David Velleman on Family History

Aye, and I can trace one side to Loch Eirne in Roscommon circe 1820, and the other to 1680 New Jersey (although one pretentious family member claims the Mayflower). Peasants and dirt farmers all.

I am utterly indifferent to any and all preceding my grandparents. Ok, 1/64 Potowatami, always fun to claim Native-American blood. I simply don’t get this. Were I to have a President (or axe-murderer) as a distant something-uncle, what has this to do with me?

Even granting the argument in toto, saying “wrong” is too strong, unless one is willing to state that many many other things are more wrong. Allowing children in modern society to grow up functionally illiterate, ill-nourished, ignorant of history, geography, reasoning, numbers, …. Instead of wrong, “sub-optimal” is the strongest adjective I could endorse here. One of my grandfathers married late, and was 85 when I was born and I never knew him. Was this “wrong” of him, since I never had a chance to make this connection? Just as “wrong” as the issues discussed herein, I think — which is to say, not wrong, but things could have been better.

I must say that I’m totally indifferent to the question of _genetic_ heritage and think it’s pretty clearly a form of bad faith in Sartre’s sense of the idea to think that it’s important in the way Velleman seems to think. My parents are (for other reasons) strongly intereted in geneology and so have traced the family lines back a long way. I can think of nothing less interesting. Why should _I_ care about those people? To my mind this is all a mistake very similar to the one made by nationalists (also a form of bad faith, I think- Simone Keller form BU has a great paper on it in Ethics a while back). At the very least it seems to take something that’s of interest _to Velleman_ and try to claim that it _should_ be of interet to everyone without sufficient ground. I’d go further and say that it should not be of any speical interest to anyone and that what interet it has should be as a sort of hobby, no more special than stamp collecting.

Suppose we would all agree that knowing one’s ancestors would be a valuable thing. Still, that would be only one among many interests of the child, as Harry rightly points out. Moreover, the interests of the child need to be weighted against other people’s interests in deciding whether or not deliberatively conceiving a child who will not know part of his biological ancestors is wrong. For example, people may not have a right to have a child, but surely wanting to raise children is something that needs to be taken into account as a legitimate interest (under normal circumstances).

Suppose a lesbian couple is in a stable and happy relationship, and they are longing very deeply for a child. What should they do? Not have a child, and mourn this absence all there lives? Or have a child from the sperm donated by a friend on the understanding that he will play no role at all, or only a limited role in the child’s life, running the risk that this man will suddenly change his mind after the child is born (understandably, since contemplating a human being is something else as feeling, touching, seeing, experiencing a human being) — with all the social and personal tragedies that are possible? Or should they be looking for an anonymous donor, in which case the child will not know part of his biological ancestors, but will be raised in a peaceful family? One could concstruct similar arguments for single women who are approaching their mid-thirthies and have to choose between single motherhood or a bad heterosexual relationship. I think these are not easy questions, but livng with your blood-relatives seems to me only one (and a minor) relevant concern to look at such dilemmas.

Doormat: Seems that Harry was using HTML editor that was inserting bogus font change tags — do a “View” “Page Source” and you can see them.

I, and my three siblings, were adopted. Add to that my two parents, and you have a house of full of six completely different people. We had a common life together and adopted my parents history and culture, but it was the commonality you find in the classroom or the workplace. I think all of us felt this.

I eventually found my birth mother and two half-siblings and extended family. There was definitely a feeling of finding my people. Just the physical similarites were comforting somehow. It definitely explained something to me about who I was and where I came from. it explained something to me about myself.

Would this have been the case if I had fit better with my adopted family, or had needed to fit better? I don’t know. I do know that finding one half of my birth family WAS important in forming an identity that made sense.

The HTML editor responsible for the funny tags is the one built into the new WordPress front end; this happened to me and it is the devil’s own job to get rid of them. I suspect that if you use a Mac or Linux or something then it is all hunky dory, but if you write the post in Word then it does this weird fonts thing. I suppose that is the price we have to pay for using such an obscure and little-known operating system and word processor.

I also don’t find this convincing.

1) I think Matt is right that this looks like the elevation of a particular hobby to an essential of life. You might as well say it’s an absolute necessity for every child to have a weblog (shudder).

2) I am not at all clear on what’s meant by:

arrangements vary in how good they are for children, and that we should try to promote arrangements that are better for, over those that are worse for, children

It looks like “Evidence based medicine” to me. I think that there’s decent reason to think that “arrangements vary in how good they are for children” isn’t a well-formed statement of social science – that the reified term “arrangements” can’t be unpacked in a way that doesn’t reduce the content of the sentence to “some kids do better than others”.

I’m reminded of the Austrian rejection of classical economics which turned on exactly the possibility or otherwise of moving between subjective and objective assessments in this way.

3) I can’t get away from the Derek Parfit point that the relevant standard is surely “will X make the child so miserable that he sincerely regrets having been born”? The answer here is clearly “no”, and I agree with the commenters above who implicitly think you’d need a “yes” answer before you started saying that someone had done “a wrong”.

by the way, if Velleman establishes this conclusion, then troublemakers like me will certainly be jumping on the bandwagon to say that we now have an argument which proves that Pakistani immigrants to the UK should not have children because those children will necessarily be confused and unable to create a coherent story which reconciles their genetic, religious and national heritages[1]. And furthermore, anyone making this argument is AFAICS going to have a lot easier time putting together sociological and empirical support for it.

[1] I think that this argument might run Donohue & Levitt (2000) close in the “most catholically offensive argument in social sciences ever” stakes.

How is it possible for a thread on genealogy to have gotten this far without
And so, I checked all the registered historical facts
And I was shocked into shame to discover
How I’m the 18th pale descendant
Of some old queen or other
Oh, has the world changed, or have I changed?
Oh has the world changed, or have I changed?

