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  1. Should vegans have children? A response to Räsänen.Louis Austin-Eames - 2024 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 45 (4):303-319.
    Joona Räsänen argues that vegans ought to be anti-natalists and therefore abstain from having children. More precisely, Räsänen claims that vegans who accept a utilitarian or rights-based argument for veganism, ought to, by parity of reasoning, accept an analogous argument for anti-natalism. In this paper, I argue that the reasons vegans have for refraining from purchasing animal products do not commit them to abstaining from having children. I provide novel arguments to the following conclusion: while there is good reason to (...)
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  • Procreating in an Overpopulated World: Role Moralities and a Climate Crisis.Craig Stanbury - forthcoming - Journal of Bioethical Inquiry:1-13.
    It is an open question when procreation is justified. Antinatalists argue that bringing a new individual into the world is morally wrong, whereas pronatalists say that creating new life is morally good. In between these positions lie attempts to provide conditions for when taking an anti or pronatal stance is appropriate. This paper is concerned with developing one of these attempts, which can be called qualified pronatalism. Qualified pronatalism typically claims that while procreation can be morally permissible, there are constraints (...)
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  • Ethics of Extinction: Humean Sentimentalism and the Value of the Human Species.Maurizio Balistreri - 2024 - Topoi 43 (1):55-63.
    The idea that the phenomenon of morality and, consequently, our ability to distinguish between vice and virtue can be explained by sympathy has been challenged as a highly controversial hypothesis, since sympathy appears to be easily influenced by proximity and selective, and would therefore seem incompatible with the possibility of taking an impartial, objective point of view. We intend to show that even a sentimentalist moral perspective such as the ‘Humean’ one, which places empathy (or ‘sympathy’, as Hume calls it) (...)
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  • The Utilitarian's Guide to Dreams.Adam Piovarchy - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (1):75-97.
    Unpleasant dreams occur much more frequently than many people realise. If one is a hedonistic utilitarian – or, at least, one thinks that dreams have positive or negative moral value in virtue of their experiential quality – then one has considerable reason to try to make such dreams more positive. Given it is possible to improve the quality of our dreams, we ought to be promoting and implementing currently available interventions that improve our dream experiences, and conducting research to find (...)
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  • Why Not Effective Altruism?Richard Yetter Chappell - 2024 - Public Affairs Quarterly 38 (1):3-21.
    Effective altruism sounds so innocuous—who could possibly be opposed to doing good more effectively? Yet it has inspired significant backlash in recent years. This paper addresses some common misconceptions and argues that the core “beneficentric” ideas of effective altruism are both excellent and widely neglected. Reasonable people may disagree on details of implementation, but all should share the basic goals or values underlying effective altruism.
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  • Moral Uncertainty, Proportionality and Bargaining.Patrick Kaczmarek, Harry R. Lloyd & Michael Plant - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    As well as disagreeing about how much one should donate to charity, moral theories also disagree about where one should donate. In light of this disagreement, how should the morally uncertain philanthropist allocate her donations? In many cases, one intuitively attractive option is for the philanthropist to split her donations across all of the charities that are recommended by moral views in which she has positive credence, with each charity’s share being proportional to her credence in the moral theories that (...)
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  • An Ethics of Philosophical Belief: The case for personal commitments.Chris Ranalli - forthcoming - In Sanford C. Goldberg & Mark Walker (eds.), Attitude in Philosophy. Oxford University Press.
    What should we do when faced with powerful theoretical arguments that support a severe change in our personal beliefs and commitments? For example, what should new parents do when confronted by unanswered anti-natalist arguments, or two lovers vexed by social theory that apparently undermines love? On the one hand, it would be irrational to ignore theory just because it’s theory; good theory is evidence, after all. On the other hand, factoring in theory can be objectifying, or risks unraveling one's life, (...)
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  • Antinatalism—Solving everything everywhere all at once?Joona Räsänen & Matti Häyry - 2023 - Bioethics 37 (9):829-830.
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  • Nothing New Under the Sun.V. Alexis Peluce - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.
    All is vanity, we learn early in Ecclesiastes. This is motivated by the mysterious aphorism that there is nothing new under the sun. But what does it mean to say that there is nothing new under the sun? One might interpret this as a statement of the Eternal Return of the past. Alternatively, one could understand it as a statement what we call the Eternal Withering of the past. Eternal Withering is the view that the present draws from the past (...)
