I see the analogy as saying less about the value of a happy life and more about the responsibility creators have towards promoting someone’s well-being. If you’re right that “it seems more accurate to merely view breaking promises as bad” (instead of also viewing it as good to keep promises), this could just mean “we merely view incompetent or careless parenting as bad” (instead of also viewing competent and caring parenting as good).
I guess you could still object that, in the analogy, we should consider competent and caring parenting to be good (it’s good to promote the child’s well-being; caring and competent parenting does this). So, maybe we can distinguish between meeting one’s responsibilities and making the world better better for others. Good parenting is both, so there’s one sense in which it’s “just” doing what you have a responsibility to do (and there’s not really much praise in it from this perspective, since you’d be a jerk to do it any different) and another sense in which it’s good because it’s making the world better for the child that now exists.
In any case, while Frick takes the promise-making analogy to argue for a procreation asymmetry in all contexts, my framework only has it as a default for minimal morality, so it can be overwritten by anyone who adopts a totalist ambitious morality (based on the typical arguments and appeals for this view).
On Frick’s promise-making analogy:
I see the analogy as saying less about the value of a happy life and more about the responsibility creators have towards promoting someone’s well-being. If you’re right that “it seems more accurate to merely view breaking promises as bad” (instead of also viewing it as good to keep promises), this could just mean “we merely view incompetent or careless parenting as bad” (instead of also viewing competent and caring parenting as good).
I guess you could still object that, in the analogy, we should consider competent and caring parenting to be good (it’s good to promote the child’s well-being; caring and competent parenting does this). So, maybe we can distinguish between meeting one’s responsibilities and making the world better better for others. Good parenting is both, so there’s one sense in which it’s “just” doing what you have a responsibility to do (and there’s not really much praise in it from this perspective, since you’d be a jerk to do it any different) and another sense in which it’s good because it’s making the world better for the child that now exists.
In any case, while Frick takes the promise-making analogy to argue for a procreation asymmetry in all contexts, my framework only has it as a default for minimal morality, so it can be overwritten by anyone who adopts a totalist ambitious morality (based on the typical arguments and appeals for this view).