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.
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.