First point, it probably detracts from the analytical purity of Harry’s post but someone has to state the obvious, that Velleman’s argument is all about Gay marriage.

Second point, the idea that one’s identity is (necessarily?) bound up with what Velleman calls one’s “biological past” seems to me an attack on a pretty generally accepted form of liberalism.

Third point, in my browser (Firefox) the font sizes are all over the place. For example, right now the links on the side bar and the comments are in a bigger font than the post.

To make another crude unanalytical point, the idea that everyone ought to care mightily about their biological pedigree (sorry, “history”) seems like an effort to claim universality as a value for something which is really just a badge of dominant social classes.

And I was shocked into shame to discover
How I’m the 18th pale descendant
Of some old queen or other

continental op – Your point is a good one. If your sense of identity is so fragile that it can be shattered by some alteration to the historical narrative in the distant past, I think you’ve got worse issues than an excessive interest in genealogy.

In my own case, there was a family story that my grandfather was the illegitimate son of the Duke of Marlborough. My father and I regard(ed) this as wildly unlikely and completely unimportant if true. But suppose it could be demonstrated, what earthly difference would it make to anybody? It would entitle nobody to anything they don’t presently have, nor would it deprive anybody of anything they do have. Who cares?

I post only because I am an adopted child who always knew I was adopted and only found out the circumstances (it was a family adoption) at the age of 30 while about to viva for the ph.d. and just before my wedding. I find that my adoption was always part of my narrative. Discovering my biological mother and half-sisters added to my self-narrative. Not know who my biological father is, is a dent in that narrative. All things being equal, I’d like that knowledge. How much I am willing to sacrifice for it, now that is an on-going question. But I think there is something about how children do take the facts around them to construct who and why they are. I was always told of a woman who loved me enough to give me up, of foster parents who loved me and didn’t want me to leave and well, adopted parents who desperately wanted a child. Of course, I also used to tell people I was put in a cardboard box and sailed across the Atlantic and harboured fantasies of being related to the British Royal Family (finding out half the actual equation has killed that one). It will also depend on how much of an acceptable narrative that those who have donation can provide.

The comments thus far have focused primarily on knowledge of one’s extended genealogy, which is not the main focus of my paper. (I see no evidence that any of the commenters has read the paper, by the way.) The focus of my paper is the value of being raised by one’s biological parents — or, more broadly, by one’s kin.

To say that a child resembles its parents not only physically but also in significant psychological respects is not “biologically naive” (pace Martin James, #10): it is well documented by research, some of which I summarize in the blog posting to which Harry has linked. The absence of such resemblance to adoptive parents is frequently noted by adoptees as contributing to a sense of rootlessness or incompleteness. That’s why the experience described by cw (#11) is not at all uncommon among adoptees. Of course, it is not absolutely universal: not all adoptees go in search of their birth parents, especially not if they know in advance that finding them would be impossible. But research shows that about half of adoptees do search for their birth parents, and many of them report (to quote cw) that “finding one half of my birth family WAS important in forming an identity that made sense”.

Note how many of these comments rely on wishful thinking. The “American mythos” requires us to think that our biological past is irrelevant to our identities (Martin James again, #10). To deny this is to “attack a pretty generally accepted form of liberalism” (engels, #19). And so on. These comments say, in effect, “Velleman is wrong because, if he were right, I would have to rethink some of my assumptions.”

Finally, some minor points:

–No, my paper is not all about gay marriage (engels, #19). It does have implications for gay marriage, but these implications are not what motivate the paper.

–Derek Parfit’s definition of a “life worth living” (daniel, #13) cannot be used to make decisions about procreation, for reasons that I explain in my paper.

–Many of the comments about creating disadvantaged children are also answered in the paper.

Engels is exactly right that this is about gay marriage. Velleman made the connection a while back in a Left2Right post that expressed an opposition gay marriage.

A prejudice against gay marriage is really the only explanation for why a smart man like Velleman would spend so much time developing such a faulty philosophical argument. It’s really a particularly egregious example of armchair philosophizing — mistaking one’s own pleasure in hearing stories about long-dead ancestors for a universal desire.

I’m not a philosopher, but I found Velleman’s arguments not very compelling: a series of personal anecdotes mixed in with some intuition pumps that just didn’t work very well. I haven’t read his paper in detail, but I’ll raise a couple of points anyway:

When Velleman writes that “it is immoral to create children with the intention that they be alienated from their biological relatives,” the end of his sentence “–for example, by donor conception” seems far too broad. I don’t know if this solution is suggested, but it seems to me that you can get around the “immorality” simply by not telling the child about his biological background and letting him assume he shares the same biological history as the parents. It’s arguably a lie by omission, but is it worse than all the hypothetical problems the child may suffer otherwise?

Velleman also asks how we can understand the stories of Telemachus, Moses, and even Luke Skywalker if we deny the importance of biological ties. “I am your father.” “So what?” But there’s a difference between understanding and personal experience. I can understand Romeo and Juliet even if I’m not part of a family at war with another and if my lover has never killed herself, thinking I was dead. I imagine that there are people who have never been deeply in love who can still make sense of the play. If someone denies the importance of biological ties, that doesn’t mean they’re ignoring the importance that society places on biological ties.

