The odds against any one named, specified individual being alive at all are incalculably high. We come into existence as the result of a long chain of causation with mostly unknown probabilities at each stage.
Two of the vital links in that chain are the fact that our parents met, & that the specific event which brought about the unique union of random halves of their respective DNA took place at the moment that it did – even the smallest difference of timing would have produced a different random set
We then had to survive pregnancy – Nature is very profligate with foetuses - & the dangers of birth itself, albeit that these are very much reduced these days, at least in the affluent West. Those of us born in recent times have had an astonishingly good chance of surviving to a ripe old age, though we should not forget that not much more than a century ago as many one quarter of all children born did not even live to celebrate their 5th birthday
Does then, all this contingency & randomness lead to the conclusion that individually our lives are without purpose & meaning?
I would say no, absolutely not
We are all, each & every one, winners of the jackpot in this lottery of life
We are therefore beholden, each of us who lives & moves & has being, to make the most of it. To live the Good Life as far as we can discern what that should be, within the limits of our random allocation of genes, talent & ability. And to do our best for all who travel with us
What it does do, however, is make a nonsense of the argument put forward by some that abortion is wrong because, from the point of view of today, we might say ‘imagine if Person A had been aborted.’ Beethoven used to be a popular choice of exemplar, now some are claiming it of President Obama
So might Hitler have been
Many factors will be taken into consideration by anybody who considers whether to attempt to intervene to abort a pregnancy, but those factors do not include certain knowledge of the qualities of the person that that foetus will become. The effect of their decision on the future of the world is just one more contingency
