I’m currently taking a class with Jeff McMahan in which he discusses prenatal injury, and I’m pretty sure he would agree with how you put it here, Richard. This doesn’t affect your point, but he now likes to discuss a complication to this: what he calls “the divergent lives problem.” The idea is that an early injury can lead to a very different life path, and that once you’re far enough down this path—and have the particular interests that you do, and the particular individuals in your life who are important to you—Jeff thinks it can be irrational to regret the injury. So, if someone’s being injured as a fetus leads them to later meet the particular life partner they love and to have particular the children they have, and if their life is good, Jeff thinks they probably shouldn’t regret the injury—even if avoiding the injury would have led to their having a life with more wellbeing. That’s because avoiding the injury would have led to them having particular people and interests in their life which they don’t in fact care about from their standpoint now. However, Jeff does add that if an early injury makes the later life not worth living, or maybe even barely worth living, then the future person who developed from the injured fetus does have reason to regret that injury. He would say that children of mothers who took Thalidomide have reason to regret that.
I’m currently taking a class with Jeff McMahan in which he discusses prenatal injury, and I’m pretty sure he would agree with how you put it here, Richard. This doesn’t affect your point, but he now likes to discuss a complication to this: what he calls “the divergent lives problem.” The idea is that an early injury can lead to a very different life path, and that once you’re far enough down this path—and have the particular interests that you do, and the particular individuals in your life who are important to you—Jeff thinks it can be irrational to regret the injury. So, if someone’s being injured as a fetus leads them to later meet the particular life partner they love and to have particular the children they have, and if their life is good, Jeff thinks they probably shouldn’t regret the injury—even if avoiding the injury would have led to their having a life with more wellbeing. That’s because avoiding the injury would have led to them having particular people and interests in their life which they don’t in fact care about from their standpoint now. However, Jeff does add that if an early injury makes the later life not worth living, or maybe even barely worth living, then the future person who developed from the injured fetus does have reason to regret that injury. He would say that children of mothers who took Thalidomide have reason to regret that.