Some of the commenters are definitely imputing something that is not in the paper or in my report of it — the idea that mere knowledge of one’s forebears in some sense gives one a pedigree. That’s not what Velleman is saying at all, or implying — his point is that it gives one resources for self-reflection that are otherwise unavailable, and are very important. Read the paper…

My question was about how important they are, because how important they are makes the claim that a wrong is being done more or less plausible (the more important they are the more plausible it is that a wrong is being done). Like some of the commenters (eg ingrid) I think children have many interests — and suspect that this is just one, so it is not enough to make an “all things considered” judgement. I’m also sympathetic with the idea (raised by z and hinted at by others) that cultural context may make some interest more or less important. I suspect Velleman disagrees, but his argument needn’t hinge on him disagreeing; it can be wrong do deprive children of the ability to meet certian interests even when those interests are “merely” culturally constructed.

I see now that composing the whole post within the program overcomes the typeface problem. I’ll try composing in other programmes.

David: I think that Derek Parfit’s criterion of whether a person’s life is worth living to them is precisely intended to address the question of whether you can do a wrong to somebody by bringing them into existence, and the way in which you address this question in your paper really does, to my eye at least, strongly resemble a line of argument which appears to me to be decisively refuted in the relevant part of “Reasons and Persons”.

Furthermore, the “argument from triviality” isn’t dependent on our taking the paper to refer to extended genealogy.

The absence of such resemblance to adoptive parents is frequently noted by adoptees as contributing to a sense of rootlessness or incompleteness.

“Rootlessness and incompleteness”? As I noted above, this is also experienced by children of immigrants, with social and psychological consequences which are definite and measurable and not dependent on personal anecdotes and just-so stories.

It really looks as if you are arguing that it is a significant wrong to bring children into the world who have a sense of rootlessness and incompleteness, which is surely bad news for the Jewish community if true (Have a look at a Woody Allen film sometime if you want a sense of rootlessness and incompleteness). The response here is not “Velleman is wrong because, if he were right, I would have to rethink some of my assumptions” but “Velleman appears to be attempting to overturn deep-seated and important liberal principles by appeal to the arguable claim that in this case they result in a really quite nebulous and trivial-looking harm.”

I can say for sure that knowing one half of my birth family was important to helping me form an identity that made sense. The family I was raised in (see my post #11 above) created a confusion in my identity in that I did not resemble anyone in my family physically, intellectually, or psychologically. That was weird. Where were people who were like me? Having my own child only confirms the reality of genetic connection for me. I see myself in her and she sees herself in me and her mother in lots and lots of way, and Ithink that that is a good thing. You know who you are, where you come from, where you belong.I look at my wife’s family and I see connections going back through the generations. Who she is makes sense in the context of who her faimly is. Even if my birth parents had turned out to be unpleasant, meeting them still would have helped me understand my origin which helps explain who I am. I don’t know if you can really feel this point unless you go through the experince.

So I think, for sure, it is better to know your birth family. (Adoptees have a significantly high rate of depression and suicide, which may or may not be attributable to the alienation issue). I don’t think it’s a life or death thing, but I do think it is important, and if I were king I would pass a law requiring sperm and egg doners to make themselves available to their offspring and that adoptions be open. I strongly believe that this would be valuable to the children. They probably won’t die for the lack of it (although there are those depression and suicide statistics) but kids don’t die (directly) from, say, fetal alchohol sysndrom either, and we do our best to limit that.

Evidence that adoptees at some point search for their birth parents is not evidence that adoptees have a “deep and unrelenting need” for this information. Velleman takes the higher number of 50% (which refers to those who at some point search) and pretends that it refers to those who feel a deep need. But there is no evidence in the paper that most adoptees who search do so out of “deep need” rather than curiosity, or need for knowledge about their medical histories.

I’ve no that that is your opinion, cw, but are you prepared to extend that judgement to billions of people worldwide? As far as I can see, going on off on one about how drug addicts are to blame for their situation would be quite irrelevant here.

Correction: …for people who do not know who their biological parents are…

And of course, cw, it couldn’t possibly be the the fact that your country allows there to be thousands of homeless people in the first place, but only the fact that they are fucking, which is causing the problem.

Velleman’s reply in comment 33 refers us to this paragraph in his post, setting up his argument:

“The most recent literature reviews of research on twins, adopted children, and pairs of biologically related and unrelated family members tend to show that differences between individuals in cognitive ability, personality, and social attitudes are significantly determined by genetic inheritance, with heritability measures in the neighborhood of 50%; heritability of differences in “psychological interests” runs at roughly 35%.”

However, I think this uses the heritability measure in precisely the way we are warned not to use it. Gary Marcus comments on this reductionist use of heritability in The Birth of the Mind:

“Heritability scores have an air of authority, but they are easily misunderstood. For example, it is tempting to interpret a heritability score of 60 percent on IQ tests as showing that “60 percent of intelligence comes from heredity.” Although twin studies do suggest that IQ has a heritability that is not far from 60 percent, that does not mean that 60 percent of your intelligence comes from your genes. In fact, the heritability measure doesn’t say what percentage of any trait comes from your genes.”

As Marcus explains, these percentages concern the variation in some trait. Using the example of tree height, Marcus writes: what enters into the statistic is not the height of the average tree, but the difference between them. … In humans, heritability only looks at differences that in the grand perspective of life on earth are tiny: whether Jimmy has a bigger vocabulary than Johnny, or whether Janey is better with a wrench than Susan.”

Such differences, I’d point out, are also going to come into play in changes in class position and education. Vellamen’s point, logically extended, would pinpoint social mobility as an identity shattering evil. But this use of the identity narrative as a template for virtue begs the question of why we are supposed to think that the adoptive person’s quest, say, for his or her biological parents is supposed to indicate some fatal lack, rather than a new permutation in the identity narrative itself. Perhaps our identity shouldn’t be sealed by our childhood – in fact, I’d say that does much greater harm in America, where youth seems to be the perpetual and impossible goal of middle age.

luc and engles

I knew it was going to go this way. You are reading all kinds of things into my post. I’m not judging anybody. I’m not saying homeless people shouldn’t fuck, or that gay people shouldn’t have children or that there is only one kind of family. I’m saying that if you know you are not going to be able to give your child the basic requirements: food, shelter, nurturing, then you should hold off.

