Selenne asked:

My intuition. Giving life is the same as killing someone. Meaning, the power to bring someone new to
this world involves as much violence as taking someone's life. I was never asked if I wanted to live —
that is the idea.

I have read some of Nietzsche's considerations, but from the suicide point of view. Here, my concern
is to fundament or not my belief.

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My take on this question, and this issue, is first, that you are confusing two things, violence, i.e.,
roughly speaking, negative, usually harmful, actions taken ona person without their consent, and
obligation, i.e., what someone does or does not owe another for an (un)asked favor or hurt. Is an
unasked-for, but (purelybeneficial, for the sake of simplification at this point) beneficial, action
violent? I do not think this is a normal or useful conception of violence, given what violence canbe.
Thus, I do not think that — only and simply — your being conceived, and even being born, is the
same as violence toward you, because, first, you did not exist (before conception, certainly — and I'm
not going to get into the debate here as to when afterward you start to exist) to have action taken on
you, second, I am going to take it as given in my discussion that your life is something of value. That
is, you benefited from being conceived, carried to term, and born.

But the question of whether you are under obligation, or the reverse, whether your parents are under
obligation to you, for your being conceived, then for being carried to term and born, and then for being
raised, is quite another issue, and a very interesting one. The usual take is that a child is under
obligation to their parents. This is pretty much universal cross-culturally, as far as I know. But what is
its justification? Well, the rationale is that you owe them your life, in some sense of the term "owe",
i.e., you wouldn't exist without their act of conception, and your existence is a "thing" or state, of
value, which they have "given" you without (at that point) your giving anything in return.

Another way to ask this is to ask what an obligation is, and why it has force, and what kind of force it
has. It's easy enough to see that, in general, where contracts are concerned; with contractual
obligations both parties agree to something under some conditions, and the honoring of that contract
is an ethical "ought" because keeping a promise is more ethical than breaking it, all other things being
equal, and second, because the loss incurred by one party in fulfilling their end of a contract is
compensated by their gain when the other party fulfills their respective end, all other things being
equal. Straightforward stuff, in this general sense. But is there such a thing as a non-contractual
obligation? There are certainly non-contractual "oughts", ethical actions which need to be done in
particular situations: not stealing when the opportunity presents itself, stopping violence, if possible,
etc. Are those therefore "obligations"? Perhaps so, but not in the former sense of the term. The gray
area concerns actions benefiting someone which were not incurred through contract. Let us
categorize those.

If someone acts through (what they understand to be) an ethical imperative, an "ought", and that
action benefits another, does that other owe the first a return, in effect a contractual return, although
there was no contract? What of the case in which the other, although they did not initiate the action,
could have refused it? In this case I believe that an argument could be made for an implicit contract,
an implicit obligation, since if refusal was possible, then the recipient of the benefit, even by not
acting, took an action, in effect. By not taking the action of refusing the benefit, they effectively took
the action of accepting it, one might argue.

Next, let us consider the case in which refusal is impossible. A person takes an action which benefits
another, and that second person not only does not enter into a contract with the first, but is not able to
refuse the benefit (e.g., a child is conceived and born). That second person, then, cannot act on any
contract, implicit or explicit. Although they might have refused the benefit, they could not; they did not
have that choice available to them.

Does a person receiving this type of benefit have any ethical obligation at all toward their benefactor?
Suppose that you fell into a river, became unconscious, then were rescued by someone. Do you have
an obligation towards that person? Usually, we feel that if, for example, someone rescued in that
manner did not at least thank their benefactor (a type of repayment), then they are remiss; they "owe"
them at least an expression of gratitude. But why? Suppose it cost the benefactor nothing to perform
the rescue; you fell into their fishing net that they were hauling up at the time anyway, or something
like that. We could still argue that the benefactor couldhave let you drown... but that rescue, we are
assuming, cost them nothing; either letting you drown or not was identical in terms of effort, time,
cost, etc. In that case, would we feel we owed them gratitude? Given absolutely no extra effort on the
part of the benefactor, I do not think that anyone would assume they owed that benefactor anything;
they were rescued by chance, as it were. Both you and your rescuer would perhaps breathe a sigh of
relief, wonder at your luck, and feel good; but there would be no debt. So again the sense of "owing"
or "gratitude owed" is, in effect, contractual: the benefactor, in othercases, expended effort in
rescuing you, and you are obligated toward them and repay them, with thanks and gratitude, at least,
for that effort expended, but not in the case where they expended no effort at all.

