Hi Jesse and Anthony, thank youāāregarding your second point, I think itās indeed a nonstarter, from a person-centered point of view, to make up a ācounterpartā for Alice. One might think the same regarding your first point: The assumption that Aliceās welfare is zero in B-worlds, where she does not exist, is made up. As Mogensen puts it (p. 1027): āWe may believe, for example, that a personās welfare level is defined in outcomes in which she does not exist, and that it takes a value of zero (Greaves & Cusbert, 2022; Holtug, 2001; Roberts, 2003). This would indeed undermine my argument. However, it is also a position that I find incredible, since I find it incredible that non-existent people have well-defined levels of any measurable quantity, be it height, weight, or welfare, any more than logic has a well-defined temperature.ā
If this is right, it immediately gets us out of the worry expressed in your first point: Alice is indeterminate between the options, so that she is bracketed out (i.e., she provides us with no contrastive reason to favor an option rather than another).
However, it seems to me that this cannot be right. Suppose Alice net-suffers terribly in A-worlds. Surely, this gives us a contrastive reason to choose B rather than A, as far as Alice is concerned. Pace Mogensen, I believe we should be able to get to this verdict without assuming that Aliceās nonexistent welfare is literally zero in B-worlds: In the scenario where Alice exists (we choose A and x-risk is averted), she has a welfare-based perspective on how worlds where she doesnāt exist compare/ārank relative to the world where she exists and suffers, and the comparison prefers nonexistence. (In other words, Alice supplies a welfare-based objection against our choosing A, grounded in the welfare-based take she has on our choice in the scenario where she comes into being.)
So, we have an Alice-indexed contrastive reason not to choose A of the following two-dimensional magnitude: (p ā [0, 1]; her negative welfare, say ā10, or perhaps [-20, 0)). This reason has a determinate direction (favoring B rather than A) but an indeterminate strength. Now suppose that, in choosing A, we also determinately save Mel from malaria, providing her with a +5 welfare benefit, say. Mel thus supplies a contrastive reason of determinate strength favoring A rather than B. The sum of contrastive reasons is now indeterminate, so that either choice is permissible.
This is the correct verdict, I think. Both intuitively and from person-centered āfirst principles,ā impartial altruists should not favor either option in this case. What we have here is one moral patient favoring A, another one opposing A, and the balance of their contrastive reasons being unclear. It makes sense, intuitively and theoretically, that either option should be permissible. (On scope-sensitive forms of altruism, this verdict may change depending on the number of people like Alice and the number of people like Mel involved in the case, as one would expect.)
It is important not to lose sight of the fact that overall indeterminacy is not to be avoided tout court. We should avoid it where, and only where, it does not actually obtain from an impartial altruistic point of view. Consider the following variation on the above case. Suppose our uncertainty regarding Alice is deeper: She might also have a net-happy life in A-worlds, who knows. In that case, Alice provides us with no contrastive reason to favor either option; if we āask her,ā sheās fine with either choice (given her welfare stakes and our credences). Assuming that, in choosing A, we determinately save Mel from malaria, impartial altruists should not reach a verdict of overall indeterminacy: Mel is not fine with either choice and should thus determine our overall verdict.
The empirical situation (regarding x-risk, various ways in which human survival may be realized, and s-risk) is, of course, complicated. My post does not address the question of what kinds of cases we happen to be facing in the actual world today. It aims to make a contribution to the prior conceptual, moral, and decision-theoretic questions.
Iād be curious about how you think about transworld identity and personal identity and to get your take on the following proposal for counterpart relations. I expect that bottom-up bracketing would rarely be action-guiding in practice without counterpart relations, because of huge numbers of contingent moral patients pointing in each direction, and counterpart relations could make some version action-guiding in practice by allowing us to bracket out far more of them.
This is a pretty rough sketch.
One way Iām thinking of grounding counterpart relations is by looking for measures that naturally generalize our concepts of transworld and personal identity. For example, Alice in A is the same person as Alice in B and her past self because of common causes of the features important to Aliceās identity, like her memories, psychological dispositions, etc.. Maybe weād say specifically due to the preservation or inheritance of the physical structures (her brain) responsible for her psychological features from her past selves.
