Matti Hayry at the JME Blog:
Illness, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “an unhealthy condition of body or mind”. Health, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), is “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being.” Life, according to any realistic account, is not characterised by complete physical, mental and social well-being. It is, in other words, an unhealthy condition of body and mind. It is an illness.This is as fallacious an inference as it sounds, although in some subtle ways. It involves a formal fallacy; 'healthy' and 'health' are not synonymous because one is said with reference to the other. -- as we might put it in lexicography-speak, 'healthy' is not 'health' but 'pertaining to health'. 'Unhealthy' is even more indirectly related to 'health', because the negation ('un-') can interact in odd ways with the 'pertaining' part. But the inference is also problematic materially. From the fact that life is not characterized by complete physical, mental, and social well-being, one cannot infer that it is the condition that itself involves the privation of complete, physical, mental, and social well-being, which is what you would have to assume in order to get the conclusion that life is an unhealthy condition of body and mind. We can see this another way by asking of the WHO definition, "Well-being of what"? And the plausible answer is that it is of living organisms insofar as they are alive. Likewise, you can ask of the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition, "Of body and mind in what respect?" And again the plausible answer is that it is something like "insofar as they are alive". An inanimate or dead body cannot be ill. But illness is cumulative or quasi-cumulative. The more ill you get, the closer to dead you get; if you get too ill, you die. Thus life may not be characterized by 'complete physical, mental, and social well-being', but illness is in the privation, not in the life. Illness is, so to speak, the empty gap between 'being alive' and 'being alive in complete physical, mental, and social well-being'; it makes no sense to say that life is the empty gap between being alive and being alive in complete well-being.
We can see all of this in yet another way, by asking if 'healthy life' is a contradiction in terms, which it would have to be if life itself were an illness. It is very clearly not. If we intended to claim that, although life in itself is not illness, life happens to be illness in the cases we know, then we would have to ask if 'healthy life of the sort we know' is a contradiction in terms; it very clearly is not. What this suggests is that when we are talking about 'life' and 'illness' we are talking about distinguishable things, even in cases where we find them both.
He continues:
Since being born means entering an existence of illness, the rationality and morality of creating new lives should perhaps be reconsidered. If illness ought to be eliminated and mitigated when possible, prevention would be the most effective way of achieving this. No new lives, no new future illness.
'Illness ought to be eliminated and mitigated when possible' is ambiguous between two senses: 'In all possible circumstances, illness ought to be eliminated and mitigated' and 'Illness ought to be eliminated and mitigated to the extent it is possible to do so'; these are modally distinct, one involving a propositional modality and the other involving a predicate modality. The inference made here requires, I think, that we take it in the (much stronger) propositional modality sense; but medical ethics only requires the predicate modality sense, as is clear from when Hayry talks about the WHO definition. Eliminating and mitigating illness is not an absolute value, for all possible circumstances, but an instrumental one. Instrumental to what? Well, the plausible answers are 'living' or 'living better' or 'living as well as possible', depending on context. Why else would people want less illness?
In any case, another example for the 'irrational anti-natalist arguments' file. This is an interesting one, though, because of all of the parallel arguments you could create. Vice is an unvirtuous condition, virtue is a state of complete mental excellence, human life is not a state of complete mental excellence, therefore human life is a vice. Ugliness is an unbeautiful condition, beauty is a state of fullness of excellence for pleasing on contemplation, human life is not such a state, therefore human life is a species of ugliness; of course your mama is ugly, because she is alive. The possibilities are endless.