But go ahead, give me the treatment. Vent your frustrations on me. I’ll be your whipping boy. I’m a team player.

Sorry luc,

I think I misread your comments as directed at mine.

I did answer it. I said I don’t know. Conditions in the developing world are different.

I’m applying my usual rule of being a pretty hands-off moderator, but I would ask people to be polite to each other (I know, I know, its the blogs, the internet, etc, but I’m trying to optimise the environment for us actually learning).

So, that said, I’m with cw on thinking that if you cannot supply a child with what it needs in order to have reasonable propsects for living a reasonably good life, you should indeed hold off. In the light of that engels’s question is a tough one. But we can say this (at least, I and engels would both say this, and I bet cw would too) — the fact that many people are in a situation in which they cannot meet some of the basic needs of any children they might have gives us a very powerful reason to alter that situation if we can. In the case of the American “underclass” I think that this is not as hard as it’s often made out to be — similarly in the case of the developing world — and wealthy westerners have a very strong reason to bear more of the burden of the redistirbution than they currently do, and I feel no embarrassment condemning them for that (even though I don’t know exactly how much they should do; its just way more than most of them do).

I strongly agree with luc that a child-rearing situation does not have to be optimal to be justified (and to count as a family). But I don’t think (and don’t know whether luc does) that therefore anything goes, or that condemnation is inappropriate. I would not blanketly condemn divorce, for example, but some divorces (and some individual parental behaviours that lead to divorces) are bad for the kids involved, and a culture of no comment on divorce certainly prompts some such divorces at the expense of children’s interests. Having a kid does not require you top optimise its chances at any cost to yourself, but it does (morally) require you to make some sacrifices (including some pretty good ones) for its benefit. Just to reiterate, I’m not blanketly condemning divorce, but I can’t believe that there is a reader over 40 here who hasn’t encountered at least one divorce in which they suspect strongly that the children would have been substantially better off without it and the parents could have lived with it, even if you are not willing to blame both parents for the situation.

Harry – Is it your view then that, with the world as it is today, most people in developing countries should “hold off” from having kids? Not just people whose kids’ lives are likely to be unbearably miserable, but those who, on the balance of probabilities, are not likely to have access to goods which a middle class American would consider to be basic, such as proper education? (Children, for example, like Brazil’s current president.)

I honestly do not find this claim at all plausible and have to say that from the point of view of my own learning I see more utility in arguing with people like Leederick, who appears to be trying to distinguish the two cases.

Cw – Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude.

Also, Harry, even if we can not reach agreement on this, or alternatively, supposing for the sake of argument that the Leederick is right and the two cases are different, I have also made a weaker argument, which is all, I think, that is needed.

Knowing who your (immediate) ancestors are surely can not be a basic good like access to education. Although in my personal opinion it isn’t worth very much at all, it would seem plausible perhaps to argue that it has a comparable value, in terms of ability to self-reflect or a humanistic conception of flourishing, to things like a knowledge of history or literature. Many parents are unable to honestly expect that their children will acquire such goods. Some might intend that they not do so. Is it wrong for them to have children?

Re international adoption:

Anne Tyler’s latest (and characteristically lovely) novel Digging to America is about two American families, one WASP and the other Iranian-American, who adopt baby girls from Korea. The WASP family, though not the Iranian-American one, try to maintain their daughter’s links to her Korean heritage by retaining her Korean name, dressing her in Korean clothes on special occasions, etc. But over the course of the novel she rebels against that, saying she hates Korean clothes, wants to be called “Jo,” etc., i.e. wants to be just as American as the Iranian family have made their daughter.

Nothing philosophical follows from this; it’s just a nice literary treatment of the issue (as well as of multiculturalism more generally).

Engles,

Thank you for apologising.

I have thought about it and here is my attempt at an answer to your question. First, we are presupposing that I can do anything about other people having children. This is a intellectual exercise. So, I am presuming now that I have the power to say who can and can’t have children (This is not a power I would entrust with anyone but myself).

If we are just talking about poverty, lack of education, society-wide nutritional standards, some inequality between the sexes but nothing too horrendous, I say–as king of procreation–if you believe you have a reasonable chance of raising that child to be happy and successful according to that cultures terms, then go ahead.

But if you don’t have a reasonable chance to provide food or shelter or the ability or temperment or training to raise children as they are rasied in that culture, then say wait until conditions change.

And if your culture has horredous child-rearing practices, such as virtual slavery for females, then I say no, change your culture.

I assert that there are basic, universal human rights and if parents cannot reasonably guarantee these for their children then they shouldn’t have children until they can.

This, of course, also presupposes that people have the ability to realistically assess their potential as parents. Not easy to do. The urge to procreate is strong. So are social expectations. There is also the lack of birth control. I believe many women in the developing world would like to have fewer children but have no birth control.

engels — chris bertram anticipates my response to the first point (knowing pretty well what i think about these things, I can see!). I guess I want to trun the tables a bit: suppose you have full control over whether and when to have a kid, and you and you have very good reason to believe that the prospects the kid would face are very poor indeed. Would you at least think that it is worse to do it than to have a child in other circumstances where you have reason to believe it will have good prospect? I think that people can have valuable lives in poor societies. But I also think that we can reaosnably say that there are circumstances in which it is wrong to have children, and we do not have to be laissez faire about this.

I think I agree with your second argument — it’s what I suggest in the post. I’d go further –even if it is a basic good like education it still might not be wrong to have kids knwoing they’ll be deprived of it, as long as they get enough of other goods. But I’m not sure, and that’s why I wanted to elicit discussion.