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  • Defending the de dicto approach to the non-identity problem.Joona Räsänen - 2023 - Monash Bioethics Review 41 (2):124-135.
    Is it wrong to create a blind child, for example by in vitro fertilization, if you could create a sighted child instead? Intuitively many people believe it is wrong, but this belief is difficult to justify. When there is a possibility to create and select either ‘blind’ or ‘sighted’ embryos choosing a set of ‘blind’ embryos seems to harm no-one since choosing ‘sighted’ embryos would create a different child altogether. So when the parents choose ‘blind’ embryos, they give some specific (...)
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  • Survivor guilt.Jordan MacKenzie & Michael Zhao - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (9):2707-2726.
    We often feel survivor guilt when the very circumstances that harm others leave us unscathed. Although survivor guilt is both commonplace and intelligible, it raises a puzzle for the standard philosophical account of guilt, according to which people feel guilt only when they take themselves to be morally blameworthy. The standard account implies that survivor guilt is uniformly unfitting, as people are not blameworthy simply for having fared better than others. In this paper, we offer a rival account of guilt, (...)
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  • Papers in Population Ethics.Elliott Thornley - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Oxford
    This thesis consists of a series of papers in population ethics: a subfield of normative ethics concerned with the distinctive issues that arise in cases where our actions can affect the identities or number of people of who ever exist. Each paper can be read independently of the others. In Chapter 1, I present a dilemma for Archimedean views in population axiology: roughly, those views on which adding enough good lives to a population can make that population better than any (...)
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  • Good is overrated: on negative altruism as normative foundation for antitheism.Andrei Seregin - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 14 (4):217-236.
    In this article, I want to demonstrate the possibility of a normative theory which, if true, would make it impossible to think of God as morally good and therefore would “disqualify” him as God. I call this theory negative altruism (NA) and regard it as the true basis of social morality, as well as the appropriate normative foundation of antitheism. The article is structured as follows: first, I clarify some basic notions I proceed from (such as antitheism, axiological atheism and (...)
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  • What You're Rejecting When You're Expecting.Blake Hereth - 2023 - Journal of Bioethical Inquiry (3):1-12.
    I defend two collapsing or reductionist arguments against Weak Pro-Natalism (WPN), the view that procreation is generally merely permissible. In particular, I argue that WPN collapses into Strong Pro-Natalism (SPN), the view that procreation is generally obligatory. Because SPN conflicts with the dominant view that procreation is never obligatory, demonstrating that WPN collapses into or entails SPN establishes epistemic parity (at least as concerns reproductive liberty) between WPN and Anti-Natalism (AN), the view that procreation is always impermissible. First, I distinguish (...)
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  • Benatar’s Anti-Natalism: Philosophically Flawed, Morally Dubious.Christian Piller - 2022 - Philosophia 51 (2):897-917.
    In the first part of the paper, I discuss Benatar’s asymmetry argument for the claim that it would have been better for each of us to have never lived at all. In contrast to other commentators, I will argue that there is a way of interpreting the premises of his argument which makes all of them come out true. (This will require one departure from Benatar’s own presentation.) Once we see why the premises are true, we will, however, also realise (...)
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  • Procreation is intrinsically valuable because it is person producing.Marcus William Hunt - 2022 - South African Journal of Philosophy 41 (1):75-87.
    The article argues that procreation is intrinsically valuable because it produces persons. The essential thought of the argument is that among the valuable things in the world are not only products, but the actions by which they are produced. The first premise is that persons have great value, for which a common consent argument is offered. The second premise is that, as an action type, procreation has persons as a product. Procreation is always a part of the action that produces (...)
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  • Hopeful Pessimism: The Kantian Mind at the End of All Things.Andrew Chignell - 2023 - In Katerina Mihaylova & Anna Ezekiel (eds.), Hope and the Kantian Legacy: New Contributions to the History of Optimism. London, Vereinigtes Königreich: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 35-52.
    Kant’s third question (“What may I hope?”) is underdiscussed in comparison to the other two, even though he himself took it to be the question that united his efforts in theoretical and practical philosophy. This is largely his own fault: in his discussion of the question he moves quickly from talking about rational hope to discussing the kind of Belief or faith (Glaube) that grounds it. Moreover, the canonical statements of his own moral proof do not seem to give hope (...)
