However, I suspect we should pick A instead. With Z available, A+ seems too unfair to the contingent people and too partial to the necessary/present people. Once the contingent people exist, Z would have been better than A+. And if Z is still an option at that point, we’d switch to it. So, anticipating this reasoning, whether or not we can later make the extra people better off later, I suspect we should rule out A+ first, and then select A over Z.
I can imagine myself as one of the original necessary people in A. If we picked A+, I’d judge that to be too selfish of us and too unkind to the extra people relative to the much fairer Z. All of us together, with the extra people, would collectively judge Z to have been better. From my impartial perspective, I would then regret the choice of A+. On the other hand, if we (the original necessary people) collectively decide to stick with A to avoid Z and the unkindness of A+ relative to Z, it’s no one else’s business. We only hurt ourselves relative to A+. The extra people won’t be around to have any claims.
Well said! I think that’s what a well-constructed account of person-affecting views should say, and I think we can indeed say that without running into contradictions or other counterintuitive conclusions elsewhere (but it’s worth working this out in detail). The rationale I would give is something like the following. “If we decide to create new people (which is never in itself important, but we might still want to do it for various reasons), it’s important that we take into consideration the interests of these new people. This rules out some ways of creating new people [like A+ when Z is available] where they’re worse off than they could be, at no compensatory moral gain.”
Some people might think it’s strange that the acceptability of A+ depends on whether Z is also available. However, I think that’s actually okay, and we can see that it is okay if we think about common sense practical examples: I’d say it’s acceptable today, even for people who aren’t particulary rich/generally best-positioned to give their children the best lives, for people to have children. (Assuming they’re doing their best to have the happiest children that they can, and if we can expect the children to be happy on average). However, imagine a utopia where everyone is “rich” (or better yet: where money no longer matters because there’s an abundance of everything) and well-positioned to give their children the best lives. In that utopia, it would be wrong to create children with unnecessarily restricted access to the utopia’s resources, who will then only be as well off as the average child in our reality in 2024.
So, most people already believe that the ethics around having children are sensitive to the parents’ means and their available options. (In the example with populations A, A+, and Z, we can think of the people in “A” as the “parent population.” The parent population in A has the means to have lots of children at welfare level 3, but in A+, they decide to only have these children at welfare level 1 instead for comparatively trivial self-oriented gain. That doesn’t seem okay, but it would be okay if A+ was them doing the best they could.)
Well said! I think that’s what a well-constructed account of person-affecting views should say, and I think we can indeed say that without running into contradictions or other counterintuitive conclusions elsewhere (but it’s worth working this out in detail). The rationale I would give is something like the following. “If we decide to create new people (which is never in itself important, but we might still want to do it for various reasons), it’s important that we take into consideration the interests of these new people. This rules out some ways of creating new people [like A+ when Z is available] where they’re worse off than they could be, at no compensatory moral gain.”
Some people might think it’s strange that the acceptability of A+ depends on whether Z is also available. However, I think that’s actually okay, and we can see that it is okay if we think about common sense practical examples: I’d say it’s acceptable today, even for people who aren’t particulary rich/generally best-positioned to give their children the best lives, for people to have children. (Assuming they’re doing their best to have the happiest children that they can, and if we can expect the children to be happy on average). However, imagine a utopia where everyone is “rich” (or better yet: where money no longer matters because there’s an abundance of everything) and well-positioned to give their children the best lives. In that utopia, it would be wrong to create children with unnecessarily restricted access to the utopia’s resources, who will then only be as well off as the average child in our reality in 2024.
So, most people already believe that the ethics around having children are sensitive to the parents’ means and their available options. (In the example with populations A, A+, and Z, we can think of the people in “A” as the “parent population.” The parent population in A has the means to have lots of children at welfare level 3, but in A+, they decide to only have these children at welfare level 1 instead for comparatively trivial self-oriented gain. That doesn’t seem okay, but it would be okay if A+ was them doing the best they could.)