The Asymmetry is certainly widely discussed by academic philosophers, as shown by e.g. the philpapers search you link to. I also agree that it seems off to characterize it as a “niche view”.
I’m not sure, however, whether it is widely endorsed or even widely defended. Are you aware of any surveys or other kinds of evidence that would speak to that more directly than the fact that there are lot of papers on the subject (which I think primarily shows that it’s an attractive topic to write about by the standards of academic philosophy)?
I’d be pretty interested in understanding the actual distribution of views among professional philosophers, with the caveat that I don’t think this is necessarily that much evidence for what view on population ethics should ultimately guide our actions. The caveat is roughly because I think the incentives of academic philosophy aren’t strongly favoring beliefs on which it’d be overall good to act on, as opposed to views one can publish well about (of course there are things pushing in the other direction as well, e.g. these are people who’ve thought about it a lot and use criteria for critizing and refining views that are more widely endorsed, so it is certainly some evidence, hence my interest).
FWIW my own impression is closer to:
The Asymmetry is widely held to be an intuitive desideratum for theories of population ethics.
As usual (cf. the founding impetus of ‘experimental philosophy’), philosophers don’t usually check whether the intuition is in fact widely held, and recent empirical work casts some doubt on that.
As usual, there are also at least some philosophers trying to ‘explain away’ the intuition (e.g. in this case Chappell 2017).
However, it turns out that it is hard to find a theory of population ethics that rationalizes the Asymmetry without having other problems. My sense is that this assessment – in part due to prominent impossibility theorems – is widely shared, and that there is likely no single widely held specific view that implies the Asymmetry.
This is basically the kind of situation that tends to spawn an ‘industry’ in academic philosophy, in which people come up with increasingly complex views that avoid known problems with previous views, other people point out new problems, and so on. And this is precisely what happened.
Overall, it is pretty hard to tell from this how many philosophers ‘actually believe’ the Asymmetry, in part because many participants in the conversation may not think of themselves as having any settled beliefs on the matter and in part because the whole language game seems to often involve “beliefs” that are at best pretty compartmentalized (e.g. don’t explain an agent’s actions in the world at large) and at worst not central examples of belief at all (perhaps more similar to how an actor relates to the beliefs of a character while enacting a play).
I think in many ways, the Asymmetry is like the view that there is some kind of principled difference between ideas and matter or that humans have free will of some sort – a perhaps widely held intuition, and certainly a fertile ground for long debates between philosophers, from which, however, it is hard to draw any clear conclusion if you are an agent who (unlike the debating philosophers) faces a high-stakes, real-world action depending on the matter. (It’s also different in some ways, e.g. it seems easier to agree on a precise statement of the Asymmetry than for some of these other issues.)
Curious how well this impression matches yours? I could imagine that the impression one gets (like me) primarily from reading the literature may be somewhat different from e.g. the vibe at conferences.
I agree with the ‘spawned an industry’ point and how that makes it difficult to assess how widespread various views really are.
As usual (cf. the founding impetus of ‘experimental philosophy’), philosophers don’t usually check whether the intuition is in fact widely held, and recent empirical work casts some doubt on that.
Magnus in the OP discusses the paper you link to in the quoted passage and points out that it also contains findings we can interpret in support of a (weak) asymmetry of some kind. Also, David (the David who’s a co-author of the paper) told me recently that he thinks these types of surveys are not worth updating on by much [edit: but “casts some doubt on” is still accurate if we previously believed people would have clear answers that favor the asymmetry] because the subjects often interpret things in all kinds of ways or don’t seem to have consistent views across multiple answers. (The publication itself mentions in the “Supplementary Materials” that framing effects play a huge role.)
This impression strikes me as basically spot on. It would have been more accurate for me to say it’s taken to be a “widely held to be an intuitive desideratum for theories of population ethics”. It does have its defenders, though, e.g. Frick, Roberts, Bader. I agree that there does not seem to be any theory that rationalises this intuition without having other problems (but this is merely a specific instance of the general case that there seems to be no theory of population ethics that retains all our intuitions—hence Arrhenius’ famous impossibility result).
I’m not aware of any surveys of philosophers on their views on population ethics. AFAIT, the number of professional philosophers who are experts in population ethics—depending on how one wants to define those terms—could probably fit into one lecture room.
