Automatic processing was studied with a task involving recognition thresholds of well-learned targets (four numbers and six letters).
For a fixed sample or experimental unit, let us denote by the expression threshold of well and gene, for and.
Hence, while the notion of capabilities refers to a very broad range of opportunities, basic capabilities refer to the real opportunity to avoid poverty or to meet or exceed a threshold of well-being.
Can prospective children be said to have an interest that their parents not act in a way likely to lead to their birth when the parents are in a position to know that the life of the child, should it be born, would fall below some relevant threshold of well-being?
To illustrate this, consider the following example:[19] A woman knows that if she conceives a baby now, because of a particular disease she has, the child will have a particular slight handicap, but will enjoy a life above the relevant threshold of well-being assuming that any marginally disabling condition well-being assumingfe below thatrelevany threshold (but see Harris 1992, 88–89).
We are, in other words, capable of crossing certain thresholds of inevitability well before the visceral manifestations produce the requisite sense of urgency.
(On the significance of the notion of a threshold level of well-being, see below, Sections 3 and 4).
This is not to say that it is impermissible for people to choose to procreate when securing a threshold level of well-being for their children-to-be will require them to sacrifice their own well-being to such a degree that they themselves will not enjoy a threshold level of well-being.
And: in such decision-making contexts currently living people cannot be said to stand under an obligation to sacrifice their own well-being so that they will fall below the threshold standard of well-being for the sake of securing a well-being for future people over and above the standard.
Secondly, claims against currently living people are unreasonable if in fulfilling them the currently living people will bring about minimal or even trivial improvements of the well-being of future people but suffer losses themselves, causing them to fall below a plausible threshold level of well-being.
Rather, in decision-making contexts where currently living people relate to future people who will exist (and in high numbers) whatever they will decide to do, currently living people do not harm future people when they secure a threshold level of well-being for them even if they could further improve the well-being of future people.
