Yeah I’m not totally sure what it implies. For consequentialists, we could say that bringing the life into existence is itself morally neutral; but once the life exists, we have reason to end it (since the life is bad for that person, although we’d have to make further sense of that claim). Deontologists could just say that there is a constraint against bringing into existence tortured lives, but this isn’t because of the life’s contribution to some “total goodness” of the world. Presumably we’d want some further explanation for why this constraint should exist. Maybe such an action involves an impermissible attitude of callous disregard for life or something like that. It seems like there are many parameters we could vary but that might seem too ad hoc.
Yeah I’m not totally sure what it implies. For consequentialists, we could say that bringing the life into existence is itself morally neutral; but once the life exists, we have reason to end it (since the life is bad for that person, although we’d have to make further sense of that claim). Deontologists could just say that there is a constraint against bringing into existence tortured lives, but this isn’t because of the life’s contribution to some “total goodness” of the world. Presumably we’d want some further explanation for why this constraint should exist. Maybe such an action involves an impermissible attitude of callous disregard for life or something like that. It seems like there are many parameters we could vary but that might seem too ad hoc.