Which brings me to Maynard Hanley’s point, which is really about methodology in normative philosophy. One of the things I like about Velleman’s paper is precisely that he reflects on his own experiences and life, and offers conclusions based on that. When we are trying to work out the content of basic human interests in a way that is meanignful for deciding what we should and shouldn’t do in practice I think we have to resort to this — its a case where anecdote, and even fiction (thanks for the tip, tom hurka), really is data, of a certain kind. But we are heavily reliant on other people whose experiences are quite different responding to, criticising, and reflecting on, our reasoning and conclusions, in order to avoid being trapped in a realm of idiosyncratic reasons. That is, as I say, why I don’t have confidence in my own response to Velleman’s piece absent a discussion with others in which they reflect on their experience (and his and mine, etc). That’s perhaps why I jumped in to ask people to be more polite — not so much because I want people to avoid hurting feelings but because it makes it easier to reflect carefully (or rather easier for me — and I put a fair bit of work into the post, which is why I feel entitled to make these demands!).

I suppose I don’t get the reasoning. Even if knowledge about one’s biological parents contributes to identity formation for those who have it, why would lack of that knowledge count as a harm? Its not like adopted children grow up without identities. Whatever experiences you have, those are the experiences that will contribute to the formation of your identity.

Not only this concept of ‘genetic forebears’ is useless and harmful, but the whole institution of ‘family’ seems rather unhealthy.

How odd to chance upon this thread after having just read Josh Marshall’s loving tribute to his just-deceased father…a tribute made all the more poignant and powerful (IMHO) by the fact that it’s only towards the very end that he reveals that his father was not, in fact, related to him by “blood”:

Since he died though I’ve realized how much he shaped me, perhaps much more, how the main guideposts of my life were ones he put in place. How much I was, in a word, his son. And that is, paradoxically, all the more precious to me since we shared not a drop of blood between us.

My biological parents were divorced soon after I was born. I don’t know just how old I was when my mother started dating Alan. But I know that he was there at my first birthday party. And I have no memory of anything before him.

Our love for each other transcended biology.

I can’t help finding this germane to the present discussion.

Velleman remarks (#27) that his paper, despite its lengthy inclusion of his extended family history, is not about genealogical knowledge; it is rather about the importance of biological ties, and the consideration of whether they are “genuinely meaningful”.

He suggests that biological relatives allow me to compare myself with someone “like me”, whose qualities and life stories I can compare and contrast with my own. Left unanswered is why genetic resemblance is the relevant way in which relatives are “like me”. Is it more important to me that Grandpa has a nose shaped like mine, or that he was a kind, honest person whose character I might emulate? Is it his hair color, or is it his curiousity about the natural world, that should matter more to me?

When comparing and contrasting myself and my children with my relatives, some resemblances may be due to genes and history, and others may be simply coincidental, and I notice them because I’m looking for them. If I sneeze just like Aunt Edna, that might be a deep family connection, but then it might not. If I’m just like my mother (she’s never satisfied), that might be genes, but it might be my upbringing by her.

Many of Velleman’s points simply assume his outlook. Donor children must have the status of “stranger in a strange land”; it must be hard to meet a man and not know that he’s not your father; one’s life story takes on meaning in relation to the life stories of one’s ancestors. Yes, these are all telling, if you already believe that biological ties are important.ol

Velleman may find meaning and satisfaction in his family ties, but he hasn’t made a convincing case that lack of the biological version of such ties is a disadvantage.

As a HS teacher, I deal with a lot of kids who are trying to form coherent identities. My anecdotal evidence to throw into the fray is that I hear a lot more complaints about biological parents who interfere with a kids life by trying to form bonds the child honestly doesn’t have or want than about kids who would feel complete if they could only know their biological parents. It seems like pretty weak evidence to base a theory, but if anecdotes are all we are looking for, count me in.

Harry wrote:
I would not blanketly condemn divorce, for example, but some divorces (and some individual parental behaviours that lead to divorces) are bad for the kids involved […. ] I can’t believe that there is a reader over 40 here who hasn’t encountered at least one divorce in which they suspect strongly that the children would have been substantially better off without it and the parents could have lived with it, even if you are not willing to blame both parents for the situation.

All undoubtedly true. But isn’t it also true that there are some marriages (and some individual parental behaviors within those marriages) that are bad for the kids involved? Don’t most of us (regardless of age) know of at least one such marriage? Think about marriages in which there is domestic violence, just to take what seems an obvious example.

Since we’re all getting anecdotal here, I’ll cite the example of my wife and her sister, who absolutely believe that they were better off for the fact that their mom divorced their alcoholic dad (who, I hasten to note, was never violent, and isn’t even a bad guy, but was totally irresponsible as a parent).

I’m with Katya (#58). My experience is identical, as are my feelings about finding my biological relations. Of my birth mother, I know her name and that she was unmarried and 18yo when I was born (in 1962, in semi-rural England). Of whomever impregnated her, I know nothing. But I’ve never felt the urge to try to find out more. I will say that being born in England and raised elsewhere (in America, by American parents) probably had some bearing on me being something of an Anglophile. That’s about as far as it goes in influencing my sense of my own identity, aside from having two passports and a birth certificate bearing a name no one ever called me.

OTOH, my cousin’s son, whom she gave up for adoption when he was born in 1968, got in touch with her three years ago, because he felt much as CW described (#11). Like my birth mother, she was unmarried and 18yo at the time.

