2-3-87 Tuesday. Whenever I think of [four-year-old] Kendra, Mark’s girl, I laugh, because she referred to me constantly during the holidays as “the kid.” “You’re a kid,” she would say, a gleam in her eye. Once she told Mom that “the kid’s out there (in the family room) reading.” [I replaced brackets with parentheses to avoid confusion.] Even after talking to her about it, I never got clear on her conception of kidhood. “Is your daddy a kid?” I would ask. “No,” she said. “But I’m older than your daddy,” I explained. “I know,” she said; “but you’re still a kid.” This tells me that kidhood, to her, isn’t simply a function of age. Mom’s theory is that I seemed to have no spouse or kids of my own, so she classified me as a kid—someone like her. But I was bigger, so I was a “big kid.” Mom later suggested that she called me “kid” because I did kidlike things with her. I played games with her, laughed with her, asked her questions, and in general treated her as an equal. Isn’t that hilarious? I miss you, Kendra.
We discussed wrongful life in Joel Feinberg’s [Philosophy of Law] seminar this evening. In the fall of 1984, when I took Joel’s previous seminar, we discussed the same subject. Joel’s position at the time (expressed in Harm to Others) was that one cannot be harmed by acts that occur before one is born. Why not? Because in order to be harmed, one must be put in a worse condition than one would have been had the act not occurred. If one does not exist, then there is no basis for comparison. But now Joel thinks otherwise. He recently published an article entitled “Wrongful Life and the Counterfactual Element in Harming.” [Joel Feinberg, “Wrongful Life and the Counterfactual Element in Harming,” Social Philosophy & Policy 4 (autumn 1986): 145-78.] In this article, he extends the concept of harm to include what he calls a “preferability condition.” If nonlife (not having been born) is rationally preferable to one’s present life (say, in a severely retarded state), then it makes sense to say that the individual has been harmed, even though when the act occurred the individual did not exist. Tonight we discussed this change in Joel’s views.
In what will sound like the height of immodesty, I argued for almost the same position in the previous seminar. It occurred to me that it made perfectly good sense to speak of a “life not worth living,” and if it did, then it made sense to say that one whose life is not worth living has been harmed by an action which caused one to be in that condition. I pulled out my notebook of essays and, sure enough, there was my argument. I even used some of the same terminology that Joel now uses, although he didn’t give me credit in the article. It’s nice to think that I may have had some influence on him. So Joel has finally come around to my position on this. I’m impressed by the fact that he would retract a position so quickly after publishing it, but that’s the kind of person he is. He’s more concerned to be right than consistent. The students were lively tonight, and rightfully so. It’s a fascinating topic, one that raises linguistic, conceptual, and metaphysical questions as well as straightforwardly moral and theoretical ones.
