Proactivity, Partiality, and Procreation

Abstract Common‐sense morality has it that parents are morally justified in acting partially toward their own children. More controversial, however, is the form of partiality that obtains between prospective parents and their yet‐to‐be‐conceived future children – or ‘pre‐parental partiality’, for short. Is pre‐parental partiality morally justified? On one hand, our intuitions seem to tell us that it is. On the other hand, we have philosophers like Douglas and Podgorski seeking to undermine its moral justifiability by arguing that we possess no reasons of special concern at all to engage in pre‐parental partiality. This paper aims to rescue the moral justifiability of pre‐parental partiality in light of these arguments. In particular, a novel account of our pre‐parental partiality obligations is developed; one which sees our special reasons (as prospective parents ) for engaging in pre‐parental partiality as arising from the special reasons for engaging in standard parental partiality that we come to possess (as parents ) in the future. The result is a compelling moral justification for pre‐parental partiality that amends itself to a whole platitude of views of what our standard parental obligations of partiality amount to.