All of this is a matter of degree, because Alice changes over time and could diverge between worlds A and B. Almost all of the particles in her neurons and elsewhere in her body are replaced over time, and which particles make her up will diverge across worlds. In cases of amnesia, brain damage and normal human aging and experience, people can change fairly dramatically in their psychological features. We might say that transworld and personal identity matching are themselves graded. Alice is kind of both the same person and kind of a different person, and more a different person the larger the divergence and the less is inherited.
Then, Alice and Bob, if both human, share more psychological dispositions than Alice and a chicken, and this can be traced back to more recent common causes of their psychological dispositions, i.e. more recent common ancestry between any two humans than between a human and a chicken, passed through genes. This could let us preferentially match counterparts that are more closely related/ātrace more of their genes that account for psychological features back to the same more recent ancestors.
Transworld identity is just a special case of this kind of causal counterpart relation where the common causes of psychological features are especially potent or of a particular kind, e.g. the āsameā brain, which we can trace through spacetime. The gap between distinct persons is admittedly generally much larger than between the same person across worlds or at different points in time, but if itās more a difference in degree than kind since both are graded, then this would give us reason to accept or reject both transworld/āpersonal identity and causal counterpart relations together, rather than accept transworld/āpersonal identiy and reject causal counterpart relations.
One potential supporting argument for the generalization from direct inheritance of psychological features to common causes of psychological features for counterpart relations:
While adult Alice inherits some psychological features from her infant self and infant brain, many of her cognitive capacities as an adult ā which are plausibly important to her identity ā were not directly inherited from her infant self or infant brain (or fetal brain), but were caused in part by general and often region-specific DNA-driven processes to restructure her brain. Furthermore, the vast majority of the particles in her neurons and brain get replaced even if most neurons are preserved, and (Iād guess) the DNA in those neurons are necessary for ensuring their function even as the particles in them turn over. So, Aliceās psychological features and identity over time and across worlds come in large part from her DNA. The same has been typically true for conscious biological beings on Earth so far.
The persistent DNA particles over time cause Aliceās psychological features over time and across worlds. Copies of them from her ancestors cause many of her relativeās similar psychological features over time and across worlds. What grounds her identity across time and worlds is common causes of her psychological features, but going back up the causal chain, we find common causes of psychological features between moral patients, too, not just within, through copies of the same DNA.[1]
If common causes, like someoneās DNA, of shared psychological features across worlds are what ground transworld identity, then we should be able to use common causes, like a common ancestorās DNA from which copies were inherited, of shared psychological features to ground counterpart relations across worlds to generalize transworld identity, too.
We can use other common causes of shared psychological features to ground counterparts more generally. Or even common causes of individualsā existences across worlds, e.g. if someone is deciding between dog breeders to breed a puppy for them (or buying a puppy from them and creating demand for further puppies), they are causally downstream of each of the possible resulting puppies, and this further common cause supports matching the possible resulting puppies across worlds as counterparts.
I also donāt think it would make a difference if all of Aliceās DNA got replaced by exact copies and none of her particles were preserved over time. Either causal relationships or continuity are doing the work here.
Interesting, thanksāāmore later, just one (meta-)comment: Maybe, if huge numbers of individuals are pointing in each direction (i.e., if we are clueful enough to be able to pick out these individuals and assign them a contrastive reason of determinate direction but vague magnitude), it would be a mistake for impartial altruists to reach a determinate overall verdict. In cases where the balance of contrastive person-attributable reasons is vague, it seems inadequate to favor either option. In other words, indeterminacy may not be a problem to āsolveā in these cases (whether hypothetical or actual); instead, it would be a problem if our theory told us that the situation, in these particular cases, is determinate.
I might be able to share a couple of thoughts on identity and counterpart relations laterāāitās very tricky business, of course. For now, just one more thought on your apparent intuition (?) that, in the cases we are actually/āempirically facing today, we should be able to set far future individuals aside. There might be another, principled way of doing this that may align quite well with the defense of person-centered bottom-up bracketing offered in the post (which justifies its verdicts in terms of each personās ex ante perspective on our choices). Start with the plausible, widely shared idea that no number of mild, barely noticeable headaches can outweigh unbearable, torture-level suffering, i.e., draw a distinction between ālowerā and āhigherā kinds of suffering (and perhaps an analogous distinction between lower and higher kinds of happiness, Ć la John Stuart Mill). Then argue that sufficiently tiny probabilities of higher suffering still fall into the lower prospect category, i.e., can be traded off with headaches. (In other words, come up with a way to avoid the kind of fanaticism at issue here.) Finally, argue that our empirical situation happens to be such that, with our actions today, we can only make sufficiently tiny probability-dents in the fates of individual far future people (as represented by us).
