Presumably you’re not neutral about creating someone who you know will live a dreadful life? If so it seems there’s no fundamental barrier to comparing existence and non-existence, and it would analogously seem you should not be neutral about creating someone you know will live a great life. You can get around this by introducing an asymmetry, but this seems ad hoc.
If it’s a person-affecting intuition that makes you neutral about creating happy lives you can run into some problems, most famously the non-identity problem. The non-identity problem implies for example that there’s nothing wrong with climate change and making our planet a hellscape, because this won’t make lives worse for anyone in particular as climate change itself will change the identities of who comes into existence. Most people agree the non-identity problem is just that...a problem, because not caring about climate change seems a bit silly.
Presumably you’re not neutral about creating someone who you know will live a dreadful life? If so it seems there’s no fundamental barrier to comparing existence and non-existence, and it would analogously seem you should not be neutral about creating someone you know will live a great life. You can get around this by introducing an asymmetry, but this seems ad hoc.
I used to hold a person-affecting view but I found the transitivity argument against being neutral about making happy people quite compelling. Similar to the money pump argument I think. Worth noting that you can get around breaking transitivity by giving up the independence of irrelevant alternatives instead, but that may not be much of an improvement.
If it’s a person-affecting intuition that makes you neutral about creating happy lives you can run into some problems, most famously the non-identity problem. The non-identity problem implies for example that there’s nothing wrong with climate change and making our planet a hellscape, because this won’t make lives worse for anyone in particular as climate change itself will change the identities of who comes into existence. Most people agree the non-identity problem is just that...a problem, because not caring about climate change seems a bit silly.