The intuition seems to be almost universally held. I agree many philosophers (and others) think that this intuition must, on reflection, be mistaken. But many philosophers, even after reflection, still think the procreative asymmetry is correct. I’m not sure how interesting it would be to argue about the appropriate meaning of the phrase “very widely held”. Based on my (perhaps atypical) experience, I guess that if you polled those who had taken a class on population ethics, I expect about 10% would agree with the statement “the procreative asymmetry is a niche position”.
Which version of the intuition? If you just mean ‘there is greater value in preventing the creation of a life with X net utils of suffering than in creating a life with X net utils of pleasure’, then maybe. But people often claim that ‘adding net-happy people is neutral, whilst adding net-suffering people is bad’ is intuitive, and there was a fairly recent paper claiming to find that this wasn’t what ordinary people thought when surveyed: https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/12537/the-asymmetry-of-population-ethics-experimental-social-choice-and-dual-process-moral-reasoning
I haven’t actually read the paper to check if it’s any good though...
The intuition seems to be almost universally held. I agree many philosophers (and others) think that this intuition must, on reflection, be mistaken. But many philosophers, even after reflection, still think the procreative asymmetry is correct. I’m not sure how interesting it would be to argue about the appropriate meaning of the phrase “very widely held”. Based on my (perhaps atypical) experience, I guess that if you polled those who had taken a class on population ethics, I expect about 10% would agree with the statement “the procreative asymmetry is a niche position”.
Which version of the intuition? If you just mean ‘there is greater value in preventing the creation of a life with X net utils of suffering than in creating a life with X net utils of pleasure’, then maybe. But people often claim that ‘adding net-happy people is neutral, whilst adding net-suffering people is bad’ is intuitive, and there was a fairly recent paper claiming to find that this wasn’t what ordinary people thought when surveyed: https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/12537/the-asymmetry-of-population-ethics-experimental-social-choice-and-dual-process-moral-reasoning
I haven’t actually read the paper to check if it’s any good though...