Person-affecting views in population ethics state that (in cases where all else is equal) we’re permitted but not required to create people who would enjoy good lives. In this paper, I present an argument against every possible variety of person-affecting view. The argument takes the form of a dilemma. Narrow person-affecting views must embrace at least one of three implausible verdicts in a case that I call ‘Expanded Non-Identity.’ Wide person-affecting views run into trouble in a case that I call (...) ‘Two-Shot Non-Identity.’ One plausible practical upshot of my argument is as follows: we individuals and our governments should be doing more to reduce the risk of human extinction this century. (shrink)

Most believe that it is worse for a person to die than to continue to exist with a good life. At the same time, many believe that it is not worse for a merely possible person never to exist than to exist with a good life. I argue that if the underlying properties that make us the sort of thing we essentially are can come in small degrees, then to maintain this commonly-held pair of beliefs we will have to embrace (...) an implausible sort of evaluative hypersensitivity to slight nonevaluative differences. Avoidance of such hypersensitivity pressures us to accept that it can be worse for merely possible people never to exist. If this conclusion is correct, then the standard basis for giving no or less priority to merely possible persons would disappear (i.e., that things cannot be better or worse for them). Though defenders of Person-Affecting Views and their opponents may still disagree in theory, they could arrive at the same answers to many monumentally important practical questions. (shrink)

I very briefly sketch two arguments for the claim that we have significant moral reason to ‘add happy people’ (that is, bring into existence people with lives that are well worth living), independently of any effects on those already existing.

Many philosophers are attracted to a complaints-based theory of the procreation asymmetry, according to which creating a person with a bad life is wrong (all else equal) because that person can complain about your act, whereas declining to create a person who would have a good life is not wrong (all else equal) because that person never exists and so cannot complain about your act. In this paper, I present two problems for such theories: the problem of impairable-life acceptance and (...) an especially acute version of the problem of improvable-life avoidance. I explain how these problems afflict two recent complaints-based theories of the procreation asymmetry, from Joe Horton and Abelard Podgorski. (shrink)

This paper develops a form of moral actualism that can explain the procreative asymmetry. Along the way, it defends and explains the attractive asymmetry: the claim that although an impermissible option can be self-conditionally permissible, a permissible option cannot be self-conditionally impermissible.

According to the Asymmetry, it is wrong to bring a miserable child into existence but permissible not to bring a happy child into existence. When it comes to procreation, we don’t have complete procreative liberty. But we do have some discretion. The Asymmetry seems highly intuitive. But a plausible account of the Asymmetry has been surprisingly difficult to provide, and it may well be that most moral philosophers – or at least most consequentialists – think that all reasonable efforts to (...) provide such an account have by now been exhausted. In this paper, I argue that, despite the difficulties, the Asymmetry is too important to be set aside. I also note a handful of accounts of the Asymmetry that have been proposed and why they fail. It seems, for example, that it will not do to say that some people matter morally and others don’t, or that a person matters morally in some worlds but not others. My own conclusion is that, while we are bound to say all people matter morally – you, me and the merely possible – we are not bound to say that all their losses– or all ours– matter morally. We can instead distinguish between morally significant and insignificant losses, with the distinction between the two being a matter of where the loss is incurred in relation to the person who incurs it. This way of looking at things – which I call Variabilism– provides the basis for a plausible account of the Asymmetry. The availability of such an account suggests, I think, that our prospects for rescuing the Asymmetry are bright. (shrink)

Intuition says that choosing to create a miserable person is wrong, but choosing not to create a happy one is not; this is ‘the Asymmetry’. There is a complete theory which agrees – the ‘Harm Minimization’ theory. A well-known objection is that this theory rejects Parfit’s principle of ‘No Difference’. But No Difference has less intuitive support than the Asymmetry, and there seems to be no complete theory which agrees with both. There is, however, a more serious problem for Harm (...) Minimization: it says it is wrong to create happy people if we could have made some of them happier at the expense of others. The purpose of this note is to describe a complete theory which agrees with the Asymmetry and avoids this unacceptable consequence; like Harm Minimization, it rejects No Difference. (shrink)

