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.
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.