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  • Childhood: Value and duties.Anca Gheaus - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 16 (12):e12793.
    In philosophy, there are two competitor views about the nature and value of childhood: The first is the traditional, deficiency, view, according to which children are mere unfinished adults. The second is a view that has recently become increasingly popular amongst philosophers, and according to which children, perhaps in virtue of their biological features, have special and valuable capacities, and, more generally, privileged access to some sources of value. This article provides a conceptual map of these views and their possible (...)
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  • Utility, Progress, and Technology: Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies.Michael Schefczyk & Christoph Schmidt-Petri (eds.) - 2021 - Karlsruhe: KIT Scientific Publishing.
    This volume collects selected papers delivered at the 15th Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies, which was held at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in July 2018. It includes papers dealing with the past, present, and future of utilitarianism – the theory that human happiness is the fundamental moral value – as well as on its applications to animal ethics, population ethics, and the future of humanity, among other topics.
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  • Philosophy and Meaning in Life Vol.3.Masahiro Morioka - 2021 - Journal of Philosophy of Life.
    This book is a collection of all the papers and the essay published in the special issue “Philosophy and Meaning in Life Vol.3,” Journal of Philosophy of Life, Vol.11, No.1, 2021, pp.1-154. We held the Third International Conference on Philosophy and Meaning in Life online at the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK, on July 21–23, 2020. This conference was co-hosted by the Birmingham Centre for Philosophy of Religion, and the Waseda Institute of Life and Death Studies. We accepted about 50 (...)
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  • What Is Birth Affirmation?: The Meaning of Saying “Yes” to Having Been Born.Masahiro Morioka - 2021 - Journal of Philosophy of Life 11 (1):43-59.
    In this paper, the concept of birth affirmation is clarified in both the psychological dimension and the philosophical dimension. In the psychological dimension, we propose two interpretations: 1) Possible world interpretation: Even if I could imagine a possible world in which my ideal was realized or my grave sufferings were resolved, I would never think, at the bottom of my heart, that it would have been better to have been born to that possible world. 2) Anti-antinatalistic interpretation: I would never (...)
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  • A Dilemma for Benatar’s Asymmetry Argument.Fumitake Yoshizawa - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (2):529-544.
    In this paper, I show that David Benatar’s asymmetry argument for anti-natalism leads to a dilemma. In Chapter 2 of his book Better Never to Have Been, Benatar claims that there is an axiological asymmetry between harms and benefits that explains four prevalent asymmetries. Based on the axiological asymmetry, he defends the anti-natalist conclusion that we should not have children. The four prevalent asymmetries to be explained are moral duties, reasons, attitudes, or feelings concerning life as a whole. However, Benatar (...)
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  • Pessimism Counts in Favor of Biomedical Enhancement: A Lesson from the Anti-Natalist Philosophy of P. W. Zapffe.Ole Martin Moen - 2021 - Neuroethics 14 (2):315-325.
    According to the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe, human life is filled with so much suffering that procreation is morally impermissible. In the first part of this paper I present Zapffe’s pessimism-based argument for anti-natalism, and contrast it with the arguments for anti-natalism proposed by Arthur Schopenhauer and David Benatar. In the second part I explore what Zapffe’s pessimism can teach us about biomedical enhancement. I make the case that pessimism counts in favor of pursuing biomedical enhancements. The reason is (...)
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  • Striving as Suffering: Schopenhauer’s A Priori Argument for Pessimism.Patrick Hassan - 2021 - Philosophia 49 (4):1487-1505.
    This paper aims to clarify Schopenhauer’s a priori argument for pessimism and, to an extent, rescue it from standard objections in secondary literature. I argue that if we separate out the various strands of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, we hit upon problems and counterexamples stemming from psychology. For example, instances where striving does not appear to equate to suffering, which puts pressure on the Schopenhauerian claim that human life, qua instantiation of the will, is painful. Schopenhauer’s sensitivity to the complexities of human (...)
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  • Aristotle and Eudoxus on the Argument from Contraries.Wei Cheng - 2020 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 102 (4):588-618.
    The debate over the value of pleasure among Eudoxus, Speusippus, and Aristotle is dramatically documented by the Nicomachean Ethics, particularly in the dialectical pros-and-cons concerning the so-called argument from contraries. Two similar versions of this argument are preserved at EN VII. 13, 1153b1–4, and X. 2, 1172b18–20. Many scholars believe that the argument at EN VII is either a report or an appropriation of the Eudoxean argument in EN X. This essay aims to revise this received view. It will explain (...)