Population axiology is the study of the conditions under which one state of affairs is better than another, when the states of affairs in ques- tion may differ over the numbers and the identities of the persons who ever live. Extant theories include totalism, averagism, variable value theories, critical level theories, and “person-affecting” theories. Each of these the- ories is open to objections that are at least prima facie serious. A series of impossibility theorems shows that this is no coincidence: (...) it can be proved, for various sets of prima facie intuitively compelling desiderata, that no axiology can simultaneously satisfy all the desiderata on the list. One’s choice of population axiology appears to be a choice of which intuition one is least unwilling to give up. (shrink)

Population ethics is widely considered to be exceptionally important and exceptionally difficult. One key source of difficulty is the conflict between certain moral intuitions and analytical results identifying requirements for rational (in the sense of complete and transitive) social choice over possible populations. One prominent such intuition is the Asymmetry, which jointly proposes that the fact that a possible child’s quality of life would be bad is a normative reason not to create the child, but the fact that a child’s (...) quality of life would be good is not a reason to create the child. This paper reports a set of questionnaire experiments about the Asymmetry in the spirit of economists’ empirical social choice. Few survey respondents show support for the Asymmetry; instead respondents report that expectations of a good quality of life are relevant. Each experiment shows evidence (among at least some participants) of dual-process moral reasoning, in which cognitive reflection is statistically associated with reporting expected good quality of life to be normatively relevant. The paper discusses possible implications of these results for the economics of population-sensitive social welfare and for the conflict between moral mathematics and population intuition. (shrink)

This paper considers two objections based in axiological considerations against the position that whether a given outcome, or possible future or world, is morally worse than a second world may depend in part on what is going on at a third world. Such a wide-angled approach to determining worseness is critical to the solution I have previously proposed in connection with the nonidentity problem. I argue that both objections fail.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 8, Page 38-39, August 2012.

ABSTRACT Suppose that, for every possible event and person who would exist whether or not the event were to occur, there is a well-being level that the person would occupy if the event were to occur, and a well-being level that the person would occupy if the event were not to occur. Do facts about such connections between events and well-being levels always suffice to determine whether an event would harm or benefit a person? Many seemingly attractive accounts of harm (...) and benefit entail an affirmative answer to this question, including the widely held Counterfactual Comparative Account (CCA). In this paper, however, we argue that all such accounts will be unsuccessful. (shrink)

Neonatal intensive care units represent simultaneously one of the great success stories of modern medicine, and one of its most controversial developments. One particularly controversial issue is the resuscitation of extremely preterm infants. Physicians in the United States generally accept that they are required to resuscitate infants born as early as 25 weeks and that it is permissible to resuscitate as early as 22 weeks. In this article, I question the moral pressure to resuscitate by criticizing the idea that resuscitation (...) in this context “saves” a human life. Our radical medical advancements have allowed us to intervene in the life of a human before it makes sense to say that such an intervention “saves” someone; rather, what the physician does in resuscitating and treating an extremely preterm infant is to take over creating it. This matters, I argue, because “rescues” are much more morally urgent than “creations.”. (shrink)

This paper asks how rule‐consequentialism might adapt to very adverse futures, and whether moderate liberal consequentialism can survive into broken futures and/or futures where humanity faces imminent extinction. The paper first recaps the recent history of rule‐consequentialist procreative ethics. It outlines rule‐consequentialism, extends it to cover future people, and applies it to broken futures. The paper then introduces a new thought experiment—the “ending world”—where humanity faces an extinction that is unavoidable and imminent, but not immediate. The paper concludes by explaining (...) why this thought experiment challenges rule‐consequentialism's commitment to procreative liberty, and briefly asking how rule‐consequentialism might respond to that challenge. (shrink)

