Bad Genes, “Wrongful Life”, and the Threshold Harm

Abstract

According to the standard counterfactual account of harm, “to be harmed” means to be made worse off. Person B is harmed, if, as a result of an act x committed by person A, B is in a worse condition than she would otherwise have been, if person A had not committed the act x. This concept of harm, when applied to reproductive choices, gives rise to two theoretical puzzles: the so called non-existence problem, being the core of the “wrongful life” cases, and the non-identity problem, discovered by Derek Parfit. Both these problems show that the standard concept of harm leads to moral conclusions which conflict with our commonsensical moral intuitions concerning what we owe to our children. The aim of this article is to analyze an alternative concept of harm, the so-called “threshold harm” account. It is argued that this concept is unaffected by the non-existence problem, but it is also unable to provide a satisfactory solution to the non-identity problem.