for them to care about the fetus, but it also generates obligations to the fetus that they didn’t have before that decision. (Download from PhilArchive)

“Wronging Future Children” Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6. 2019

I argue that we can appeal to procreators’ obligations as prospective parents, not because parental obligations fully capture procreative obligations, but because procreators incur parental obligations by procreating. Procreators can wrong their offspring, on this account, when they procreate despite lacking either the capacity or willingness to adequately parent the persons they create or when they make procreative choices that are antithetical to the end of the parental role itself. (Download from Ergo)

“The Problem of Choosing (For) Our Children” in Procreation, Parenthood, and Educational Rights: Ethical and Philosophical Issues, edited by Jaime Ahlberg and Michael Cholbli, Routledge, 2017, pp. 73–93

In this paper, I compare the scope of procreators’ permission to select the traits of their offspring to the scope of parents’ permission to control the education of their children. I argue that procreators, like parents, do not have the moral authority to do whatever would best transmit their own culture, beliefs or values to their children. Parents, both actual and prospective, must constrain their choices in light of their parental obligation to facilitate their children’s future autonomy. I show how this requirement undermines arguments in favor of reproductive selection that appeal to the parents’ interest in parenting a child who shares their beliefs and values.

Teaching Publications:

“Reading Together: Using Perusall to Help Students Engage with Readings,” in Innovations in Teaching Philosophy, edited by Brynn Welch, Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming

“Ethics for Everyday Life: Designing a Core Philosophy Course,” in The Art of Teaching Philosophy: Reflective Values and Concrete Practices, edited by BrynnWelch, Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, pp. 69–76.