Este artículo realiza una defensa de las axiologías centradas en el sufrimiento, que sostienen la prioridad de evitar el sufrimiento frente a la promoción de otros valores. Para ello, explica en primer lugar cómo ciertas cuestiones relativas a la creación de individuos sugieren la existencia de una asimetría entre el sufrimiento y la felicidad. Continúa describiendo un conjunto de argumentos a favor de la prioridad del sufrimiento relativos a individuos ya existentes. Asimismo, señala y responde a distintas objeciones que podrían (...) ser dirigidas contra estas axiologías. Finalmente, concluye que las posiciones centradas en el sufrimiento no están todavía lo bastante exploradas y pueden tener un gran potencial. (shrink)

Wilhelm has recently shown that widely accepted principles about immediate ground are inconsistent with some principles of propositional identity. This note responds to this inconsistency by developing two ground-theoretic accounts of propositional individuation. On one account some of the grounding principles are incorrect; on the other account, the principles of propositional individuation are incorrect.

According to the procreation asymmetry, we have strong pro tanto reason to do what prevents someone from coming into a miserable existence—an existence so bad that it would be rational to prefer having never been born—solely because it prevents them from coming into a miserable existence, but we do not have strong pro tanto reason to do what allows someone to come into a happy existence solely because it allows them to come into a happy existence. At best, the fact (...) that an act would create a happy person merely offsets the reasons we have to avoid that act—i.e., an act that would be impermissible because it brings a miserable person into existence could be rendered permissible if it also brought into existence enough happy people. In this paper, I first argue that there is an intuitive asymmetry in the offsetting weight of happy humans and the offsetting weight of happy animals: the offsetting weight of happy animal lives vis-à-vis miserable animal lives appears to be greater than the offsetting weight of happy human lives vis-à-vis miserable human lives. This is the Procreation Asymmetry Asymmetry. I then argue that there is no Procreation Asymmetry Asymmetry. The best explanation of why happy human lives have only weak offsetting weight implies that happy animal lives also have only weak offsetting weight. (shrink)

Two related asymmetries have been discussed in relation to the ethics of creating new lives: First, we seem to have strong moral reason to avoid creating lives that are not worth living, but no moral reason to create lives that are worth living. Second, we seem to have strong moral reason to improve the wellbeing of existing lives, but, again, no moral reason to create lives that are worth living. Both asymmetries have proven very difficult to account for in any (...) coherent moral framework. I propose an impersonal population axiology to underpin the asymmetries, which sidesteps the problematic issue of whether or not people can be harmed or benefited by creation or non-creation. This axiology yields perfect asymmetry from a deliberative perspective, in terms of expected value. The axiology also yields substantial asymmetry for large and realistic populations in terms of their actual value, beyond deliberative relevance. (shrink)

Consider a duty of beneficence towards a particular individual, S, and call a reason that is grounded in that duty a “beneficence reason towards S.” Call a person who will be brought into existence by an act of procreation the “resultant person.” Is there ever a beneficence reason towards the resultant person for an agent to procreate? In this paper, I argue for such a reason by appealing to two main premises. First, we owe a pro tanto duty of beneficence (...) to future persons; and second, some of us can benefit some of those persons by procreating. In support of the first premise I reject the presentist account of time in favor of the view that future persons are just as real as presently existing persons. I then argue that future persons are like us in all the morally relevant ways, and since we owe duties of beneficence to each other, we also owe duties of beneficence to future persons. In support of the second premise I offer an account of benefiting according to which an individual can be benefited by an action even if it makes her no better off than she would have been, had the action not been performed. This account of benefiting solves what I call the “non-identity benefit problem.” Finally, I argue that having a life worth living is a benefit, and some of us can cause some persons that benefit by causing them to exist. (shrink)

According to the Welfare Diffusion Objection, we should reject Prioritarianism because it implies the ‘desirability of welfare diffusion’: the claim that it can be better for there to be less total wellbeing spread thinly between a larger total number of people, rather than for there to be more total wellbeing, spread more generously between a smaller total number of people. I argue that while Prioritarianism does not directly imply the desirability of welfare diffusion, Prioritarians are nevertheless implicitly committed to certain (...) principles for comparing different-number populations which, together with the Prioritarian same-person axiology, imply the desirability of welfare diffusion. (shrink)

