The Ethics of Creation: from the Bedroom, to the Laboratory, to the Garden
Michelangelo - Creation of Adam - 1511
Is it better to exist than not to exist? Is it right to create life? These two questions, of considerable philosophical gravity, are connected. Depending on one’s answer, entirely different world-views follow. The questions are tricky though, and not like many other philosophical questions. In fact, some may challenge how sensible it is to form those questions in that way, in the first place.
If someone asks you “Is it better to be cold, or cozy?”, you know very well what being cold and cozy is like. If someone asks you “Is it right to give someone who is cold, a jacket?”, you can also easily imagine facing the winter with a jacket or without. We all know what it’s like to shiver. The question “Is it better to exist than not?” is trickier though. We cannot imagine what it would be like to not exist, because there is no ‘what it is like’ to not exist, to not have been created. There’s no comparison with any other experience, because it is not an experience. We can know what it’s like to be cold, but not what it would be like to not be or never have been.
If it is not straightforward to answer whether it is better to exist or not, then how do we approach questions about the ethics of existence? If we at least struggle upon recognizing that we don’t know what it’s like to not be then we are forced to rethink the terms we use to discuss creation. Making someone exist isn’t like giving them a jacket. It’s making them. Despite how common it is, since we are, all of us, made by parents, curiously, as if from nothing. What philosophers (and science fiction writers) can help us realize though, is that it’s quite special, even strange, to be a creator.
Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus, from Cornhill Publishing Company. Plate found on page 7 of Frankenstein, captioned "Frankenstein at Work in his Laboratory” (1922)
Science Fiction & Frankenstein
Since its birth as a genre, science fiction has loved the trope of creation. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been lauded by some as the first work of science fiction. In the tale, a scientist with perhaps more ambition than sense creates life, only to realize that what he created is capable not only of suffering, but of causing suffering. Frankenstein’s monster suffers loneliness and isolation, discrimination, fear, resentment, and longing. Confronted by his creation, the scientist is held to account for the life he made and the suffering it felt and wrought. A litany of books and films have explored the same theme, asking “Did Dr. Frankenstein do something wrong by making the monster?”
“You shouldn’t play God!” is how one can imagine many responding to Dr. Frankenstein’s creation of life from the assembled pieces of the others’ bodies. The sentiment connects squarely with Shelley’s own thematic intentions. In the 1818 edition of Frankenstein, Shelley includes an epigraph, quoting John Milton’s Paradise Lost. She quotes a scene where Adam confronts his creator, God, saying:
Did I request thee, Maker from my clay
To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?
Adam demands to know how and why he should be held accountable for sin when he did not ask to exist. Instead, it was God who made him from nothing. Likewise, Shelley makes us sympathetic to the creature, Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, by allowing us to see the tragedy in its own existence. Like Adam, the creature in Frankenstein feels that the act of his own creation was morally ambiguous at best, or vain and criminal at worst.
Science fiction allows us to imagine humanity at the cusp of playing a god-like role in the universe. If we go far enough forward with our technology, then we shall arrive back at Genesis. The question is, once there, how ought we proceed? What these stories help us to confront is the ethical uniqueness of creation
Even though creation is central to the everyday language of religions and parenthood, science fiction casts a light on it again to examine it anew. Science fiction makes a good philosophical aid then, by allowing us to scrutinize the fundamental question “Is it right to create?”, and perhaps better understand related questions one might have about why a god would make humans, or a parent would have children.
The Horror of Creation
The moral unease of Frankenstein lingers in our age of explosive scientific progress. As more and more sophisticated AI are produced, authors and directors seem to want to tell cautionary tales. Films and books like The Golem, Prometheus, Ex Machina, Westworld, I Robot, Dune, and Blade Runner are examples of such cautionary tales, which depict the creators of sentient AI as naive, foolish, cruel, or even self-destructive.
Science fiction’s account of creation is unique not only because it is a preoccupation of the genre, but because it frequently draws on the genre of horror. Frankenstein was a work of Gothic Horror after all. In such works, the greatest villains are often the creators rather than the creations. As many fans of Frankenstein joke: “The real monster was the doctor.”
Across all these examples, what is troubling about the act of creation varies. In Frankenstein, it is not just that the doctor creates a creature who thinks and feels, but that he brings it into a world which is unaccepting, and does not furnish his creation with a partner. In Ex Machina, Westworld, I Robot, and Blade Runner, the creators of sentient machines use them, resulting in violent resistance to their exploitation. In the Alien franchise’s Prometheus, the extra-terrestrial ‘Engineers’ who created humans used a terrifying mutagen that spawns not just humanity, but monsters.
In each case, it is not just the act of creation that is examined, but other ethical considerations. Is the world into which one brings creation hospitable? Is the treatment of the creation by the creator just? Is the means of creation ethical? Is what is created good? Yet even when all of these questions are answered for, the act of creation remains a source of awe and wonder.
Creation is Not like Giving Someone a Jacket
It is not uncommon to hear life described as a gift, or, cynically, as a curse. In some crucial ways however, making something come into existence is different from most other good or harm we can do to others. If I give someone a jacket in the cold, they have improved their condition and can judge for themselves the benefit. In the case of creating life, like Frankenstein’s amalgam of bodies, or an AI in a novel or film, there is no subject, no person, to receive any gift. If life were a gift, there must be someone to give it to. Similarly, if it were a curse, there must be someone to curse. Instead, the act of creation also creates the thing it supposedly benefits or harms. In other words, you cannot give someone existence - certainly not in the way you give someone a jacket.