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  • If robots are people, can they be made for profit? Commercial implications of robot personhood.Bartek Chomanski - forthcoming - AI and Ethics.
    It could become technologically possible to build artificial agents instantiating whatever properties are sufficient for personhood. It is also possible, if not likely, that such beings could be built for commercial purposes. This paper asks whether such commercialization can be handled in a way that is not morally reprehensible, and answers in the affirmative. There exists a morally acceptable institutional framework that could allow for building artificial persons for commercial gain. The paper first considers the minimal ethical requirements that any (...)
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  • Toward a Philosophy of Harm Reduction.Shannon Dea - 2020 - Health Care Analysis 28 (4):302-313.
    In this paper, I offer a prolegomenon to the philosophy of harm reduction. I begin with an overview of the philosophical literature on both harm and harm reduction, and a brief summary of harm reduction scholarship outside of philosophy in order to make the case that philosophers have something to contribute to understanding harm reduction, and moreover that engagement with harm reduction would improve philosophical scholarship. I then proceed to survey and assess the nascent and still modest philosophy of harm (...)
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  • Antitheodicy and the Grading of Theodicies by Moral Offensiveness.James Franklin - 2020 - Sophia 59 (3):563-576.
    Antitheodicy objects to all attempts to solve the problem of evil. Its objections are almost all on moral grounds—it argues that the whole project of theodicy is morally offensive. Trying to excuse God’s permission of evil is said to deny the reality of evil, to exhibit gross insensitivity to suffering, and to insult the victims of grave evils. Since antitheodicists urge the avoidance of theodicies for moral reasons, it is desirable to evaluate the moral reasons against theodicies in abstraction from (...)
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  • A thousand pleasures are not worth a single pain: The compensation argument for Schopenhauer's pessimism.Byron Simmons - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 29 (1):120-136.
    Pessimism is, roughly, the view that life is not worth living. In chapter 46 of the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer provides an oft-neglected argument for this view. The argument is that a life is worth living only if it does not contain any uncompensated evils; but since all our lives happen to contain such evils, none of them are worth living. The now standard interpretation of this argument (endorsed by Kuno Fischer and Christopher (...)
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  • Benatar on the Badness of All Human Lives.Iddo Landau - 2020 - Philosophia 49 (1):333-345.
    This paper presents a critique of David Benatar’s arguments on the badness of all human lives. I argue that even if Benatar is right that there is an asymmetry between the good and the bad in life so that each “unit” of bad is indeed more effective than each “unit” of good, lives in which there is a lot of good and only little bad are still overall good. Even if there are more unfulfilled than fulfilled desires in life, a (...)
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  • What Is the Question to which Anti-Natalism Is the Answer?Nicholas Smyth - 2020 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (1):1-17.
    The ethics of biological procreation has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Yet, as I show in this paper, much of what has come to be called procreative ethics is conducted in a strangely abstract, impersonal mode, one which stands little chance of speaking to the practical perspectives of any prospective parent. In short, the field appears to be flirting with a strange sort of practical irrelevance, wherein its verdicts are answers to questions that no-one is asking. (...)
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  • Unconscious Rationalization, or: How (Not) to Think about Awfulness and Death.Jake Quilty-Dunn - manuscript
    Many contemporary epistemologists take rational inference to be a conscious action performed by the thinker (Boghossian 2014; 2018; Valaris 2014; Malmgren 2018). It is tempting to think that rational evaluability requires responsibility, which in turn requires conscious action. In that case, unconscious cognition involves merely associative or otherwise arational processing. This paper argues instead for deep rationalism: unconscious inference often exhibits the same rational status and richly structured logical character as conscious inference. The central case study is rationalization, in which (...)
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  • Is it ever morally permissible to select for deafness in one’s child?Jacqueline Mae Wallis - 2020 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 23 (1):3-15.
    As reproductive genetic technologies advance, families have more options to choose what sort of child they want to have. Using preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), for example, allows parents to evaluate several existing embryos before selecting which to implant via in vitro fertilization (IVF). One of the traits PGD can identify is genetic deafness, and hearing embryos are now preferentially selected around the globe using this method. Importantly, some Deaf families desire a deaf child, and PGD–IVF is also an option for (...)
