Ralph Bader, here, has a rather interesting and novel defence of it: https://homeweb.unifr.ch/BaderR/Pub/Asymmetry (R. Bader).pdf. Another strategy is to say you have no reason not to create the miserable child, but you have reason to end it’s life once it starts existing; this doesn’t help with scenarios where you can’t end the life.
Ya, this is interesting. Bader’s approach basically is premised on the fact that you’d want to end the life of a miserable child, and you’d want to do it as soon as possible, and ensuring this as soon as possible (in theory, not in practice) basically looks like not bringing them into existence in the first place. You could do this with the amount of badness in general, too, e.g. intensity of experiences, as I described in point 2 here until the end of the comment for suffering specifically.
The second approach you mention seems like it would lead to dynamic inconsistency or a kind of money pump, which seems similar to Bader’s point (from this comment):
if people decide to have a child they know will be forever miserable because they don’t count the harm ahead of time, once the child is born (or the decision to have the child is made), the parent(s) may decide to euthanize (abort, etc.) them for the child’s sake. And then, they could do this [have a child expected to be miserable and then euthanize/abort them] again and again and again, knowing they’ll change their minds at each point, because at each point, although they might recognize the harm, they don’t count it until after the decision is made.
The reason they might do this is because they recognize some benefit to having the child at all, and do not anticipate the need to euthanize/abort them until after the child “counts”. Euthanizing/aborting the child could be costly and outweigh the initial benefits of having the child in the first place, so it seems best to not have the child in the first place. You might respond that not having the child is therefore in the parents’ interests, given expectations about how they will act in the future and this has nothing to do with the child’s interests, so can be handled with a symmetric person-affecting view. However, this is only true because they’re predicting they will take the child’s interests into account. So, they already are taking the child’s interests into account when deciding whether or not to have them at all, just indirectly.
And I can see some person-affecting views approaching mere/benign addition and the repugnant conclusion similarly. You bring the extra people with marginally good lives into existence to get A+, since it’s no worse than A (or better, by benign addition instead of mere addition), but then you’re compelled to redistribute welfare after the fact, and this puts you in an outcome you’d find significantly worse than had you not brought the extra people into existence in the first place. You should predict that you will want to redistribute welfare after the fact when deciding whether or not to bring the extra people into existence at all.
Yup. I suspect Bader’s approach is ultimately ad hoc (I saw him present it at a conf and haven’t been through the paper closely) but I do like it.
On the second bit, I think that’s right with the A, A+ bit: the person-affector can see that letting them new people arrive and then redistributing to everyone is worse for the original people. So if you think that’s what will happen, you should avoid it. Much the same thing to say about the child.
Ya, this is interesting. Bader’s approach basically is premised on the fact that you’d want to end the life of a miserable child, and you’d want to do it as soon as possible, and ensuring this as soon as possible (in theory, not in practice) basically looks like not bringing them into existence in the first place. You could do this with the amount of badness in general, too, e.g. intensity of experiences, as I described in point 2 here until the end of the comment for suffering specifically.
The second approach you mention seems like it would lead to dynamic inconsistency or a kind of money pump, which seems similar to Bader’s point (from this comment):
The reason they might do this is because they recognize some benefit to having the child at all, and do not anticipate the need to euthanize/abort them until after the child “counts”. Euthanizing/aborting the child could be costly and outweigh the initial benefits of having the child in the first place, so it seems best to not have the child in the first place. You might respond that not having the child is therefore in the parents’ interests, given expectations about how they will act in the future and this has nothing to do with the child’s interests, so can be handled with a symmetric person-affecting view. However, this is only true because they’re predicting they will take the child’s interests into account. So, they already are taking the child’s interests into account when deciding whether or not to have them at all, just indirectly.
And I can see some person-affecting views approaching mere/benign addition and the repugnant conclusion similarly. You bring the extra people with marginally good lives into existence to get A+, since it’s no worse than A (or better, by benign addition instead of mere addition), but then you’re compelled to redistribute welfare after the fact, and this puts you in an outcome you’d find significantly worse than had you not brought the extra people into existence in the first place. You should predict that you will want to redistribute welfare after the fact when deciding whether or not to bring the extra people into existence at all.
Yup. I suspect Bader’s approach is ultimately ad hoc (I saw him present it at a conf and haven’t been through the paper closely) but I do like it.
On the second bit, I think that’s right with the A, A+ bit: the person-affector can see that letting them new people arrive and then redistributing to everyone is worse for the original people. So if you think that’s what will happen, you should avoid it. Much the same thing to say about the child.