Is the argument something like we should only care about fulfilling preferences that already exist, and adding people to the world doesn’t automatically do that, so there’s no general reason to add happy people if it doesn’t satisfy a preference of someone who is here already?
Pretty much, but my point is only that this is a perfectly defensible way to think about population ethics, not that I expect everyone to find it compelling over alternatives.
As I say in the longer post:
Just like the concept “athletic fitness” has several defensible interpretations (e.g., the difference between a 100m sprinter and a marathon runner), so (I argue) does “doing the most moral/altruistic thing.”
I agree with what you write about “objective” – I’m guilty of violating your advice.
(That said, I think there’s a sense in which preference utilitarianism would be unsatisfying as a “moral realist” answer to all of ethics because it doesn’t say anything about what preferences to adopt. Or, if it did say what preferences to adopt, then it would again be subject to my criticism – what if objective preference utilitarianism says I should think of my preferences in one particular way but that doesn’t resonate with me?)
Couldn’t you show that adding suffering people isn’t automatically bad by the same reasoning, since it doesn’t necessarily violate an existing preference?
I tried to address this in the last paragraph of my previous comment. It gets a bit complicated because I’m relying on a distinction between “ambitious morality” and “minimal morality” ( = “don’t be a jerk”) which also only makes sense if there’s no objective axiology.
I don’t expect the following to be easily intelligible to people used to thinking within the moral realist framework, but for more context, I recommend the section “minimal morality vs. ambitious morality” here. This link explains why I think it makes sense to have a distinction between minimal morality and ambitious morality, instead of treating all of morality as the same thing. (“Care morality” vs. “cooperation morality” is a similar framing, which probably tells you more about what I mean here.) And my earlier comment (in particular, the last paragraph in my previous comment) already explained why I think minimal morality contains a population-ethical asymmetry.
Pretty much, but my point is only that this is a perfectly defensible way to think about population ethics, not that I expect everyone to find it compelling over alternatives.
As I say in the longer post:
I agree with what you write about “objective” – I’m guilty of violating your advice.
(That said, I think there’s a sense in which preference utilitarianism would be unsatisfying as a “moral realist” answer to all of ethics because it doesn’t say anything about what preferences to adopt. Or, if it did say what preferences to adopt, then it would again be subject to my criticism – what if objective preference utilitarianism says I should think of my preferences in one particular way but that doesn’t resonate with me?)
I tried to address this in the last paragraph of my previous comment. It gets a bit complicated because I’m relying on a distinction between “ambitious morality” and “minimal morality” ( = “don’t be a jerk”) which also only makes sense if there’s no objective axiology.
I don’t expect the following to be easily intelligible to people used to thinking within the moral realist framework, but for more context, I recommend the section “minimal morality vs. ambitious morality” here. This link explains why I think it makes sense to have a distinction between minimal morality and ambitious morality, instead of treating all of morality as the same thing. (“Care morality” vs. “cooperation morality” is a similar framing, which probably tells you more about what I mean here.) And my earlier comment (in particular, the last paragraph in my previous comment) already explained why I think minimal morality contains a population-ethical asymmetry.