I agree that the extreme view is inconsistent with “the person-affecting view” (the specific principle), or at least, conscious wellbeing would no longer be action-guiding, but there are other “person-affecting views” that would still be action-guiding and also avoid the repugnant conclusion when applied to “atoms”, “person-moments” or individual experiences.
It’s possible to both satisfy the procreation asymmetry and “solve” the nonidentity problem, with a wide asymmetric person-affecting view, at the cost of the independence of irrelevant alternatives, see
Or, with a narrow asymmetric person-affecting view, i.e. being indifferent when both experiences would be “positive”, but choosing against the worst off one when it is negative, only negative states would matter. Negative utilitarianism could be founded on such a view. See also tranquilism, and this thread on my shortform.
You could also have something like a wide necessitarianism, which would “solve” the nonidentity problem but have nothing to say about whether adding extra experiences is good or bad (assuming no effects on others), regardless of their welfare. At the level of persons, I think Teruji Thomas’ paper discusses this, and Christopher Meacham’s approach could probably be modified for this, too. See also Dasgupta’s approach, described in “The welfare economics of population” by John Broome, which could be combined with something like Meacham’s counterpart relations.
Thank you very much for this great reply! I’ll certainly check them out once I get back to thinking about population ethics.
I do want to make clear that the approach I took in this paper was one of seeing what views and implications would “flow” from reductionism, rather than one of finding the best theory to accommodate our existing moral intuitions in light of some new fact.
I agree that the extreme view is inconsistent with “the person-affecting view” (the specific principle), or at least, conscious wellbeing would no longer be action-guiding, but there are other “person-affecting views” that would still be action-guiding and also avoid the repugnant conclusion when applied to “atoms”, “person-moments” or individual experiences.
It’s possible to both satisfy the procreation asymmetry and “solve” the nonidentity problem, with a wide asymmetric person-affecting view, at the cost of the independence of irrelevant alternatives, see
“Person-affecting views and saturating counterpart relations” by Christopher Meacham
“‘Making People Happy, Not Making Happy People’: A Defense of the Asymmetry Intuition in Population Ethics” by Johann Frick
“The Asymmetry, Uncertainty, and the Long Term” by Teruji Thomas
Or, with a narrow asymmetric person-affecting view, i.e. being indifferent when both experiences would be “positive”, but choosing against the worst off one when it is negative, only negative states would matter. Negative utilitarianism could be founded on such a view. See also tranquilism, and this thread on my shortform.
You could also have something like a wide necessitarianism, which would “solve” the nonidentity problem but have nothing to say about whether adding extra experiences is good or bad (assuming no effects on others), regardless of their welfare. At the level of persons, I think Teruji Thomas’ paper discusses this, and Christopher Meacham’s approach could probably be modified for this, too. See also Dasgupta’s approach, described in “The welfare economics of population” by John Broome, which could be combined with something like Meacham’s counterpart relations.
Thank you very much for this great reply! I’ll certainly check them out once I get back to thinking about population ethics.
I do want to make clear that the approach I took in this paper was one of seeing what views and implications would “flow” from reductionism, rather than one of finding the best theory to accommodate our existing moral intuitions in light of some new fact.