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  • Are Zoos and Aquariums Justifiable? A Utilitarian Evaluation of Two Prominent Arguments.Stephen Bennett - 2019 - Journal of Animal Ethics 9 (2):177-183.
    Keeping animals captive in zoos and aquariums is commonly justified by claiming that doing so produces worthwhile consequences in terms of public education and animal conservation. I take a utilitarian approach to the issue, and, after establishing a view on the moral status of animals, assert that these arguments in favor of zoos and aquariums fail. Furthermore, if, as I suspect they are, these two justifications turn out to form the foundation of the argument justifying these institutions, then we ought (...)
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  • Neutral, Natural and Hedonic State in Plato.Wei Cheng - 2019 - Mnemosyne 4 (72):525-549.
    This paper aims to clarify Plato’s notions of the natural and the neutral state in relation to hedonic properties. Contra two extreme trends among scholars—people either conflate one state with the other, or keep them apart as to establish an unsurmount- able gap between both states, I argue that neither view accurately reflects Plato’s position because the natural state is real and can coincide with the neutral state in part, whereas the latter, as an umbrella term, can also be realized (...)
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  • To Be or Never to Have Been: Anti-Natalism and a Life Worth Living.Aaron Smuts - 2013 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (4):711-729.
    David Benatar argues that being brought into existence is always a net harm and never a benefit. I disagree. I argue that if you bring someone into existence who lives a life worth living (LWL), then you have not all things considered wronged her. Lives are worth living if they are high in various objective goods and low in objective bads. These lives constitute a net benefit. In contrast, lives worth avoiding (LWA) constitute a net harm. Lives worth avoiding are (...)
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  • Still Better Never to Have Been: A Reply to My Critics.David Benatar - 2013 - The Journal of Ethics 17 (1-2):121-151.
    In Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, I argued that coming into existence is always a harm and that procreation is wrong. In this paper, I respond to those of my critics to whom I have not previously responded. More specifically, I engage the objections of Tim Bayne, Ben Bradley, Campbell Brown, David DeGrazia, Elizabeth Harman, Chris Kaposy, Joseph Packer and Saul Smilansky.
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  • Causing People to Exist and Saving People’s Lives.Jeff McMahan - 2013 - The Journal of Ethics 17 (1):5-35.
    Most people are skeptical of the claim that the expectation that a person would have a life that would be well worth living provides a reason to cause that person to exist. In this essay I argue that to cause such a person to exist would be to confer a benefit of a noncomparative kind and that there is a moral reason to bestow benefits of this kind. But this conclusion raises many problems, among which is that it must be (...)
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  • The Burdens of Life.Mark Wells - 2019 - Philosophia 47 (5):1613-1620.
    In this paper, I make the case for risks and burdens of morality and meaning. Recognizing such risks and burdens would require many of us to expand how we think about the imposition of risks and burdens. As I take it, if such an expansion helps us make more sense of relevant cases and helps us clarify or resolve debates for which risks and burdens are relevant, then it is well-motivated. Accordingly, I will demonstrate the relevance of my proposed expansion (...)
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  • The Hypothetical Consent Objection to Anti-Natalism.Asheel Singh - 2018 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (5):1135-1150.
    A very common but untested assumption is that potential children would consent to be exposed to the harms of existence in order to experience its benefits. And so, would-be parents might appeal to the following view: Procreation is all-things-considered permissible, as it is morally acceptable for one to knowingly harm an unconsenting patient if one has good reasons for assuming her hypothetical consent—and procreators can indeed reasonably rely on some notion of hypothetical consent. I argue that this view is in (...)
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  • The Rights of Future Persons under Attack: Correlativity in the Non-Identity Problem.Andre Santos Campos - 2019 - Philosophia 47 (3):625-648.
    This paper aims at answering some of the objections to the NIP’s criticism of the idea of rights of future persons. Those objections usually adopt different perspectives depending on how they understand differently the nature of the correlativity between rights and duties – some adopt a present-rights-of-future-persons view, others a future-rights-of-future-persons view, others a transitive present-rights-of-present-persons view, and others still an eternalist view of rights and persons. The paper will try to show that only a non-transitive present-rights-of-present-persons view can survive (...)
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  • Is Death Bad for a Cow?Ben Bradley - 2015 - In Tatjana Višak & Robert Garner (eds.), The Ethics of Killing Animals. New York: Oxford University Press USA. pp. 51-64.
