Response from David Brink on November 27, 2008

I suspect that most people would think, on reflection that principle (1) is too strong. For instance, if it foreseeable that, because of your bad character, you will free-ride on fair rules of cooperation that we establish, does that make us morally responsible for your free-riding? I doubt it. At most, we should be responsible for what we freely cause. But we are not the cause of everything that foreseeably results from our actions. So I don't see that A's giving birth to B causes B's eventual death. If B dies by drowning that is caused by his falling into the the river, being unable to swim, or being too weak for the current (etc) not by his parents conceiving him. The most that could be said, and I'm not too confident even of this, is that parents are a foreseeable cause of their children's mortality (as opposed to any particular time, manner, and place of death). As I say, I'm not even sure that's right. But, if it was, so what? That would mean that we were morally responsible for our children's mortality. That doesn't sound so monstrous.