I agree with the meta point, but my reaction is that if this particular theory is practically never action-guiding, Iāll just move onto other theories that could be action-guiding, say via some kind of metanormative bracketing or wager.
I think treating tiny probabilities of severe suffering (or any large difference for an individual) as lower would probably work to often give determinate comparisons, as you suggest. We could get a range of views that set the thresholds between higher and lower in different places and have moral uncertainty over them.
It could go too far or turn on empirical facts that in my view it shouldnāt really, although this is pulling in nonidentity/ācounterpart intuitions, so basically question begging.
Generally any moral patients who do not yet exist /ā are not yet conceived could be dramatically discounted because each such pre-specified individual is extremely unlikely to exist, based on the huge number of sperm cells in the race to fertilize an egg. The view could practically be a strict person-affecting view like presentism or necessitarianism.
All of our apparently cost-effective animal welfare interventions could only help animals to the lower level, because none of them help already conceived individuals, given the delay between the decision to support an intervention and its actual implementation.
Causing millions more chickens to be factory farmed per year would only reach the lower level for each resulting chicken ex ante.
Plausibly each specific far future moral patient is far far far less likely to exist than any specific chicken in the next 10 years. Each individualās probability of existing could roughly decrease exponentially with their generation number from the present, at least for biological moral patients. So, there could be thresholds where chickens over the next few years reach higher, but far future moral patients only reach lower. But should the view turn on these particulars?
Hi Impartial, thanks for this reply! Canāt speak for Jesse, but I definitely agree with this:
It is important not to lose sight of the fact that overall indeterminacy is not to be avoided tout court. We should avoid it where, and only where, it does not actually obtain from an impartial altruistic point of view.
So, if bracketing (either TD or BU) is entirely non-action-guiding for the reasons Jesse mentions, that doesnāt bear on whether bracketing is a good normative theory. But it does bear on your claim at the start of your post: āBottom-up, person-centered bracketing can thus preserve principled impartial action guidanceā.
Hi againāāthanks! Yes, I should have been more precise about what the claim is Iām trying to argue: that person-centered bottom-up bracketing provides action guiding (determinate) verdicts in just those cases, whether hypothetical or actual, where altruistic action guidance plausibly obtains, and outputs indeterminacy in the other cases. In other words, the claim is that there are no normatively problematic failures of action guidance.
Is this a version of (weak) actualism as a person-affecting theory? In worlds where Alice doesnāt exist, she has no properties like welfare to provide us any reasons or welfare-based objections.
Weak actualism, as in the literature (Hare, 2007, Spencer, 2021 section 6), would say to pick among the options that maximize āself-conditional valueā. An option is permissible only if itās no worse than any other for the people who (ever) exist in the resulting outcome. In other words, assuming we choose the option A, we compare all the options pairwise on the basis of the reasons provided by the people who would exist given our choice of A,[1] and if A is no worse overall than any other option on these comparisons, then it maximizes self-conditional value.[2]
It sounds similar to what you wrote here, too:
Perhaps, on a person-centered approach to ethics, that is simply true (cf. Boonin 2014 and Pummer 2024): If we choose B, we will have made it the case that (i) no actual person has negative welfare, which they could object to on personal welfare grounds, and (ii) all actual persons have the maximum amount of positive welfare they could have had. (Person p2, once she exists, will have no welfare-based objection to our choosing B: We could not have made her better off. Nor will p1, who will not exist.) On a person-centered approach, we may therefore have maximized peopleās welfare in the sense that matters.
I also think maximizing self-conditional value as formalized in the literature is the wrong approach for an actualist when deciding between at least 3 options, because itās myopic, and we should use backward induction on behalf of the people who would exist given an option. This can avoid the repugnant conclusion. I have an unpublished draft based on the idea of backward induction for weak actualism Iād be happy to share, and I discuss the problem a bit here.
Thanks, Michaelābriefly for now (Iām short on time today and this week): I think some actualist views deserve to be taken very seriously, but for the purpose of defending person-centered bottom-up bracketing, I meant to leave open what procreative reasons are supplied by the persons we can bring into existence. E.g., while the framing of welfare-based objections/āregrets suggests an asymmetric view (focused on preventing miserable lives), antiobjections/āgratitudes might give us reasons too (to bring happy lives into existence, or to grant them permitting/ājustifying/ācanceling force). I agree myopia is an issue but think avoiding it is doable. Iād be interested in reading your draft.
