But for many they are not. What if your children will feel differently? What if they find life too difficult and don’t understand why they have to bear all the difficulties? Their suffering will be your fault. And there are many people whose life is bad in their eyes and they would prefer not to have been created. There are a lot of unhappy people or people who go through very unhappy stages in life that no pleasure makes worthwhile. And the chance of creating someone for whom the pleasures are not worth the suffering is renewed every time someone is created. You never know what the result of creating a person will be. You never know whether whoever will be created will be happy with her life, or unhappy, or just be someone who gets through life somehow. Meaning, in this claim there is an acceptance that there will be those who will pay a very high personal price. And this is despite the fact that no one will pay any price for the pleasures that s/he will not experience if s/he is never created.
Is it permissible to sacrifice all those for whom the pleasures are not worth their suffering? Is it morally justified to create a lot of people knowing in advance that some will be unhappy even if the rest are happy (which of course is not true because how many truly happy people are there if any?) when there is no reason and certainly no necessity to create any of them, and none of them will be harmed if we decide not to create them?
After all, if we reverse the wording, we will get a position that no decent person would be comfortable declaring. If instead of claiming that reproduction is morally justified because for most people the pleasures outweigh the suffering, we claim that reproduction is morally justified even though for some people the suffering outweighs the pleasures, it is hard to believe that moral people would accept this. Moral people do not think it is justified to sacrifice people for the pleasure of others. Certainly not when no one’s life is necessary. No one has to produce anyone. Everyone produces others because they want to or because they succumbed to the pressures of society, to the pressures of their spouses, to the pressures of their parents who want grandchildren, to norms, to what they believe is a religious or national dictation, or they simply did not think about it at all but do it because that is what is acceptable and normative, they do it simply because that’s how it is, it’s something you just do at a certain point in life. People are born, go to kindergarten, to school, to the army in some countries, go on a trip, study or find a job, find a partner, get married, have children, grow old and die. Therefore, deciding to reproduce, even though in general (meaning if you take into account the total number of people who will reproduce) reproduction will certainly create miserable people, is immoral. Most probably that is so also in the eyes of those who think they support reproduction, but simply have never really thought about it that way, or at all.
The moral principle in this context is very simple: those who find their lives unworthy are harmed by being forced with these lives, while no one is harmed by not having a life. That is why it is always right to refrain from creating a life because we will never know whether the result of creating a life will be a person who feels that her/his life is not worthy, and we know that the result of preventing life from being created is always that no one will be harmed. Avoiding reproduction will prevent the misery of those who would be unhappy, and it will not harm those who would have been happy if they existed but don’t.
Therefore it is not true that reproduction is morally justified because for most people the pleasures are worth the suffering, but that reproduction is not morally justified because for some people the pleasures are not worth the suffering.