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  • Not “Not ‘Better Never to Have Been’”: A Reply to Christine Overall.David Benatar - 2019 - Philosophia 47 (2):353-367.
    In her Why Have Children?, Christine Overall takes issue with my anti-natalist arguments that it is better never to come into existence. She provides three criticisms of my arguments and then, in a fourth criticism, suggests that my conclusions are bad for women. I respond to her criticisms, arguing that they fail.
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  • Superintelligence as a Cause or Cure for Risks of Astronomical Suffering.Kaj Sotala & Lukas Gloor - 2017 - Informatica: An International Journal of Computing and Informatics 41 (4):389-400.
    Discussions about the possible consequences of creating superintelligence have included the possibility of existential risk, often understood mainly as the risk of human extinction. We argue that suffering risks (s-risks) , where an adverse outcome would bring about severe suffering on an astronomical scale, are risks of a comparable severity and probability as risks of extinction. Preventing them is the common interest of many different value systems. Furthermore, we argue that in the same way as superintelligent AI both contributes to (...)
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  • Social choice ethics in artificial intelligence.Seth D. Baum - 2020 - AI and Society 35 (1):165-176.
    A major approach to the ethics of artificial intelligence is to use social choice, in which the AI is designed to act according to the aggregate views of society. This is found in the AI ethics of “coherent extrapolated volition” and “bottom–up ethics”. This paper shows that the normative basis of AI social choice ethics is weak due to the fact that there is no one single aggregate ethical view of society. Instead, the design of social choice AI faces three (...)
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  • Why We Should Create Artificial Offspring: Meaning and the Collective Afterlife.John Danaher - 2018 - Science and Engineering Ethics 24 (4):1097-1118.
    This article argues that the creation of artificial offspring could make our lives more meaningful. By ‘artificial offspring’ I mean beings that we construct, with a mix of human and non-human-like qualities. Robotic artificial intelligences are paradigmatic examples of the form. There are two reasons for thinking that the creation of such beings could make our lives more meaningful and valuable. The first is that the existence of a collective afterlife—i.e. a set of human-like lives that continue after we die—is (...)
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  • better no longer to be.R. Mcgregor & E. Sullivan-Bissett - 2012 - South African Journal of Philosophy 31 (1):55-68.
    David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a harm, and that – for all of us unfortunate enough to have come into existence – it would be better had we never come to be. We contend that if one accepts Benatar’s arguments for the asymmetry between the presence and absence of pleasure and pain, and the poor quality of life, one must also accept that suicide is preferable to continued existence, and that his view therefore implies both anti-natalism (...)
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  • What’s wrong with human extinction?Elizabeth Finneron-Burns - 2017 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47 (2-3):327-343.
    This paper explores what could be wrong with the fact of human extinction. I first present four reasons why we might consider human extinction to be wrong: it would prevent millions of people from being born; it would mean the loss of rational life and civilization; it would cause existing people to suffer pain or death; it would involve various psychological traumas. I argue that looking at the question from a contractualist perspective, only reasons and are admissible. I then consider (...)
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  • A portable defense of the Procreation Asymmetry.Jake Earl - 2017 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47 (2-3):178-199.
    The Procreation Asymmetry holds that we have strong moral reasons not to create miserable people for their own sakes, but no moral reasons to create happy people for their own sakes. To defend this conjunction against an argument that it leads to inconsistency, I show how recognizing ‘creation’ as a temporally extended process allows us to revise the conjuncts in a way that preserves their intuitive force. This defense of the Procreation Asymmetry is preferable to others because it does not (...)
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  • Reconsidering Meaning in Life: A Philosophical Dialogue with Thaddeus Metz.Masahiro Morioka (ed.) - 2015 - Journal of Philosophy of Life, Waseda University.
    An e-book devoted to 13 critical discussions of Thaddeus Metz's book "Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study", with a lengthy reply from the author. -/- Preface Masahiro Morioka i -/- Précis of Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study Thaddeus Metz ii-vi -/- Source and Bearer: Metz on the Pure Part-Life View of Meaning Hasko von Kriegstein 1-18 -/- Fundamentality and Extradimensional Final Value David Matheson 19-32 -/- Meaningful and More Meaningful: A Modest Measure Peter Baumann 33-49 -/- Is Meaning in (...)
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