(As another judge of the competition: Seconded!)
Hi Jesse and Anthony, thank youāāregarding your second point, I think itās indeed a nonstarter, from a person-centered point of view, to make up a ācounterpartā for Alice. One might think the same regarding your first point: The assumption that Aliceās welfare is zero in B-worlds, where she does not exist, is made up. As Mogensen puts it (p. 1027): āWe may believe, for example, that a personās welfare level is defined in outcomes in which she does not exist, and that it takes a value of zero (Greaves & Cusbert, 2022; Holtug, 2001; Roberts, 2003). This would indeed undermine my argument. However, it is also a position that I find incredible, since I find it incredible that non-existent people have well-defined levels of any measurable quantity, be it height, weight, or welfare, any more than logic has a well-defined temperature.ā
If this is right, it immediately gets us out of the worry expressed in your first point: Alice is indeterminate between the options, so that she is bracketed out (i.e., she provides us with no contrastive reason to favor an option rather than another).
However, it seems to me that this cannot be right. Suppose Alice net-suffers terribly in A-worlds. Surely, this gives us a contrastive reason to choose B rather than A, as far as Alice is concerned. Pace Mogensen, I believe we should be able to get to this verdict without assuming that Aliceās nonexistent welfare is literally zero in B-worlds: In the scenario where Alice exists (we choose A and x-risk is averted), she has a welfare-based perspective on how worlds where she doesnāt exist compare/ārank relative to the world where she exists and suffers, and the comparison prefers nonexistence. (In other words, Alice supplies a welfare-based objection against our choosing A, grounded in the welfare-based take she has on our choice in the scenario where she comes into being.)
So, we have an Alice-indexed contrastive reason not to choose A of the following two-dimensional magnitude: (p ā [0, 1]; her negative welfare, say ā10, or perhaps [-20, 0)). This reason has a determinate direction (favoring B rather than A) but an indeterminate strength. Now suppose that, in choosing A, we also determinately save Mel from malaria, providing her with a +5 welfare benefit, say. Mel thus supplies a contrastive reason of determinate strength favoring A rather than B. The sum of contrastive reasons is now indeterminate, so that either choice is permissible.
This is the correct verdict, I think. Both intuitively and from person-centered āfirst principles,ā impartial altruists should not favor either option in this case. What we have here is one moral patient favoring A, another one opposing A, and the balance of their contrastive reasons being unclear. It makes sense, intuitively and theoretically, that either option should be permissible. (On scope-sensitive forms of altruism, this verdict may change depending on the number of people like Alice and the number of people like Mel involved in the case, as one would expect.)
It is important not to lose sight of the fact that overall indeterminacy is not to be avoided tout court. We should avoid it where, and only where, it does not actually obtain from an impartial altruistic point of view. Consider the following variation on the above case. Suppose our uncertainty regarding Alice is deeper: She might also have a net-happy life in A-worlds, who knows. In that case, Alice provides us with no contrastive reason to favor either option; if we āask her,ā sheās fine with either choice (given her welfare stakes and our credences). Assuming that, in choosing A, we determinately save Mel from malaria, impartial altruists should not reach a verdict of overall indeterminacy: Mel is not fine with either choice and should thus determine our overall verdict.
The empirical situation (regarding x-risk, various ways in which human survival may be realized, and s-risk) is, of course, complicated. My post does not address the question of what kinds of cases we happen to be facing in the actual world today. It aims to make a contribution to the prior conceptual, moral, and decision-theoretic questions.
Iād be curious about how you think about transworld identity and personal identity and to get your take on the following proposal for counterpart relations. I expect that bottom-up bracketing would rarely be action-guiding in practice without counterpart relations, because of huge numbers of contingent moral patients pointing in each direction, and counterpart relations could make some version action-guiding in practice by allowing us to bracket out far more of them.
This is a pretty rough sketch.
One way Iām thinking of grounding counterpart relations is by looking for measures that naturally generalize our concepts of transworld and personal identity. For example, Alice in A is the same person as Alice in B and her past self because of common causes of the features important to Aliceās identity, like her memories, psychological dispositions, etc.. Maybe weād say specifically due to the preservation or inheritance of the physical structures (her brain) responsible for her psychological features from her past selves.
