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 don’t 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 it’s just adding up the good and bad in their life and judging there’s more good than bad. But then an “empty life”, 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 haven’t 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 “wide” version, in light of the nonidentity problem. And my views are also asymmetric.
That’s 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 don’t 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 it’s just adding up the good and bad in their life and judging there’s more good than bad. But then an “empty life”, 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 haven’t 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 “wide” version, in light of the nonidentity problem. And my views are also asymmetric.