They can agree, but they need not. Again, if everyone were purely selfish, it seems like they would disagree. The extra people would prefer to exist, given their positive welfare levels. The original people would prefer the extra not to exist, if itās paired with a loss to their own welfare. Or, if we took the perspectives of whatās best for each personās personal/āselfish welfare on their behalf, weād have those two groups of perspectives.
And we can probably rig up a version thatās other-regarding for the people, say the extra people are total utilitarians, and the original people have person-affecting views.
It makes sense to want to keep existing if you already exist. But believing that it would have been bad, had you never existed in the first place, is a different matter. For whom would it have been bad? Apparently for nobody.
I can, now that I exist, assign myself welfare level 0 in the counterfactuals in which I was never born. I can also assign welfare level 0 to potential people who donāt come to exist.
People talk about being grateful to have been born. One way to make sense of this is that they compare to a counterfactual in which they were never born. Or maybe itās just adding up the good and bad in their life and judging thereās more good than bad. But then an āempty lifeā, with no goods or bads, would be net 0, and you could equate that with nonexistence.
On some interpretations of the total view, it can be worse for someone to not be born even if they havenāt been conceived yet, and even if they never will be.
Personally, I roughly agree with your intuition here, but it might need to be made into a āwideā version, in light of the nonidentity problem. And my views are also asymmetric.
They can agree, but they need not. Again, if everyone were purely selfish, it seems like they would disagree. The extra people would prefer to exist, given their positive welfare levels. The original people would prefer the extra not to exist, if itās paired with a loss to their own welfare. Or, if we took the perspectives of whatās best for each personās personal/āselfish welfare on their behalf, weād have those two groups of perspectives.
And we can probably rig up a version thatās other-regarding for the people, say the extra people are total utilitarians, and the original people have person-affecting views.
It makes sense to want to keep existing if you already exist. But believing that it would have been bad, had you never existed in the first place, is a different matter. For whom would it have been bad? Apparently for nobody.
Thatās a person-affecting intuition.
I can, now that I exist, assign myself welfare level 0 in the counterfactuals in which I was never born. I can also assign welfare level 0 to potential people who donāt come to exist.
People talk about being grateful to have been born. One way to make sense of this is that they compare to a counterfactual in which they were never born. Or maybe itās just adding up the good and bad in their life and judging thereās more good than bad. But then an āempty lifeā, with no goods or bads, would be net 0, and you could equate that with nonexistence.
On some interpretations of the total view, it can be worse for someone to not be born even if they havenāt been conceived yet, and even if they never will be.
Personally, I roughly agree with your intuition here, but it might need to be made into a āwideā version, in light of the nonidentity problem. And my views are also asymmetric.