Perhaps the most important question is whether you support a restriction on space colonization (completely or to a few nearby planets) during the Long Reflection. Unrestricted colonization seems good from a pure pro-natalist perspective, but bad from an optionalist perspective, as it makes much more likely that if anti-natalism (or adjacent positions like there should be strict care or controls over what lives can be brought into existence) is right, some of the colonies will fail to reach the correct conclusion and go on to colonize the universe in an unrestricted way, thus making humanity as a whole unable to implement the correct option.
If you do support such a restriction, then I think we agree on “the highest order bits” or the most important policy implication of optionalism, but probably still disagree on what is the best population size during the Long Reflection, which may be unresolvable due to our differing intuitions. I think I probably have more sympathy for anti-natalist intuitions than you do (in particular that most current lives may have negative value and people are mistaken about this), and worry more that creating negative-value lives and/or bringing lives into existence without adequate care could constitute a kind of irreversible or irreparable moral error. Unfortunately I do not see a good way to resolve such disagreements at our current stage of philosophical progress.
Perhaps the most important question is whether you support a restriction on space colonization (completely or to a few nearby planets) during the Long Reflection. Unrestricted colonization seems good from a pure pro-natalist perspective, but bad from an optionalist perspective, as it makes much more likely that if anti-natalism (or adjacent positions like there should be strict care or controls over what lives can be brought into existence) is right, some of the colonies will fail to reach the correct conclusion and go on to colonize the universe in an unrestricted way, thus making humanity as a whole unable to implement the correct option.
If you do support such a restriction, then I think we agree on “the highest order bits” or the most important policy implication of optionalism, but probably still disagree on what is the best population size during the Long Reflection, which may be unresolvable due to our differing intuitions. I think I probably have more sympathy for anti-natalist intuitions than you do (in particular that most current lives may have negative value and people are mistaken about this), and worry more that creating negative-value lives and/or bringing lives into existence without adequate care could constitute a kind of irreversible or irreparable moral error. Unfortunately I do not see a good way to resolve such disagreements at our current stage of philosophical progress.