You outline a moral dichotomy between the following:
Actions which negatively affect a person’s future interests,
e.g. a mother taking a drug which causes birth defects in her child,
which are morally wrong
Actions which prevent the occurrence of a person having future interests,
e.g. a mother preventing the birth of her child,
which are morally neutral
It seems to me that longtermism explicitly rejects this dichotomy, because longtermists believe the prevention of the occurrence of the interests of innumerable future people would be a catastrophic moral loss. A believer in this dichotomy would argue that a human extinction event is morally neutral with respect to the interests of innumerable future people who would have lived, because the extinction event simply “prevents those interests from arising in the first place”. Do you agree that this dichotomy is inconsistent with longtermism?
The dichotomy merely suggests that failing to create a person does not harm or wrong that individual in the way that negatively affecting their interests (e.g. by killing them as a young adult) does. Contraception isn’t murder, and neither is abstinence.
But avoiding wrongs isn’t all that matters. We can additionally claim that there’s always some (albeit weaker) reason to positively benefit possible future people by bringing them into a positive existence. So there’s some moral reason to have kids, for example, even though it doesn’t wrong anyone to remain childless by choice.
And when you multiply those individually weak reasons by zillions, you can end up with overwhelmingly strong reasons to prevent human extinction, just as longtermists claim. (This reason is so strong it would plausibly be wrong to neglect or violate it, even though it does not wrong any particular individual. Just as the non-identity problem shows that one outcome can be worse than another without necessarily being worse for any particular individual.)
You outline a moral dichotomy between the following:
Actions which negatively affect a person’s future interests,
e.g. a mother taking a drug which causes birth defects in her child,
which are morally wrong
Actions which prevent the occurrence of a person having future interests,
e.g. a mother preventing the birth of her child,
which are morally neutral
It seems to me that longtermism explicitly rejects this dichotomy, because longtermists believe the prevention of the occurrence of the interests of innumerable future people would be a catastrophic moral loss. A believer in this dichotomy would argue that a human extinction event is morally neutral with respect to the interests of innumerable future people who would have lived, because the extinction event simply “prevents those interests from arising in the first place”. Do you agree that this dichotomy is inconsistent with longtermism?
Not exactly—though it is a good question!
The dichotomy merely suggests that failing to create a person does not harm or wrong that individual in the way that negatively affecting their interests (e.g. by killing them as a young adult) does. Contraception isn’t murder, and neither is abstinence.
But avoiding wrongs isn’t all that matters. We can additionally claim that there’s always some (albeit weaker) reason to positively benefit possible future people by bringing them into a positive existence. So there’s some moral reason to have kids, for example, even though it doesn’t wrong anyone to remain childless by choice.
And when you multiply those individually weak reasons by zillions, you can end up with overwhelmingly strong reasons to prevent human extinction, just as longtermists claim. (This reason is so strong it would plausibly be wrong to neglect or violate it, even though it does not wrong any particular individual. Just as the non-identity problem shows that one outcome can be worse than another without necessarily being worse for any particular individual.)