What if your benefactor were forcedto rescue you, even though it cost them resources? Someone
stood over them with a gun and commanded them to fish you out of the water, even though they
didn't want to... do you owe them anything? I do not believe so; you might feel sorry for them, but not
grateful if they truly had no choice. The debt here would be toward the person who forced them to
perform the rescue, if that action incurred a cost to that latter person.

Obligation, then, seems to be effectively contractual. Do you owe your parents anything for nothing
more than being conceived and born? Given the above, to evaluate that question you would have to
look at them and their circumstances. Was getting pregnant involuntary or voluntary? If voluntary,
then they made a choice, independently of you, to pay a certain price, and for that, you owe them
nothing. Did they want to, and was it feasible for them to abort you? If so, then your mother's carrying
you to term cost her the effort of pregnancy. If they were so poor or disadvantaged in some way that
abortion was not an option, then that cost was not a decision they could make; they expended no
effort in keeping you that was not purely a consequence of her getting pregnant.

Do you see what I'm doing? Going through (thinking about going through, actually) every step from
conception to birth and attempting to note where choices were voluntary; where those voluntary
choices cost your parents; and what the motivations of that cost were. If there was no choice, then
you are not obligated to them: to borrow from the analogy above, they hadto rescue you, whether
they wanted to or not. If there was choice, how much did it cost them? Were their motivations purely
selfish: did they rescue you (going back to the above) in expectation of reward? That is, did they have
a child strongly expecting that child would take care of them in old age, help them in their business,
etc.? This is not a simple issue.

Further, I have not yet considered their raising you (which I assume they did). That cost them a great
deal of resources; children are very expensive, in all senses of that term. Why did they do that? How?
Were they forced to? This is a possibility, certainly... after all, in the West, killing and/or selling
children is illegal... although giving them up is not, under certain circumstances. Did they raise you in
expectation of reward or return (as above, where, for example, children are raised to work on farms or
in the strong expectation that they will care for their parents in their old age), or because they wanted,
even in part, to benefit you? Again, these are very complex issues that may not be possible to
disentangle and analyze; I'm taking a pretty clear case when I consider someone drowning, after all.
Did they put extra effort, beyond the absolute minimum, into raising you? If so, then they did,
probably, go beyond what they were forced to do or what they considered their return would be. And
so forth.

All in all, given normal circumstances, you probably doowe your parents something. It's unlikely that
they were genuinely, totally, forced to have you, and that they raised you purely in expectation of
reward, or for other purely selfish reasons, and/or that they did nothing more than the absolute
minimum that society forced them to, in raising you. Human motivations are complex, usually. Of
course, if you have been mistreated, then there has been cost to you, perhaps enough to
compensate for their cost in raising you, perhaps not. I certainly can make no judgment about you
personally. You must do your best to evaluate that, and to take, as best you can, the complexities of
your particular situation into account when thinking about this whole issue.

Steven Ravett Brown

None of us asked to live, but we can make the best of it. You can't make the best of killing or being
killed. Giving birth isn't an act of violence, nor is violence intended. Entry into consciousness and the
realisation that you are needy and dependent is sometimes described as a violence, but that is simply
one metaphor applied to coming to be by some continental philosophers and could simply mean
"shock" and, in any case, doubts can be raised about its applicability.

This is different from killing someone. Levinas said "Thou shalt not kill" is not a commandment, but
reflects man's phenomenological nature. When you come to the point of killing, you cannot kill,
because you have lost the concept of a person. Sheer violence and an evil drive are all that there is.
Others will call it killing, but it is not killing for the one who performs the act.

Rachel Browne