What I find interesting about the situation is that we all feel like we’re part of the same family. I find myself feeling related to my cousin’s son despite his recent appearance (and I didn’t even know he existed until three years ago), and my cousin — in fact, my entire extended family — has never treated me as any less a part of the family because I was adopted. I can understand his curiosity about what I think of as “my” family, embrace him as being a part of it, simply because of his biological link to people I grew up loving. At the same time, I feel no less a part of the family despite the lack of that biological link.

Doesn’t this suggest that people are more adaptable to circumstance than public policy often gives them credit for? Doesn’t it suggest that “the redefinition of the family to mean ‘whatever arrangement the adult seeking to procreate has created for the child'” isn’t, in fact, a redefinition at all, but pretty much the way it has always been? As another comment noted, we have only ever had the assurances of our families that they are our families at all — none of us witnessed our own conceptions, let alone the conceptions of our ancestors. To my mind, the only thing that is immoral is the idea that you should tell people how to make their reproductive choices. Any of us could, and very likely does, have lords and serfs, masters and slaves, even drug-addicts and lawyers (oh, the horror!) somewhere in our lineage. Saying that any of these “shouldn’t” have had children because of their circumstances at the time is nonsensical — we wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t. How do you know that your future daughter-in-law — and thus, grandchildren & great-grandchildren — won’t be here because someone told an infertile couple about the wrongness of using an anonymous surrogate to conceive?

I think the question asked might be recast as how central is a sense of belonging to a shared family history important to one’s sense of self. Is biology necessary or is it simply the commonest form, as it is the default connection?

Per the comments just raised about adoption and belonging I would describe the flip situation. As it happens in my circle of family, friends and acquaintances, many have had a parent, kindly described as difficult. Or have just been different enough from everyone else to have felt most like an outsider among their closest relatives. As a result, many believe, strongly, that families are whom one chooses (friends, partners, some relatives), not those with whom one shares blood necessarily, a belief that has only been strengthened, interestingly, when (grand)children have arrived. It is often the moment at which choosing family is stated as the most precious of gifts, because blood ties are so much a matter of chance.

I happen to have been raised by parents who strongly believed in treating their biological children as choices, and in seeing a necessity in earning our affection and trust. They also created a family narrative out of our lives and their own (so we were creating the narrative as we grew and our sense of family is in many ways tied to the shared experiences). One result? We all remain close, but I have no particular interest in forebears whom I never met. Quite honestly, other people’s family histories often interest me more.

While none of these anecdotes include adopted children, and so cannot absolutely clarify the question of narrative as requiring biological underpinings, it does suggest that the attitude toward and the quality of ties may be far more important to one’s sense of identity than whether they are blood ties.

Which makes me think that while knowing one’s biological family may be optimal, being denied that opportunity is misguided but probably does not rise to the level of inflicting serious harm. Or, perhaps more accurately, the extent to which biological ties are important to one’s own sense of identity, the more harm one would see in denying that to another.

One of my grandfathers wasn’t biologically my grandfather – he wasn’t my mother’s biological father. But he’s the grandparent I feel I have the strongest continuity with – he was also a “sub-scholarly” bibliophile – and I’m interested in his history and the cultural milieux which formed him.

So I think Velleman’s argument is just confused. Children have a biological (medical) interest in knowing who their biological parents are; they have a cultural interest in understanding the traditions in which they were raised and the background of the parents who raised them.

It would make no sense for someone to claim they had a right to a blood sample or genetic analysis of an adoptive parent; why does it make any sense to claim a cultural inheritance from a purely biological parent?

I have just read through thirty pages of distilled Velleman and I’m left with the feeling that Harry Brighouse has certainly committed some kind of moral wrong in promising me that the experience would be “riveting”. I can also report that my “cherished liberal assumptions” are, pace David Velleman, entirely intact. In the first part, Velleman does self-indulgent. In the second, Velleman does polemical. In short order, Velleman does mystical and Velleman does obscure. What Velleman doesn’t do, as far as I can see, is provide any clear or rigorous argument for his prima facie ridiculous statement that knowing the original excretor of the sperm and egg from which one has grown is a “basic human good”. That claim still strikes me as entirely ridiculous. It represents, as commenters on his own site have noted, a “horrifying, irrational attachment to the origins of one’s DNA”.

First of all we are treated to a long and egotistical section about Velleman’s own family history. So far so boring.

This is followed by a series of chilling warnings about a “vast social experiment” “designing” children in accordance with a sinister “new ideology of the family”, which is definitely the most entertaining part of the essay, but which seems unlikely to convince many philosophers, or indeed anyone who doesn’t regularly listen to Rush Limbaugh. He later goes on to say, sarcastically, that he wants to address the “enlightened” in their own “rationalistic” terms. Velleman notes that this kind of puff is “polemical” and that it will probably offend his readers. Well, it didn’t offend me but I did think it was terribly clichéd.

In the next section, Velleman boosts his nice guy credentials, by reassuring us that although he thinks that large numbers of normal, happy children should never have been born, this does not mean that we shouldn’t celebrate their birthdays. Also in this section, Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance is made to groan under the weight of Velleman’s inferences and much is made here of the alleged ineffable nature of family resemblance relations. This controversial assumption is then deployed to set up a further quasi-mystical claim, that I would know my doppelgänger by his family resemblance to me. It’s hard to know what to make of any of this, but as far as I can tell it seems to imply that someone who has never known his biological family would not be able to recognise his doppelgänger. This, at least, is a testable prediction and it is surely false.

Velleman then ups the ante and throws a few more taunts at us benighted “rationalists” who can not appreciate the central ethical importance of DNA-fetishism. He charges that, in addition to being incapable of self-reflection, we are unable to “read world literature with any comprehension”. Telemachus, Oedipus, and, wait for it, Luke Skywalker are entirely beyond our ken.