All of this is a matter of degree, because Alice changes over time and could diverge between worlds A and B. Almost all of the particles in her neurons and elsewhere in her body are replaced over time, and which particles make her up will diverge across worlds. In cases of amnesia, brain damage and normal human aging and experience, people can change fairly dramatically in their psychological features. We might say that transworld and personal identity matching are themselves graded. Alice is kind of both the same person and kind of a different person, and more a different person the larger the divergence and the less is inherited.
Then, Alice and Bob, if both human, share more psychological dispositions than Alice and a chicken, and this can be traced back to more recent common causes of their psychological dispositions, i.e. more recent common ancestry between any two humans than between a human and a chicken, passed through genes. This could let us preferentially match counterparts that are more closely related/ātrace more of their genes that account for psychological features back to the same more recent ancestors.
Transworld identity is just a special case of this kind of causal counterpart relation where the common causes of psychological features are especially potent or of a particular kind, e.g. the āsameā brain, which we can trace through spacetime. The gap between distinct persons is admittedly generally much larger than between the same person across worlds or at different points in time, but if itās more a difference in degree than kind since both are graded, then this would give us reason to accept or reject both transworld/āpersonal identity and causal counterpart relations together, rather than accept transworld/āpersonal identiy and reject causal counterpart relations.
One potential supporting argument for the generalization from direct inheritance of psychological features to common causes of psychological features for counterpart relations:
While adult Alice inherits some psychological features from her infant self and infant brain, many of her cognitive capacities as an adult ā which are plausibly important to her identity ā were not directly inherited from her infant self or infant brain (or fetal brain), but were caused in part by general and often region-specific DNA-driven processes to restructure her brain. Furthermore, the vast majority of the particles in her neurons and brain get replaced even if most neurons are preserved, and (Iād guess) the DNA in those neurons are necessary for ensuring their function even as the particles in them turn over. So, Aliceās psychological features and identity over time and across worlds come in large part from her DNA. The same has been typically true for conscious biological beings on Earth so far.
The persistent DNA particles over time cause Aliceās psychological features over time and across worlds. Copies of them from her ancestors cause many of her relativeās similar psychological features over time and across worlds. What grounds her identity across time and worlds is common causes of her psychological features, but going back up the causal chain, we find common causes of psychological features between moral patients, too, not just within, through copies of the same DNA.[1]
If common causes, like someoneās DNA, of shared psychological features across worlds are what ground transworld identity, then we should be able to use common causes, like a common ancestorās DNA from which copies were inherited, of shared psychological features to ground counterpart relations across worlds to generalize transworld identity, too.
We can use other common causes of shared psychological features to ground counterparts more generally. Or even common causes of individualsā existences across worlds, e.g. if someone is deciding between dog breeders to breed a puppy for them (or buying a puppy from them and creating demand for further puppies), they are causally downstream of each of the possible resulting puppies, and this further common cause supports matching the possible resulting puppies across worlds as counterparts.
I also donāt think it would make a difference if all of Aliceās DNA got replaced by exact copies and none of her particles were preserved over time. Either causal relationships or continuity are doing the work here.
Interesting, thanksāāmore later, just one (meta-)comment: Maybe, if huge numbers of individuals are pointing in each direction (i.e., if we are clueful enough to be able to pick out these individuals and assign them a contrastive reason of determinate direction but vague magnitude), it would be a mistake for impartial altruists to reach a determinate overall verdict. In cases where the balance of contrastive person-attributable reasons is vague, it seems inadequate to favor either option. In other words, indeterminacy may not be a problem to āsolveā in these cases (whether hypothetical or actual); instead, it would be a problem if our theory told us that the situation, in these particular cases, is determinate.
I might be able to share a couple of thoughts on identity and counterpart relations laterāāitās very tricky business, of course. For now, just one more thought on your apparent intuition (?) that, in the cases we are actually/āempirically facing today, we should be able to set far future individuals aside. There might be another, principled way of doing this that may align quite well with the defense of person-centered bottom-up bracketing offered in the post (which justifies its verdicts in terms of each personās ex ante perspective on our choices). Start with the plausible, widely shared idea that no number of mild, barely noticeable headaches can outweigh unbearable, torture-level suffering, i.e., draw a distinction between ālowerā and āhigherā kinds of suffering (and perhaps an analogous distinction between lower and higher kinds of happiness, Ć la John Stuart Mill). Then argue that sufficiently tiny probabilities of higher suffering still fall into the lower prospect category, i.e., can be traded off with headaches. (In other words, come up with a way to avoid the kind of fanaticism at issue here.) Finally, argue that our empirical situation happens to be such that, with our actions today, we can only make sufficiently tiny probability-dents in the fates of individual far future people (as represented by us).
