My post and some other Actualist views support the procreation asymmetry without directly depending on any kind of asymmetry between goods and bads, harms and benefits, victims and beneficiaries, problems and opportunities or any kind of claimed psychological/consciousness asymmetries, instead only asymmetry in treating actual world people/interests vs non-actual world people/interests. I didn’t really know what Actualism was at the time I wrote my post, and more standard accounts like Weak Actualism (see perhaps Hare, 2007,Roberts, 2011 or Spencer, 2021, and the latter responds to objections in the first two) or Spencer, 2021′s recent Stable Actualism may be better. Another relatively recent paper is Cohen, 2019. There are probably other Actualist accounts out there, too.
I think Frick, 2020 also supports the procreation asymmetry without depending directly on an asymmetry, although Bykvist and Campbell, 2021 dispute this. Frick claims we have conditional reasons of the following kind:
I have reason to (if I do p, do q)
(In evaluative terms, which I prefer, we might instead write “it’s better that (if p, then q)”, but I’ll stick with Frick’s terminology here.)
Specifically in the case of procreation:
I have a moral reason to (if I create a new person, make it the case that this person’s life is at least neutral)
This gives us reason to prevent bad lives, but not reason to create good lives.
Bykvist and Campbell, 2021 criticize this and then steelman it into a contrastive reason (although to me the distinction seems kind of silly, and I think I normally think of reasons as contrastive, anyway):
I have a moral reason to (if I create a new person, make it the case that this person’s life is at least neutral) rather than not (if I create a new person, make it the case that this person’s life is at least neutral).
And if we generalize:
I have reason to (if I do p, do q) rather than not (if I do p, do q)
Bykvist and Campbell, 2021 claim that this still fails to imply that we have no reason to create good lives. That’s correct, but, as far as I can tell, there’s no symmetric argument that gives us a reason to create good lives; I think you’d need to modify “if I do p, do q” in a way that’s no longer an implication, and so not a “conditional reason” at all. So, this is a counterexample to MacAskill’s claim. Then, to get the other side of the asymmetry, we could just claim that all reasons are of this general (contrastive) conditional kind, where p conditions on the existence of a moral patient or an interest and q refers to it/them.
This can also be used to defend antifrustrationism and negative preference utilitarianism in particular, since among allowable reasons (not necessarily all reasons would be of this form), we could let p be “allow some preference x to come to exist” and let q be “ensure that x is perfectly satisfied”, so that it’s better for a preference to not exist than go less than perfectly satisfied. If all reasons are of the conditional kind where p is like “allow preference x to come to exist” (or “some preference x exists” in evaluative terms), we have no inherent reason to ensure any preference exists at all.
Although Magnus doesn’t mention it, I think you’re aware of Bader’s article on the asymmetry, which also supports the asymmetry without depending on an asymmetry, instead using “structural consistency”.
Of course, I also just think that some asymmetries are directly intuitive, and that flipping them is not, as Magnus pointed out. The procreation asymmetry is one of my strongest intuitions. I don’t have the intuition that pleasure is good in itself, but I have the intuition that (involuntary) suffering is bad. I find antifrustrationism and asymmetric preference-affecting views intuitive, also partly because ignoring an individual’s own preferences to create and satisfy new ones in them seems pretty “perverse” to me; I discuss this a bit more here.
For what it’s worth, Magnus cites me, 2019 and Frick, 2020 further down.
My post and some other Actualist views support the procreation asymmetry without directly depending on any kind of asymmetry between goods and bads, harms and benefits, victims and beneficiaries, problems and opportunities or any kind of claimed psychological/consciousness asymmetries, instead only asymmetry in treating actual world people/interests vs non-actual world people/interests. I didn’t really know what Actualism was at the time I wrote my post, and more standard accounts like Weak Actualism (see perhaps Hare, 2007, Roberts, 2011 or Spencer, 2021, and the latter responds to objections in the first two) or Spencer, 2021′s recent Stable Actualism may be better. Another relatively recent paper is Cohen, 2019. There are probably other Actualist accounts out there, too.
I think Frick, 2020 also supports the procreation asymmetry without depending directly on an asymmetry, although Bykvist and Campbell, 2021 dispute this. Frick claims we have conditional reasons of the following kind:
(In evaluative terms, which I prefer, we might instead write “it’s better that (if p, then q)”, but I’ll stick with Frick’s terminology here.)
Specifically in the case of procreation:
This gives us reason to prevent bad lives, but not reason to create good lives.
Bykvist and Campbell, 2021 criticize this and then steelman it into a contrastive reason (although to me the distinction seems kind of silly, and I think I normally think of reasons as contrastive, anyway):
And if we generalize:
Bykvist and Campbell, 2021 claim that this still fails to imply that we have no reason to create good lives. That’s correct, but, as far as I can tell, there’s no symmetric argument that gives us a reason to create good lives; I think you’d need to modify “if I do p, do q” in a way that’s no longer an implication, and so not a “conditional reason” at all. So, this is a counterexample to MacAskill’s claim. Then, to get the other side of the asymmetry, we could just claim that all reasons are of this general (contrastive) conditional kind, where p conditions on the existence of a moral patient or an interest and q refers to it/them.
This can also be used to defend antifrustrationism and negative preference utilitarianism in particular, since among allowable reasons (not necessarily all reasons would be of this form), we could let p be “allow some preference x to come to exist” and let q be “ensure that x is perfectly satisfied”, so that it’s better for a preference to not exist than go less than perfectly satisfied. If all reasons are of the conditional kind where p is like “allow preference x to come to exist” (or “some preference x exists” in evaluative terms), we have no inherent reason to ensure any preference exists at all.
Although Magnus doesn’t mention it, I think you’re aware of Bader’s article on the asymmetry, which also supports the asymmetry without depending on an asymmetry, instead using “structural consistency”.
Of course, I also just think that some asymmetries are directly intuitive, and that flipping them is not, as Magnus pointed out. The procreation asymmetry is one of my strongest intuitions. I don’t have the intuition that pleasure is good in itself, but I have the intuition that (involuntary) suffering is bad. I find antifrustrationism and asymmetric preference-affecting views intuitive, also partly because ignoring an individual’s own preferences to create and satisfy new ones in them seems pretty “perverse” to me; I discuss this a bit more here.