The Asymmetry is certainly widely discussed by academic philosophers, as shown by e.g. the philpapers search you link to. I also agree that it seems off to characterize it as a “niche view”.
I’m not sure, however, whether it is widely endorsed or even widely defended. Are you aware of any surveys or other kinds of evidence that would speak to that more directly than the fact that there are lot of papers on the subject (which I think primarily shows that it’s an attractive topic to write about by the standards of academic philosophy)?
I’d be pretty interested in understanding the actual distribution of views among professional philosophers, with the caveat that I don’t think this is necessarily that much evidence for what view on population ethics should ultimately guide our actions. The caveat is roughly because I think the incentives of academic philosophy aren’t strongly favoring beliefs on which it’d be overall good to act on, as opposed to views one can publish well about (of course there are things pushing in the other direction as well, e.g. these are people who’ve thought about it a lot and use criteria for critizing and refining views that are more widely endorsed, so it is certainly some evidence, hence my interest).
FWIW my own impression is closer to:
The Asymmetry is widely held to be an intuitive desideratum for theories of population ethics.
As usual (cf. the founding impetus of ‘experimental philosophy’), philosophers don’t usually check whether the intuition is in fact widely held, and recent empirical work casts some doubt on that.
As usual, there are also at least some philosophers trying to ‘explain away’ the intuition (e.g. in this case Chappell 2017).
However, it turns out that it is hard to find a theory of population ethics that rationalizes the Asymmetry without having other problems. My sense is that this assessment – in part due to prominent impossibility theorems – is widely shared, and that there is likely no single widely held specific view that implies the Asymmetry.
This is basically the kind of situation that tends to spawn an ‘industry’ in academic philosophy, in which people come up with increasingly complex views that avoid known problems with previous views, other people point out new problems, and so on. And this is precisely what happened.
Overall, it is pretty hard to tell from this how many philosophers ‘actually believe’ the Asymmetry, in part because many participants in the conversation may not think of themselves as having any settled beliefs on the matter and in part because the whole language game seems to often involve “beliefs” that are at best pretty compartmentalized (e.g. don’t explain an agent’s actions in the world at large) and at worst not central examples of belief at all (perhaps more similar to how an actor relates to the beliefs of a character while enacting a play).
I think in many ways, the Asymmetry is like the view that there is some kind of principled difference between ideas and matter or that humans have free will of some sort – a perhaps widely held intuition, and certainly a fertile ground for long debates between philosophers, from which, however, it is hard to draw any clear conclusion if you are an agent who (unlike the debating philosophers) faces a high-stakes, real-world action depending on the matter. (It’s also different in some ways, e.g. it seems easier to agree on a precise statement of the Asymmetry than for some of these other issues.)
Curious how well this impression matches yours? I could imagine that the impression one gets (like me) primarily from reading the literature may be somewhat different from e.g. the vibe at conferences.
I agree with the ‘spawned an industry’ point and how that makes it difficult to assess how widespread various views really are.
Magnus in the OP discusses the paper you link to in the quoted passage and points out that it also contains findings we can interpret in support of a (weak) asymmetry of some kind. Also, David (the David who’s a co-author of the paper) told me recently that he thinks these types of surveys are not worth updating on by much [edit: but “casts some doubt on” is still accurate if we previously believed people would have clear answers that favor the asymmetry] because the subjects often interpret things in all kinds of ways or don’t seem to have consistent views across multiple answers. (The publication itself mentions in the “Supplementary Materials” that framing effects play a huge role.)
Thank you, that’s interesting and I hadn’t seen this.
(I now wrote a comment elaborating on some of these inconsistencies here.)
This impression strikes me as basically spot on. It would have been more accurate for me to say it’s taken to be a “widely held to be an intuitive desideratum for theories of population ethics”. It does have its defenders, though, e.g. Frick, Roberts, Bader. I agree that there does not seem to be any theory that rationalises this intuition without having other problems (but this is merely a specific instance of the general case that there seems to be no theory of population ethics that retains all our intuitions—hence Arrhenius’ famous impossibility result).
I’m not aware of any surveys of philosophers on their views on population ethics. AFAIT, the number of professional philosophers who are experts in population ethics—depending on how one wants to define those terms—could probably fit into one lecture room.