The question
What does it mean to call a life mine when its first conditions were never chosen?
The argument
Body, need, time, vulnerability, and mortality precede the self’s ability to consent or deliberate. Agency arises inside this situation. The ethical question concerns the responsibility of those whose decisions establish another person’s conditions.
The strongest objection
Consent cannot be requested from someone who does not yet exist, so a consent-based criticism of birth may be conceptually misplaced.
The response and its limits
The argument recognizes that there is no waiting person whose permission was ignored. The impossibility of consultation creates a burden of justification for those making the decision; it is not, by itself, a complete verdict against birth.
What it does not establish
Questioning the creation of a life never diminishes the worth or right to care of an existing person.
In the author’s words
A person becomes the recipient of existence before becoming capable of judging its terms. The recipient appears only as the inheritance takes effect. Choice is real, but it is late.
The Inheritance of Existence, manuscript p. 187. Transcribed from the supplied manuscript; line breaks normalized.