Saunders Ben
Bioethics. 2015 Sep;29(7):499-506. doi: 10.1111/bioe.12147. Epub 2015 Feb 6.
There has been much argument over whether procreative selection is obligatory or wrong. Rebecca Bennett has recently challenged the assumption that procreative choices are properly moral choices, arguing that these views express mere preferences. This article challenges Bennett's view on two fronts. First, I argue that the Non-Identity Problem does not show that there cannot be harmless wrongs - though this would require us to abandon the intuitively attractive 'person-affecting principle', that may be a lesser cost than abandoning some more firmly-held intuition. But, even if we accept Bennett's claim that these choices are not moral, that does not show them to be mere personal preferences. I argue that there is a class of non-moral 'categorical preferences' that have much the same implications as moral preferences. If a moral preference for able-bodied children is problematic (as Bennett claims), then so is a non-moral categorical preference. Thus, showing that these preferences are not moral does not show that they are not problematic, since they may still be categorical.
关于生育选择是义务性的还是错误的，一直存在很多争论。丽贝卡·贝内特最近对生育选择是恰当的道德选择这一假设提出了质疑，认为这些观点仅仅表达了个人偏好。本文从两个方面对贝内特的观点提出质疑。首先，我认为非同一性问题并不能表明不存在无害的错误行为——尽管这将要求我们摒弃直观上有吸引力的“影响人原则”，但这可能比放弃一些更坚定持有的直觉付出的代价要小。但是，即使我们接受贝内特的观点，即这些选择不是道德选择，这也并不表明它们仅仅是个人偏好。我认为存在一类非道德的“绝对偏好”，其含义与道德偏好大致相同。如果对身体健全的孩子的道德偏好存在问题（如贝内特所主张的），那么非道德的绝对偏好也是如此。因此，表明这些偏好不是道德的，并不能表明它们没有问题，因为它们可能仍然是绝对的。