How can they even understand the colloquy between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker? Surely, the revelation ‘I am your father’ should strike them as a bit of dramatic stupidity-a remark to be answered ‘So what?’

This is silliness of the first order. Can it count for nothing with Velleman that Star Wars takes place in a fictional world? Can rationalists like me fully and innocently relate to George Lucas’s vision of a manichean struggle between Jedis and the Dark Side in a galaxy far, far away? Perhaps, but perhaps not, or at least not when we have our rational faculties switched on. Does any of this have any implications for serious moral decisions in the real world? Not by the forest moons of Endor!

For the general tone of the following intermezzo you can do no better than this little cadenza –

First comes love, then comes marriage, and then comes the proverbial baby carriage. Well, it’s not such a ridiculous way of doing things, is it?

– which Velleman intones approximately halfway through it, without apparent irony.

After a few more pages in which Velleman tries and fails to solve Parfit’s ‘non-identity problem’ there is an invocation of the currently fashionable ‘narrative theory of self-identity’. This kind of thing is all well and good, but nowhere does Velleman successfully demonstrate the relevance of brute genetic facts to the stories about ourselves and our families which we spin and which are held to define who we are. After this, Velleman is unable to resist a few more pages of autobiographical wittering before signing off with a final blast of pseudo-profundity about his “forbears”.

Look, I’m not one of the familial libertarians, despised by Velleman and Brighouse, who believe that “All You Need is Love” (Velleman’s characterisation) and that anything goes in terms of intimate relationships. I think that people can do wrong to those they love and that parents can harm their children in all sorts of horrible ways. I just don’t think that raising a child in ignorance of its biological parents is one of them, and David Velleman’s essay has not given me any reason to change my mind.

Something like 50% of the UK population bought a Rubik’s cube.

And when my adoptive father solved his, I felt nothing… nothing, I tell you.

If only I could know that, somewhere, my biological father had a Rubik’s Cube just like mine, then I could feel a sense of purpose and meaning in this cruel world.

Imagine the excitement

Perhaps this excitement can make up for the confusion and lack of dramatic gravitas that so many stunted, non-biological children suffer when watching that “I am your father” scene in Star Wars.

If some of you are right and biological relationships aren’t important, then surely using anonymous donors to enable someone to have a biological child is just pointless and these people’s desire for a biological child is downright misguided.

Can you really have it both ways? Can you kick the stool out from under people’s claim to have an interest in knowing their biological forebears without also kicking the stool out from under people’s claim to have an interest in knowing their biological descendants?

I can’t help but think that as a defence for the use of anonymous donors that line of reasoning is self-defeating.

I don’t have a strong opinion on all of this. The issues strike me as quite complex.

But on Velleman’s side, it might be worth taking a look at the following blogs (and others like them):

A woman who was conceived through sperm donation and whose sensibilities on this are very close to Velleman’s (in fact she links to his article):

http://whosedaughter.blogspot.com/

Another woman, this one born of a surrogate mother, again not very happy about it:

http://umbliclychallenged.blogspot.com/

And this one from a man who was conceived through sperm donation:

http://donatedgeneration.blogspot.com/

As soon as you find one of these blogs they lead you to others… This is a limited and self-selected sample, I know. Nonetheless, it can give you a clear sense of how the interests of the child might (emphasis on “might”) look to the child, not necessarily as a child, but later in life — when balancing the interests of the child and of would-be parents as Ingrid Roybens suggests above. One theme in these blogs is that the experience of having children of their own (biological children conceived naturally) has led these people as adults to see their own lives in a different light. They now see their own childhoods as lacking in a very significant good, and say that they would never choose to be involved in donor conception, surrogacy, etc — on either end of the transaction.

Food for thought, at least.

Equally, you can probably find some people somewhere who feel their lives were ruined when their biological father/sperm donor/surrogate mother turned up on their doorstep and wanted to be “part of their life”.

Michael; but if we played the game of you linking to those blogs while I linked to blogs written by people who were unhappy about their inability to have a baby, what odds do you think I’d be able to give you? I think, nine to one, at least.

Perhaps taking the question out of the “family” dynamic would clarify:

If the IVF lab screws up and implants Couple A’s embryo into one member of Couple B and implants Couple B’s embryo into one member of Couple A, and thereby deprives the two children of relationships with their biological parents, has the lab harmed the children? (Of course the lab has failed the parents, but that’s a separate question.) Assume that Couple A and Couple B are equally good parents, and that there are no complicating ethnic/religious/genetic issues–the couples are essentially matched. Assume that the embryos chosen would otherwise have been destroyed, if that’s necessary to avoid talking about Parfit. Is there a harm here, or has the lab simply done something less than ideal from the perspective of the child?

I don’t get this Luke Skywalker thing.

Luke was a kid who never knew his father, except through a few vague statements by Obi wan Kenobi to the effect that his father was killed by Darth Vader. Then, he meets Darth Vader, and finds out that his worst enemy is, in fact, his father.

Why would a kid need to know his biological father to understand this? If the assumption that one needs to have similar family relationships to those of fictional characters in order to understand those fictional character’s drama is correct, shouldn’t it be the opposite? Luke didn’t know his biological father. Then he did, and was horrified by what he found.

If Velleman is correct, I should be unable to relate to Luke because I’ve always known my biological father, whereas a kid who was adopted or conceived by artificial insemination should have no difficulty grasping Luke’s plight.

If we’re going to make up stupid Theory claims about interpreting Star Wars, can we at least make sure our theory and our examples are consistent?

You could have a biological child with or without anonymous donation

I could (I’ve got two). But as I understand it, there are plenty of people who cannot, in that it would not be possible to run sperm banks as they if they did not guarantee donor anonymity.