I agree with the meta point, but my reaction is that if this particular theory is practically never action-guiding, Iāll just move onto other theories that could be action-guiding, say via some kind of metanormative bracketing or wager.
I think treating tiny probabilities of severe suffering (or any large difference for an individual) as lower would probably work to often give determinate comparisons, as you suggest. We could get a range of views that set the thresholds between higher and lower in different places and have moral uncertainty over them.
It could go too far or turn on empirical facts that in my view it shouldnāt really, although this is pulling in nonidentity/ācounterpart intuitions, so basically question begging.
Generally any moral patients who do not yet exist /ā are not yet conceived could be dramatically discounted because each such pre-specified individual is extremely unlikely to exist, based on the huge number of sperm cells in the race to fertilize an egg. The view could practically be a strict person-affecting view like presentism or necessitarianism.
All of our apparently cost-effective animal welfare interventions could only help animals to the lower level, because none of them help already conceived individuals, given the delay between the decision to support an intervention and its actual implementation.
Causing millions more chickens to be factory farmed per year would only reach the lower level for each resulting chicken ex ante.
Plausibly each specific far future moral patient is far far far less likely to exist than any specific chicken in the next 10 years. Each individualās probability of existing could roughly decrease exponentially with their generation number from the present, at least for biological moral patients. So, there could be thresholds where chickens over the next few years reach higher, but far future moral patients only reach lower. But should the view turn on these particulars?
Hi Impartial, thanks for this reply! Canāt speak for Jesse, but I definitely agree with this:
So, if bracketing (either TD or BU) is entirely non-action-guiding for the reasons Jesse mentions, that doesnāt bear on whether bracketing is a good normative theory. But it does bear on your claim at the start of your post: āBottom-up, person-centered bracketing can thus preserve principled impartial action guidanceā.
Hi againāāthanks! Yes, I should have been more precise about what the claim is Iām trying to argue: that person-centered bottom-up bracketing provides action guiding (determinate) verdicts in just those cases, whether hypothetical or actual, where altruistic action guidance plausibly obtains, and outputs indeterminacy in the other cases. In other words, the claim is that there are no normatively problematic failures of action guidance.
Is this a version of (weak) actualism as a person-affecting theory? In worlds where Alice doesnāt exist, she has no properties like welfare to provide us any reasons or welfare-based objections.
Weak actualism, as in the literature (Hare, 2007, Spencer, 2021 section 6), would say to pick among the options that maximize āself-conditional valueā. An option is permissible only if itās no worse than any other for the people who (ever) exist in the resulting outcome. In other words, assuming we choose the option A, we compare all the options pairwise on the basis of the reasons provided by the people who would exist given our choice of A,[1] and if A is no worse overall than any other option on these comparisons, then it maximizes self-conditional value.[2]
It sounds similar to what you wrote here, too:
Weighing the reasons by the probability that those reasons exist at all, say.
Weak actualism doesnāt need to say that all options that maximize self-conditional value are permissible. There are some cases where we can plausibly recommend choices between them.
I also think maximizing self-conditional value as formalized in the literature is the wrong approach for an actualist when deciding between at least 3 options, because itās myopic, and we should use backward induction on behalf of the people who would exist given an option. This can avoid the repugnant conclusion. I have an unpublished draft based on the idea of backward induction for weak actualism Iād be happy to share, and I discuss the problem a bit here.
Thanks, Michaelābriefly for now (Iām short on time today and this week): I think some actualist views deserve to be taken very seriously, but for the purpose of defending person-centered bottom-up bracketing, I meant to leave open what procreative reasons are supplied by the persons we can bring into existence. E.g., while the framing of welfare-based objections/āregrets suggests an asymmetric view (focused on preventing miserable lives), antiobjections/āgratitudes might give us reasons too (to bring happy lives into existence, or to grant them permitting/ājustifying/ācanceling force). I agree myopia is an issue but think avoiding it is doable. Iād be interested in reading your draft.
Hereās the draft!