Top o' the Stack.
The Austrian philosopher and Vienna Circle member Herbert Feigl wrote about nomological danglers. Mental states as the epiphenomenalist conceives them have causes, but no effects. They are caused by physical states of the body and brain, but dangle nomologically in that there are no laws that relate mental states to physical states.
The childless are anthropological danglers. They are life's epiphenomena. They have ancestors (causes) but no descendants (effects). Parents are essential: without them we could not have come into fleshly existence. But offspring are wholly inessential: the individual, though not the species, can exist quite well without them.
I mention pros and cons of dangling anthropologically.
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