Lots of good criticisms here, and I have to agree with engels that this paper falls well short of riveting. The fact that the belief that this biological connection matters in some profound way, we should remember, cuts both ways in a way that Velleman and his ilk seem to utterly fail to appreciate. Before I got over our societies obsession with blood, biology, and identity, back in my teenage days, my biological connection to my father was a source of much consternation for me–he’s a lousy person and I liked to think I wasn’t, but feared otherwise–and I would have been nothing short of delighted to learn that I had no biological connection to him. Given the non-trivial portion of the population who aren’t good people, this side of the coin should hardly be dismissed. Constructing an identity from a biological blank slate may not be ideal, but it’s a big improvement for some of us.

Sperm banks and donor insemination can and does exist without anonymity…

According to an article from the Daily Mail titled “Anonymity law change blamed for chronic sperm donor shortage”…..

Um, the Daily Mail article says that the UK sperm bank system is becoming unworkable now that anonymity is no longer guaranteed. I’m always very sympathetic to the idea that the Daily Mail is wrong, but isn’t it a bit odd to introduce them as evidence against the story which they are reporting?

You know, if in order to operate sperm banks really need to induce people into fatherhood who wouldn’t otherwise do it, by offering them cash and shielding them from the consequences of it, then perhaps it would be best if it were not possible to run them.

110 – why? It doesn’t matter if the men providing sperm would not make good fathers, that’s not a fault that’s going to show up in their DNA.

Ray, my worry isn’t that the men providing sperm would not make good fathers. My worry is that reproductive decisions like these are pretty weighty ones, and people who wouldn’t make them otherwise are doing it because they’re offered various inducements. But perhaps people shouldn’t make these kind of decisions for themselves under the influence of those sorts of considerations.

ray, isn’t it a weighty decision for the reasons described in no. 93?

Or is that sort of hand-waving only permitted in justifying, not questioning, the practice purportedly being examined?

(should note – the decision has no consequences for you, and the consequences for other people are not bad. This isn’t a case of dropping a bomb on a foreign country, more like leaving a wallet full of money on a street corner. The people who use the donated sperm are obviously glad it exists, and I have a hard time believing that most children of anonymously donated sperm would rather not have been born)

ray, that doesn’t sound persuasive to me at all–it looks, as I suggested before, entirely ad hoc. Something like this: biology doesn’t matter at all, and it’s retrograde, foolish and antiliberal to suggest it does, but of course biology does matter to parents, but only to some–not to donors. There apparently is a biologically based reason for people to care about their children, but that biologically based reason is entirely absent if someone signs the right forms.

A few points: for those who are arguing that the “need to have biologically related children” is the only factor in donor insemination, I will refer you to the fact that in more and more states in the US, non-heterosexual couples are being legally ruled unfit to adopt. At all. So, say you’re a lesbian couple in Florida, and you desperately want kids. Do you invite a man in to father your child, with the knowledge that for whatever reason he could possibly sue for custody later on, and likely *win* in a system where there is already legal precedent ruling that you are de facto an unfit parent? Or do you use an anonymous sperm donor?

Re adoption and general questions of biological identity, I can relate several personal anecdotes. My (adopted) brother and sister are from Korea. My brother was 6, my sister 3, when they came to live with us. Assimilation into US culture was more difficult for my brother for a number of reasons, including, I think, that the experience itself of coming over was very traumatic for him. He’s been very angry about it and a lot of other things, and moved to Seattle (we grew up in the Midwest) to be in a place where he ‘blended in’ as Asian more.

My sister never had any of those issues, though, and pretty much I think considered the Cosby Show to be her main role model. She was much more affected by the fact that we lived in a wealthy school district but that we were poor to the point of relying on food stamps for several years. She got married to a white midwestern man, has 4 kids, and lives in Wisconsin.

A few years ago, my brother went to Korea and found his birth family. Including some surprises: we were all told that he and my sis were orphans, but in fact their mother is still alive. Also, they have another sister that they never knew about. The experience was huge for my brother for about 4 months, when he seemed genuinely happy and transformed. But there are language and culture barriers, and I think that more and more his experience with his Korean family made him feel how American he is. He hasn’t communicated with them at all in years, and has pretty much reverted to being angry. Talking with him now, he has no interest in that part of his family anymore.

Also, as an aside, his calling them his ‘real’ family was very hurtful to my mom, who after all did raise and love and support him (enough to go with him to Korea, and pay for their trip, and help find his family). I think many adoptive families do live with the worry that at some point they’ll be negated in this way.

As far as my sis was concerned, she had no interest in any of it. Her attitude is “they didn’t want me; I don’t want them.” She has never considered herself Korean or even Korean American– she’s American, and is more closely bonded with my folks than I am, to be honest.

My husband was raised by his biological parents, in the same house which they still live in. And he’s always felt like a freak in his family. They are very active, whereas he’s more intellectual; they aren’t abstract thinkers, whereas he specializes in theoretical work; they are liberal and atheist, and he’s religious and Republican (though not a Bush fan). They have almost no contact and he’s spent most of his life wishing to have nothing to do with them.

And I am disabled, with a heritable disability that my father’s side of the family has had for a long time (though covered it up in odd ways– my mom had no idea that it was a ‘feature’ of my dad’s genetic makeup when she married him). I don’t know that she’d have married him (or had kids with him at least) anyway, but I certainly do not regret the circumstances or fact of my birth and life. I’ll go as far as to venture that my folks don’t, either.

All of this is to say that human endeavors and relationships are complex, and when we begin to decide that because X Y or Z seem hard from the outside (or even from the inside), X Y or Z should be *condemned*, we’d better know very well what we’re talking about. I don’t think Velleman’s argument even begins to pass this test, and begs a lot of very troubling questions.