I think both natalism and anti-natalism risk committing moral atrocities, if their opposite position turns out to be correct. Natalism if either people are often mistaken about their lives being worth living (cf Deluded Gladness Argument), or bringing people into existence requires much more due diligence about understanding/predicting their specific well-informed preferences (perhaps more understanding than current science and philosophy allow). Anti-natalism if human extinction implies losing an astronomically large amount of potential value (cf Astronomical Waste).
My own position, which might be called “min-natalism” or “optionalism”, is that we should ideally aim for a minimal population that’s necessary to prevent extinction and foster philosophical progress. This would maintain our optionality for pursuing natalism, anti-natalism, or something else later, while acknowledging and attempting to minimize the relevant moral risks, until we can more definitively answer the various philosophical questions that these positions depend on.
(It occurs to me this is essentially the Long Reflection, applied to the natalism question, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone explicitly take this position or make this connection before. It seems somewhat surprising that it’s not a more popular perspective in the natalism vs anti-natalism debate.)
Isn’t the point of the Long Reflection to avoid “locking in” irreversible mistakes? Extinction, for example, is irreversible. But large population isn’t. So I don’t actually see any sense in which present “min-natalism” maintains more future “optionality” (or better minimizes moral risks) than pro-natalism. Both leave entirely open what future generations choose to do. They just differ in our present population target. And presently aiming for a “minimal population” strikes me as much the worse and riskier of the two options, for both intrinsic moral reasons and instrumental ones like misjudging / undershooting the minimally sustainable level.
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.
I think both natalism and anti-natalism risk committing moral atrocities, if their opposite position turns out to be correct. Natalism if either people are often mistaken about their lives being worth living (cf Deluded Gladness Argument), or bringing people into existence requires much more due diligence about understanding/predicting their specific well-informed preferences (perhaps more understanding than current science and philosophy allow). Anti-natalism if human extinction implies losing an astronomically large amount of potential value (cf Astronomical Waste).
My own position, which might be called “min-natalism” or “optionalism”, is that we should ideally aim for a minimal population that’s necessary to prevent extinction and foster philosophical progress. This would maintain our optionality for pursuing natalism, anti-natalism, or something else later, while acknowledging and attempting to minimize the relevant moral risks, until we can more definitively answer the various philosophical questions that these positions depend on.
(It occurs to me this is essentially the Long Reflection, applied to the natalism question, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone explicitly take this position or make this connection before. It seems somewhat surprising that it’s not a more popular perspective in the natalism vs anti-natalism debate.)
Isn’t the point of the Long Reflection to avoid “locking in” irreversible mistakes? Extinction, for example, is irreversible. But large population isn’t. So I don’t actually see any sense in which present “min-natalism” maintains more future “optionality” (or better minimizes moral risks) than pro-natalism. Both leave entirely open what future generations choose to do. They just differ in our present population target. And presently aiming for a “minimal population” strikes me as much the worse and riskier of the two options, for both intrinsic moral reasons and instrumental ones like misjudging / undershooting the minimally sustainable level.
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.