I argue for the principle of Anonymity, according to which two populations are equally good whenever they have the same anonymous distribution of wellbeing. I first show that, given transitivity of the at-least-as-good-as relation, Anonymity is entailed by the ``Non-Identity Principle'', according to which the consequence of bringing better rather than worse lives into existence is, all else equal, better. I then argue for the Non-Identity Principle on the basis that if it were false, it would follow that we fail (...) to improve the world when we make existing people better off, while at the same time replacing worse-off future people with different better-off future people. Since this is implausible, we should accept the Non-Identity Principle, and therefore Anonymity as well. (shrink)

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 (...) require us to take on controversial metaphysical or metaethical commitments – in other words, it has the theoretical virtue of portability. (shrink)

According to “the asymmetry”, the fact that a future person would have a life not worth living counts against bringing that person into existence but the fact that a future person would have a life worth living does not count in favour of bringing that person into existence. While this asymmetry seems intuitive, it is also puzzling: if we think that it is of moral importance to prevent people from living lives not worth living, shouldn't we also that it is (...) of moral importance to create people with lives worth living? Melinda Roberts has suggested a view, “Variabilism”, which she argues solves this problem. I argue that Variabilism fails as a solution to the asymmetry. First, Variabilism relies on a particular distinction between gains and losses which is at least as puzzling as the asymmetry itself. Second, in some cases Variabilism is incompatible with the asymmetry. In these cases, the fact that a person would have a life worth living does count in favour of creating her. (shrink)

In this paper we distinguish two versions of the non-identity problem: one involving positive well-being and one involving negative well-being. Intuitively, there seems to be a difference between the two versions of the problem. In the negative case it is clear that one ought to cause the better off person to exist. However, it has recently been suggested that this is not so in the positive case. We argue that such an asymmetrical treatment of the two versions should be rejected (...) and that this is evidence against views according to which it is permissible to cause the less well off person to exist in the positive non-identity case. (shrink)

Is the procreation asymmetry intuitively supported? According to a recent article in this journal, an experimental study suggests the opposite. Dean Spears (2020) claims that nearly three-quarters of participants report that there is a reason to create a person just because that person’s life would be happy. In reply, I argue that various confounding factors render the study internally invalid. More generally, I show how one might come to adopt the procreation asymmetry for the wrong reasons by misinterpreting one’s intuitions.

This thesis is about the moral reasons we have to do less than best. It consists of six chapters. Part I of the thesis proposes, extends, and defends reasons to do less than best. In Chapter One (“The Conditional Obligation”) I outline and reject two recent arguments from Joe Horton and Theron Pummer for the claim that we have a conditional obligation to bring about the most good. In Chapter Two (“Agglomeration and Agent-Relative Costs”) I argue that agent-relative costs can (...) justify permissions to less than best in a far greater range of decisions contexts than we currently believe. In Chapter Three (“Risk and Aggregation”) I discuss how anti-aggregative moral theories deal with risk, whilst proposing an argument in favour of ex-post moral theories. -/- In Part II of the thesis, I discuss longtermism, presenting a series of reasons to believe we have both significant permissions and obligations to prioritise those in the short-term. In Chapter Four (“Listening to Future People”) I criticise a recent argument presented by Andreas Mogensen for the claim we cannot have obligations grounded in the wellbeing of future people. I then show that, even permitting the existence of obligations to future people, we still have significant reasons to resist longtermism on the grounds of partiality. In Chapter Five (“The Complaints of Future People”) I argue that scepticism about aggregation is inconsistent with an obligation, or indeed even a permission, to help far future people. In Chapter Six (“Leaving the Present Behind”) I explore the moral significance of “dooming”, whilst arguing that we have a pro tanto reason of fairness to prioritise aiding those currently in existence. (shrink)

