To me it feels pretty clear that if someone will have a reasonably happy life, it’s better for them to live and have their life cut short than to never be born.
I agree with this conditional, but I question whether the condition (bolded) is a safe assumption. For example, if you could go back in time to survey all of the hibakusha and their children, I wonder what they would say about that C.S. Lewis quotation. It wouldn’t surprise me if many of them would consider it badly oversimplified, or even outright wrong.
My friend’s parents asked their priest if it was ok to have a child in the 1980s given the risk of nuclear war. Fortunately for my friend, the priest said yes.
This strikes me as some indexical sleight of hand. If the priests were instead saying no during the 1980s, wouldn’t that have led to a baby boom in the 1990s...?
I agree with this conditional, but I question whether the condition (bolded) is a safe assumption. For example, if you could go back in time to survey all of the hibakusha and their children, I wonder what they would say about that C.S. Lewis quotation. It wouldn’t surprise me if many of them would consider it badly oversimplified, or even outright wrong.
This strikes me as some indexical sleight of hand. If the priests were instead saying no during the 1980s, wouldn’t that have led to a baby boom in the 1990s...?