I think the title of this post doesn’t quite match the dialogue. Most of the dialogue is about whether additional good lives is at least somewhat good. But that’s different from whether each additional good life is morally equivalent to a prevented death. The former seems more plausible than the latter, to me.
Separating the two will lead to some situations where a life is bad to create but also good to save, once started. That seems more like a feature than a bug. If you ask people in surveys, my impression is that some small fraction of people say that they’d prefer to not have been born and that some larger fraction of people say that they’d not want to relive their life again — without this necessarily implying that they currently want to die.
I think the title of this post doesn’t quite match the dialogue. Most of the dialogue is about whether additional good lives is at least somewhat good. But that’s different from whether each additional good life is morally equivalent to a prevented death. The former seems more plausible than the latter, to me.
Separating the two will lead to some situations where a life is bad to create but also good to save, once started. That seems more like a feature than a bug. If you ask people in surveys, my impression is that some small fraction of people say that they’d prefer to not have been born and that some larger fraction of people say that they’d not want to relive their life again — without this necessarily implying that they currently want to die.
I think that’s a fair point. These positions just pretty much end up in the same place when it comes to valuing existential risk.