In this paper, we defend three claims about what it will take for an AI system to be a basic moral patient to whom we can owe duties of non-maleficence not to harm her and duties of beneficence to benefit her: (1) Moral patients are mental patients; (2) Mental patients are true intentional systems; and (3) True intentional systems are systematically flexible. We suggest that we should be particularly alert to the possibility of such systematically flexible true intentional systems developing (...) in the areas of exploratory robots and artificial personal assistants. Finally, we argue that in light of our failure to respect the well-being of existing biological moral patients and worries about our limited resources, there are compelling moral reasons to treat artificial moral patiency as something to be avoided at least for now. (shrink)

In Derek Parfit's original formulation the Repugnant Conclusion is characterized as follows: “For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living” (Parfit 1984). The Repugnant Conclusion highlights a problem in an area of ethics which has become known as population ethics . The (...) last three decades have witnessed an increasing philosophical interest in questions such as “Is it possible to make the world a better place by creating additional happy creatures?” and “Is there a moral obligation to have children?” The main problem has been to find an adequate theory about the moral value of states of affairs where the number of people, the quality of their lives, and their identities may vary. Since, arguably, any reasonable moral theory has to take these aspects of possible states of affairs into account when determining the normative status of actions, the study of population ethics is of general import for moral theory. As the name indicates, Parfit finds the Repugnant Conclusion unacceptable and many philosophers agree. However, it has been surprisingly difficult to find a theory that avoids the Repugnant Conclusion without implying other equally counterintuitive conclusions. Thus, the question as to how the Repugnant Conclusion should be dealt with and, more generally, what it shows about the nature of ethics has turned the conclusion into one of the cardinal challenges of modern ethics. (shrink)

Why should we refrain from doing things that, taken collectively, are environmentally destructive, if our individual acts seem almost certain to make no difference? According to the expected consequences approach, we should refrain from doing these things because our individual acts have small risks of causing great harm, which outweigh the expected benefits of performing them. Several authors have argued convincingly that this provides a plausible account of our moral reasons to do things like vote for policies that will reduce (...) our countries’ greenhouse gas emissions, adopt plant-based diets, and otherwise reduce our individual emissions. But this approach has recently been challenged by authors like Bernward Gesang and Julia Nefsky. Gesang contends that it may be genuinely impossible for our individual emissions to make a morally relevant difference. Nefsky argues more generally that the expected consequences approach cannot adequately explain our reasons not to do things if there is no precise fact of the matter about whether their outcomes are harmful. -/- In the following chapter, author Howard Nye defends the expected consequences approach against these objections. Nye contends that Gesang has shown at most that our emissions could have metaphysically indeterministic effects that lack precise objective chances. He argues, moreover, that the expected consequences approach can draw upon existing extensions to cases of indeterminism and imprecise probabilities to deliver the result that we have the same moral reasons to reduce our emissions in Gesang’s scenario as in deterministic scenarios. Nye also shows how the expected consequences approach can draw upon these extensions to handle Nefsky’s concern about the absence of precise facts concerning whether the outcomes of certain acts are harmful. The author concludes that the expected consequences approach provides a fully adequate account of our moral reasons to take both political and personal action to reduce our ecological footprints. (shrink)

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 (...) other. In Chapter 2, I extend Gustaf Arrhenius’s famous impossibility theorems in population axiology into the domain of choices under risk. My risky impossibility theorems dispense with the assumption that welfare levels are finitely fine-grained, and so tell against lexical views in population axiology. In Chapter 3, I present objections to critical-level and critical-range views in population axiology. I then sketch out what I call the ‘Imprecise Exchange Rates View’ and argue that it is an attractive alternative. In Chapter 4, I address critical-level and critical-range views again. This time, I note that they are vulnerable to objections from biographical identity: identity between lives. I suggest that these objections give us reason to reject critical-level and critical-range views and embrace the Total View. In Chapter 5, I argue that objections of the same form – objections from personal identity – tell against person-affecting views in population ethics. In Chapter 6, I draw out some counterintuitive implications of two recent complaints-based theories of the procreation asymmetry. (shrink)

