Do I Have the Right to Be?

It’s a disturbing thought: All of us are alive today thanks at least partly to some mass atrocity that was committed in the past. This is because war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and ethnic cleansing invariably affect who is born after them. Who knows how many of us can claim, “Even if the Holocaust had not occurred, I would still have been born”? And if you can, perhaps because you were conceived before 1933 or shortly afterward without having been influenced in some way by the effects of Hitlerism, what about the Crusades or slavery in America? Anyone who reflects on the unjust death of others will be surprised at how much his or her own right to be is put in question, to the point where his or her place on this earth can appear as a usurpation. This might not be obvious at first so let’s slow down a bit.

Many philosophers agree that who we are is dependent, at least in part, on our origins. Consider your own identity as a case in point. You have the distinctive property of having grown from the particular fertilized egg from which you in fact grew. (I am here ignoring the various religious doctrines of ensoulment, which would suggest that your soul exists before being infused into a body.) The fertilized egg was formed by the union of two cells deriving from your biological parents, who conceived you at time X. If they had conceived a child earlier or later, it wouldn’t be you. It wouldn’t be you because it wouldn’t be developmentally continuous with the actual fertilized egg from which you arose. This has far-reaching implications; it means that if at any time in the past an event occurred that interfered with the relation between the egg and the sperm whose fusion produced you, you would not have been born.

I think we fail to appreciate how radically contingent our lives really are. The reason appears that psychologically we have a great deal of trouble imagining ourselves not in existence. Freud says that we cannot imagine our own death because whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves in the role of spectator. For the same reason, I would suggest, we have a hard time imagining not being born, which amounts to saying that every one of us believes he or she would have been born no matter what. But it should be obvious that you and I are merely, as Silenus the satyr said to Midas, “children of chance.” The funniest commercial of the current FIFA World Cup (“Boom”) shows a local hospital in Spain brimming with very pregnant couples and newborns. The nurses are naturally baffled, with one asking, “What was going on nine months ago?” Cut back to Spain’s historic 2010 World Cup win and the joyous celebration of Spanish fans whose exuberance and fervor spill over into passionate embraces and kisses. The 30-second commercial deftly illustrates how a single event (“Because Fútbol”) can literally create a baby boom.

Sometimes events prevent people from being born. Most have heard of the “grandfather paradox.” The paradox comes from a 1943 science fiction story by René Barjavel called “Le Voyageur Imprudent” (The Imprudent Traveler), and describes a time traveler who goes back to the time before his grandfather had married and killed him. A result is that the time traveler was never born, so how was he able to travel through time and kill his grandfather?

The time traveler, however, does not need to kill his grandfather to wipe himself out of existence, for as we said children conceived at different times would be in fact different children. All he has to do is distract his grandfather long enough to alter the timing of the conception of his grandfather’s child, and poof! He vanishes. Given that men produce about 1,500 sperm per second and that the particular sperm that succeeded in fertilizing the egg from which our time traveler’s parent came was in competition with about 400 million released on average during sex, I should think a loud thud on Gram and Gramps’s bedroom door at just the right moment should do the trick.

The mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz coined the phrase “Butterfly Effect” to refer in chaos theory to the manner in which small occurrences (like the flutter of a butterfly’s wings) can have enormous consequences that appear to be random (like the weather). When the initial conditions include a tumultuous event like ethnic cleansing or genocide, we can reasonably assume that the consequences are such that within 100 to 200 years there would be no one living who would have been alive had the mass atrocity not occurred. I call it the “Barbarism Effect.”

It is not just that genocide, for example, effectively deprives the world of future progeny that the victims would have had had they not been murdered, which is true. It also sets up a sequence of events in which an entirely different set of people end up being born. Unlike most actions whose remote consequences diminish to zero, like the furthermost ripples of a pond after a pebble has been thrown into it, altering when children are conceived or to whom they are conceived has repercussions that steadily increase over time. The consequences of a different set of marriages, births, accidents, road gridlocks, crimes, FIFA World Cup winners, businesses, books, inventions and scientific discoveries increase exponentially the further we progress along time’s arrow. The changes would be so profound — remember we are talking here about mass killing in history affecting conceptions in so many ways — that the probability of your being born would be effectively zero.

But this poses a very profound and uncomfortable moral problem that we would nevertheless do well to ponder. Nietzsche once surmised that anyone who had ever wanted to relive a moment of joy was committed to affirming the idea of reliving the entirety of his or her life up to that point. Why? Because Nietzsche, a dyed-in-the-wool determinist, believed that the present instant of joy is made possible by all the events in one’s past that caused it. As he lyrically put it, “All things are enchained with one another, bound together by love.” For Nietzsche this is a splendid thing, for it gives us the power to redeem the past. It ultimately enables us to justify those moments of pain and suffering in our past that are now seen as necessary links in the chain of cause and effect leading to the present affirmation of joy — a case of “I didn’t like it at the time, but it all turned out for the best and I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

I had always solaced myself with Nietzsche’s idea of looking back at one’s life and affirming all of it, even the bad parts, which are indispensable conditions for whatever happiness my life currently contains, until one day it dawned on me that if I am to say “yes” to those events in the past that caused me to suffer but which are causally necessary for my life’s being lived as I live it now, then I must also say “yes” to those events that have caused others to suffer as well.

But who can do this? Who can maintain in good conscience that the Holocaust or slavery was justified because otherwise he or she, or anyone else currently living for that matter, wouldn’t have been born. (Nietzsche notoriously maintained that the only justification of the French Revolution — including the Reign of Terror — was that it produced Napoleon.) Whose natural narcissism is so extreme that he or she can justify the unjustifiable suffering of innumerable innocent lives? The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was more discerning: “What is most natural becomes the most problematic. Do I have the right to be? Is being in the world not taking the place of someone?”

Peter Atterton is a professor of philosophy at San Diego State University. He is the author of several books, including “Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought” and “Radicalizing Levinas.”