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Creating And Raising Humans: Essays On The Morality Of Procreation And Parenting, Jason T. Marsh

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

It used to be widely held that procreation does not need a justification, that its moral permissibility is simply obvious. But things are different now. And the change is largely due to a number of arguments from Benatar, Shiffrin and Velleman. In response to this background my dissertation offers the beginnings of the first systematic defense of procreation, one that consists in four articles. Along the way it draws some implications for parenting, for bioethics, for normative ethics, and for political philosophy.

Article one presents a novel argument that our lives may be much more valuable than we think, one …