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existence.
Unfortunately, this same view carries a less desirable implication:
it makes it wrong, other things being equal, to bring
into existence a child- who will on the whole be very happy,
and will be able to satisfy nearly all of her preferences, but will
still have some preferences unsatisfied. For if the creation of
each preference is a debit that is cancelled only when the desire
is satisfied, even the best life will, taken in itself, leave a small
debit in the ledger. Since everyone has some unsatisfied desires,
the conclusion to be drawn is that it would have been better if
none of us had been born. Thus the moral ledger model of
creating and satisfying a preference will not do. It might be
saved by attaching to it a stipulation that sets a given level of
preference satisfaction, below complete satisfaction, as a minimum
for overcoming the negative entry opened by the creation
of a being with unsatisfied preferences. This might be the level
at which we consider a life ceases to be worth living, from the
perspective of the person leading that life. Such a solution seems
a little ad hoc, but it may be possible to incorporate it into a
plausible version of preference utilitarianism.
Another possibility is to take our model from Shakespeare,
Who speaks of 'life's uncertain voyage', and see the lives of self-
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Practical Ethics
conscious beings as arduous and uncertain journeys, at different
stages, in which various amounts of hope and desire, as well
as time and effort have been invested in order to reach particular
goals or destinations. Suppose that I am thinking of travelling
to Nepal, where I plan to trek to Thyangboche Monastery, at
the base of Mt. Everest. I have always loved high mountains,
and I know that I would enjoy being in the Himalayas for the
first time. If during these early days of musing on the possibility
of such a trip an insuperable obstacle arises - perhaps the Nepalese
government bans tourism on the grounds that it is an
environmental hazard - I will be a little put out, naturally, but
my disappointment will be nothing compared with what it
would have been if I had already arranged to take the necessary /
time off work, perhaps bought a non-refundable plane ticket to
Kathmandu, or even trekked a long distance towards my destination,
before being barred from reaching my goal. Similarly,
one can regard a decision not to bring an infant into the world
as akin to preventing a journey from getting underway, but this
is not in itself seriously wrong, for the voyager has made no
plans and set no goals. Gradually, as goals are set, even if tentatively,
and a lot is done in order to increase the probability
of the goals being reached, the wrongness of bringing the journey
to a premature end increases. Towards the end of life, when
most things that might have been achieved have either been
done, or are now unlikely to be accomplished, the loss of life
may again be less of tragedy than it would have been at an
earlier stage of life.
The great virtue of this 'journey' model of a life is that it can
explain why beings who can conceive of their own future existence
and have embarked on their life journey are not replaceable,
while at the same it can account for why it is wrong
to bring a miserable being into existence. To do so is to send a
being out on a journey that is doomed to disappointment and
frustration. The model also offers a natural explanation of why
Parfit's two women both do wrong, and to an equal degree:
130
! ,)
Taking Life: Animals
they both quite unnecessarily send out voyagers with fewer
prospects of making a successful journey than other voyagers
whom they might have placed at the starting line. The women's
children can be thought of as replaceable before the journey
begins, but this does not require us to hold that there is an
obligation to bring more children into existence, let alone to
regard people as replaceable once life's journey has properly
begun.
Both the modified moral ledger model and the journey model
are metaphors, and should not be taken too literally. At best
they suggest ways of thinking about when beings might be
considered replaceable, and when they might not be so considered.
As I indicated in the Preface, this is an area in which fully
satisfactory answers are still to be found.
Before we leave the topic of killing non-self-conscious beings,
I should emphasise that to take the view that non-self-conscious
beings are replaceable is not to say that their interests do not
count. I hope that the third chapter of this book makes it clear
that their interests do count. As long as sentIent beings are
conscious, they have an interest in experiencing as much pleasure
and as little pain as possible. Sentience suffices to place a
being within the sphere of equal consideration of interests; but
it does not mean that the being has a personal interest in continuing
to live.
CONCLUSIONS
If the arguments in this chapter are correct, there is no single
answer to the question: 'Is it normally wrong to take the life of
an animal?' The term 'animal' - even in the restricted sense of
'non-human animal' - covers too diverse a range of lives for
one principle to apply to all of them.
Some non-human animals appear to be rational and selfconscious,
conceiving themselves as distinct beings with a past
and a future. When this is so, or to the best of our knowledge
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Practical Ethics
may be so, the case against killing is strong, as strong as the
case against killing permanently intellectually disabled human
beings at a similar mental level. (I have in mind here the direct