We found that people do not endorse the so-called intuition of neutrality according to which creating new people with lives worth living is morally neutral. In Studies 2a-b, participants considered a world containing an additional happy person better and a world containing an additional unhappy person worse.
Moreover, we also found that people’s judgments about the positive value of adding a new happy person and the negative value of adding a new unhappy person were symmetrical. That is, their judgments did not reflect the so-called asymmetry—according to which adding a new unhappy person is bad but adding a new happy person is neutral.
The study design is quite different from Nuno’s, though. No doubt the study design matters.
In 2a, it looks like they didn’t explicitly get subjects to try to control for impacts on other people in their question like Nuno did, and (I’m not sure if this matters) they assumed the extra person would be added to a world of a million neutral life people. They just asked, for each of adding a neutral life, adding a bad life and adding a good life:
In terms of its overall value, how much better or worse would this world (containing this additional person) be compared to before?
2b was pretty similar, but used either an empty world or world of a billion neutral life people.
I wonder if the reason for adding the happy person to the empty world is not welfarist, though, e.g. maybe people really dislike empty worlds, value life in itself or think empty worlds lack beauty or something. EDIT: Indeed, it seemed some people preferred to add an unhappy life than not, basically no one preferred not to add a happy life and people tended to prefer adding a neutral life than not, based on figure 5 (an answer of 4 means “equally good”, above means better and below means worse). Maybe another explanation compatible with welfarist symmetry is that if there’s at least one life, good or bad, they expect good lives eventually, and for them to outweigh the bad.
Also, does the question actually answer whether anyone in particular holds the asymmetry, or are they just averaging responses across people? You could have some people who actually give greater weight to adding a happy life to an empty world than adding a miserable life to an empty world (which seems to be the case, based on Figure 5), along with people holding the standard asymmetry or weaker versions, and they could roughly cancel out in aggregate to support symmetry.
There is a paper by Lucius Caviola et al of relevance:
The study design is quite different from Nuno’s, though. No doubt the study design matters.
In 2a, it looks like they didn’t explicitly get subjects to try to control for impacts on other people in their question like Nuno did, and (I’m not sure if this matters) they assumed the extra person would be added to a world of a million neutral life people. They just asked, for each of adding a neutral life, adding a bad life and adding a good life:
2b was pretty similar, but used either an empty world or world of a billion neutral life people.
2b involves an empty world—where there can’t be an effect on other people—and replicates 2a afaict.
Fair, my mistake.
I wonder if the reason for adding the happy person to the empty world is not welfarist, though, e.g. maybe people really dislike empty worlds, value life in itself or think empty worlds lack beauty or something. EDIT: Indeed, it seemed some people preferred to add an unhappy life than not, basically no one preferred not to add a happy life and people tended to prefer adding a neutral life than not, based on figure 5 (an answer of 4 means “equally good”, above means better and below means worse). Maybe another explanation compatible with welfarist symmetry is that if there’s at least one life, good or bad, they expect good lives eventually, and for them to outweigh the bad.
Also, does the question actually answer whether anyone in particular holds the asymmetry, or are they just averaging responses across people? You could have some people who actually give greater weight to adding a happy life to an empty world than adding a miserable life to an empty world (which seems to be the case, based on Figure 5), along with people holding the standard asymmetry or weaker versions, and they could roughly cancel out in aggregate to support symmetry.