Philosophers might clarify the above by saying “existence is not a predicate.” Predicates are normally used to describe something. They give us information about the subject of a sentence. We could say a man is cold or warm, that he does or does not have a jacket. Predicates are properties which characterize. To say that a man is cold, but that he would not be cold if he had a jacket, is to reason counterfactually with predicates about a person. Though existence is often used like a predicate, philosophers long realized that existence is not a predicate. Centuries ago, Immanuel Kant, the German Enlightenment philosopher helped dismiss some lingering philosophical confusions by making precisely this observation. Particularly, something is not better or worse because it exists, because existence is not a predicate, a way of being, or a quality.
When we keep the comparison of feeling cold and having jackets in mind, we begin to see why Kant’s insight about predicates helps us to think about the strangeness of existence and creation, and the trouble of how we typically talk about it. If we accept that existence is not a predicate, and cannot be given or taken in the way that other items or qualities can be, then it belongs somewhere else, ethically. We can no longer use the same tools conversationally or argumentatively to discuss existence and creation. Is it good for Frankenstein’s creature to exist? As opposed to what - not existing? How can we compare the condition of Frankenstein’s creature in existence to non-existence? In the event of non-existence, there is nothing to compare him to.
What About Parenthood?
Does accepting that existence is not a predicate force us to give up conversations about the ethics of creation? Certainly not. A philosophically earnest discussion of creation may not resemble the phrasing and habits of thought we are used to, but it seems costly to abandon. If we throw away questions about whether or not it is good to create thinking things, like Frankenstein’s monster or sentient robots, we would also undermine our ability to talk about parenthood.
Having a child and creating sentient AI are similar acts of creation at one level, despite differences elsewhere. What mad-scientists do not experience is precisely what helps to isolate the philosophically interesting aspects of creation. Dr. Frankenstein did not make the monster because of biological, cultural, or psychological pressures. Science fiction, by stripping away those motives, brings others into focus. The symmetry between science fiction and parenthood rests on the core act of making a thinking and feeling thing where there wasn’t one, almost from nothing. Some resonances remain of course. We could say Doctor Frankenstein is not unlike a parent who failed in his fatherly duties to furnish his son, the monster, with a good life.
The judgments we pass on parents and Dr. Frankensteins are similar and familiar. It was wrong of Dr. Frankenstein to create something which would have no peers, as he did, and relegate it to a life of loneliness. In other tales, the moral failing is to create robots and AI which exist merely to serve, like slaves, later disposed of. A parent who has children for the purpose of putting them to work is rightly called selfish. Parents who have children they can neither feed nor provide for, we call foolish. At some level there seems to be clear agreement that there are conditions which are so bad, it would be better not to create a child. What we debate then, normally, are those conditions. We puzzle over conditions but not creation itself.
However, humans tend to view their own existence and procreation as natural and inevitable. Science fiction reframes an ethically similar question while removing the sense of its inevitability. Asking “Is it okay to have children?” does not always go over well at parties. Asking “Is it morally right to create sentient AI?” can be chatted about by respectable philosophers at a dinner or even by a couple of podcast hosts sitting around and smoking. Dr. Frankenstein was driven by no cultural norms nor biological urges to make his creation. So when we look at his decision, to fashion a creature capable of pleasure and pain, of thought, of death, we can more easily allow ourselves to feel puzzled, to ask “why?”.
The Bedroom, The Garden, and the Laboratory
If we take the question of “why create?” seriously enough, and accept that existence is not a predicate, we are forced to accept some unconventional and unpopular conclusions. Whatever reason can be given to create, it cannot be for the sake of the created. It cannot be compared to a gift, given, like a jacket, to someone who is cold. When Adam or Frankenstein’s creation confronts their creator and demands to know “Why did you make me?” the answer can have nothing to do with them at all. No conscious being has ever been created for its own sake. Since the created thing does not exist before its creation, the created thing is neither means nor ends. It simply wasn’t, and then it was, and if we are honest, we have to admit that is strange. Perhaps it is this very strangeness that leads science fiction to grapple with these questions, reframing them in dramatic thought experiments.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein refers to Paradise Lost because she too felt the gravity and strangeness of the question that not only her character asked, but that Adam asked of God in Milton’s story:
“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man? did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me…?”
Nothing that exists ever asked to exist. Strange. Yet science fiction invites us to view the question from another point of view, the creator. So in that same spirit of thought experiments and drama, let’s inhabit this classic creation story, and ask the same question we’ve been asking this whole article again, from yet another perspective:
Imagine it’s ‘the beginning’ and you are God. Would you have made humans?
Set aside belief, there need not be nor ever have been a god. Simply imagine you were some perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing, and wantless god like that of the Old Testament. What possible reason could you have to make humans? As this god, you lack nothing. You have by definition no needs or wants. What possible reason could you imagine to make humans and place them in that garden? If there is a compelling answer, it may tell us something not only about the garden, but about the laboratory, and even the bedroom. Why create?
Post-Script:
For related discussions about the ethics of natalism, the work of David Benatar served as a partial but indirect inspiration for this article.
Benatar, David, and David Wasserman. Debating procreation: is it wrong to reproduce?. Oxford University Press, 2015.