This thesis consists of several independent papers in population ethics. I begin in Chapter 1 by critiquing some well-known 'impossibility theorems', which purport to show there can be no intuitively satisfactory population axiology. I identify axiological vagueness as a promising way to escape or at least mitigate the effects of these theorems. In particular, in Chapter 2, I argue that certain of the impossibility theorems have little more dialectical force than sorites arguments do. From these negative arguments I move to (...) positive ones. In Chapter 3, I justify the use of a 'veil of ignorance', starting from three more basic normative principles. This leads to positive arguments for various kinds of utilitarianism - the best such arguments I know. But in general the implications of the veil depend on how one answers what I call 'the risky existential question': what is the value to an individual of a chance of non-existence? I chart out the main options, and raise some puzzles for non-comparativism, the view that life is incomparable to non-existence. Finally, in Chapter 4, I consider the consequences for population ethics of the idea that what is normatively relevant is not personal identity, but a degreed relation of psychological connectedness. In particular, I pursue a strategy based in population ethics for understanding the controversial 'time-relative interests' account of the badness of death. (shrink)

According to the procreation asymmetry there is no moral reason to create a new and foreseeably happy person just because this person will be happy, but there is however a moral reason against creating a new and foreseeably unhappy person just because this person will be unhappy. A common way to defend this conjunction of claims is by employing a so-called existence-requirement, according to which the happiness of a given person p in a world w depends on it being possible (...) to understand p as an existing person in w. The aim of this paper is to consider whether this existence-requirement strategy is compatible with other intuitions and convictions held in normative moral theory and populations ethics. This aim will be achieved by considering whether the existence-requirement strategy is compatible with three plausible desiderata for a solution to the procreation asymmetry. Although some solutions to some potential incompatibilities are suggested, the thesis that will be argued for is that every instance of the existence-requirement strategy is incompatible with at least one of the relevant desiderata. Where the common denominating incompatibility for all instances of the existence-requirement strategy is to be found in an inability to be sufficiently action-guiding. (shrink)

This thesis in an invistigation into the concept of "harm" and its moral relevance. A common view is that an analysis of harm should include a counterfactual condition: an act harms a person iff it makes that person worse off. A common objection to the moral relevance of harm, thus understood, is the non-identity problem. -/- This thesis criticises the counterfactual condition, argues for an alternative analysis and that harm plays two important normative roles. -/- The main ground for rejecting (...) the counterfactual condition is that it has unacceptable consequences in cases of overdetermination and pre-emption. Several modifications to the condition are considered but all fail to solve this problem. -/- According to the alternative analysis to do harm is to perform an act which is responsible for the obtaining of a state of affairs which makes a person’s life go worse. It is argued that should be understood in terms of counterfactual dependence. This claim is defended against counterexamples based on redundant causation. An analysis of is also provided using the notion of a well-being function. It is argued that by introducing this notion it is possible to analyse contributive value without making use of counterfactual comparisons and to solve the non-identity problem. -/- Regarding the normative importance of harm, a popular intuition is that there is an asymmetry in our obligations to future people: that a person would have a life worth living were she to exist is not a reason in favour of creating that person while that a person would have a life not worth living is a reason against creating that person. It is argued that the asymmetry can be classified as a moral option grounded in autonomy. Central to this defence is the suggestion that harm is relevant to understanding autonomy. Autonomy involves partly the freedom to pursue one’s own aims as long as one does no harm. (shrink)

The Asymmetry in procreative ethics consists of two claims. The first is that it is morally wrong to bring into existence a child who will have an abjectly miserable life; the second is that it is permissible not to bring into existence a child who will enjoy a very happy life. In this paper, I distinguish between two variations of the Asymmetry. The first is the Abstract Asymmetry, the idealized variation of the Asymmetry that many philosophers have been trying to (...) solve. The second is the Real-World Asymmetry, a non-idealized variation that applies explicitly to cases of ordinary human reproduction. I argue that the Real-World Asymmetry can be defended by properly acknowledging the general wrongness of causing someone else to suffer, the limits of what morality can reasonably demand of us, and the significance of respecting women’s autonomy. I then argue that the Abstract Asymmetry is indefensible. (shrink)