Socrates Café Kuala Lumpur

Population Ethics: The More The Merrier?

Sun, Apr 26 · 5:00 PM MYT

Top G Coffee & Cafe, Lot 05, Level G4, Block D5, Publika Shopping Galery, Solaris Dutamas, Kuala Lumpur, MY

Population ethics is concerned with issues that arise when our actions affect the number or identities of people who can exist. Whereas most moral questions ask what we owe to people who already exist, some of our choices today can affect who will exist in the future at all.

Suppose we wanted to make the world a better place. We could make existing people's lives better. We could also try and make the future better. The central problem with population ethics arises because each of us were conceived from a particular pair of cells. It seems true that if any particular person had not been conceived when they were in fact conceived, it is in fact true that they would never have existed.

Parfit cites an example of some British politician welcoming the fact that there were fewer teenage pregnancies in the 80s. A middle-aged man wrote in anger to The Times, admitting that while his early years had been hard for both his 14-year-old mother and himself, his life was now well worth living. He was livid that the politician seemed to suggest that it would have been better if he had never been born. Were his mother to have conceived later in life, the resulting child born would not have been from the same sperm and ovum that conceived that middle-aged man. A different child would have been brought into existence.

Suppose that a couple are considering having a child. They suffer from a vitamin B9 and B12 deficiency, which may make the child susceptible to major depressive disorder. They could conceive now, or conceive a few months later. The couple does not harm the future child by conceiving today. They merely bring a different child into existence. This decision would not be worse for any of the children. On this account, our regular ethics does not tell us how to act in this case.

When we scale it up, the conclusions we must accept get less intuitive. If we were to solve alleviate global poverty by neglecting climate change prevention, we could alleviate the suffering of many existing people. The future quality of life may be worse, but so long as future lives are worth living, can we say we have acted wrongly?

If we think more people living happier lives is better, is it then better to have one excellent lives or 2 decent lives? How about 10 billion good lives or 100 billion half-as-good lives? What about only 1 billion people living doubly good lives?

Many policies affect the number and identities of future people, most obviously China's one-child policy; policies incentivising or disincentivising childbirth; or preventing genetic diseases from being inherited. Our ethics seems unequipped to make decisive decisions on these issues.

This session is an introduction to those tensions. No background in philosophy is needed. The aim of this session is to see whether our ethics or our intuitions can get us far enough to make sense of these issues, and if not, which we need to give up.

Discussion questions:

1. Are we morally required to prevent lives full of suffering? If so, are we also morally required to create extra happy people?
2. How much do future people count morally, and do we therefore have additional reasons to spend resources to improve the future?
3. Kavka's claim: if your parents had conceived you even one minute earlier or later, you would never have existed. Do we believe this?
4. If your existence depends causally on some horrible historical event (suppose a war that killed millions led your grandparents to meet), can we regret that that event occurred?
5. Would we do something wrong if we create a person with a decent life when instead we could create a person with an excellent life?
6. What does a life barely worth living look like?
7. Suppose we have a choice between two futures: Future A has 10 billion people with excellent lives. Future A+ has 10 billion people with excellent lives and 10 billion lives that are barely worth living. Which is better?
8. Is the repugnant conclusion all that repugnant?
9. Suppose we (or Dr. Brand from Interstellar) could colonise a faraway planet where life is roughly as good as on Earth with the same proportion of lives containing happiness and suffering. Would it be wrong to create this civilisation because some people within it will suffer?
10. Finally, which theory of population ethics should we adopt? Do we bite the repugnant bullet, or can we make the conclusion less repugnant?

Recommended readings
"The Repugnant Conclusion" (4:30 video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLcWjDYIjgo
- Video, (4:30). Introduces how we get to the repugnant conclusion.

Oh No, Is the Repugnant Conclusion... Correct?" (article) https://morallawwithin.substack.com/p/oh-no-is-the-repugnant-conclusion
- Short article on how we arrive at the repugnant conclusion.

utilitarianism.net, "Population Ethics" (article) https://utilitarianism.net/population-ethics/
- **What to read:** Introduction, sections 3 (The Total View), 4 (The Average View), and 6 (Person-Affecting Views).
- This article maps the five main theories of population ethics and shows what problems each one faces. It's written from a broadly utilitarian perspective, so if you're sceptical you can check out the Theron Pummer lecture below.
- The article deals mainly with axiological questions (how to assign value to different populations) rather than normative ones (what we're obligated to do).
- By the way, there is an extensive further reading section here if you want to look at the literature on population ethics.

Derek Parfit, "Reasons and Persons (1984)" - Part IV (Primary text)
- §119. How Our Identity In Face Depends On When We Were Conceived (pages 351 & 352 only)
- This helps to establish the non-identity problem by establishing a "time-dependence claim".
- §122. A Young Girl's Child & §123. How Lowering the Quality of Life Might Be Worse for No One.
- Without appealing to utilitarianism, to answer these thought experiments we might be tempted to adopt a total or average view.
- §131. The Repugnant Conclusion
- If you think adding extra happy people always makes things better, you end up committed to the repugnant conclusion that feels intuitively wrong.

Further Reading
"The Non-Identity Problem" (47min lecture) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQAX8k6Lf2Y
- Video essay on the non-identity problem by Johann Frick.
- The stretch from 8:00–19:22 covers the core problem and applies it to climate change policy.

Gregory Sadler, Parfit's Reasons and Persons lecture series
- **The non-identity problem**: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7NFgWQ5FYg
- **The repugnant conclusion** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rErE7J_CxQ
- **The absurd conclusion**
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOhA_TgV54g

Hilary Greaves on Population Ethics (podcast, 30min segment) https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/hilary-greaves-global-priorities-institute/
- Podcast with Hilary Greaves. Population ethics starts around the 56:00 minute mark and ends at 1:26:00-ish. The rest of the podcast isn't relevant to the discussion.

Theron Pummer, "Person-Affecting Views and the Asymmetry" (lecture) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVRlHGUMzx4
- Theron Pummer's lecture, where he presents a convincing person-affecting view.

Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (reference articles)

• https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
• https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonidentity-problem/

utilitarianism.net's further readings https://utilitarianism.net/population-ethics/#resources-and-further-reading

Readings from Shelly Kagan's seminar https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ems4xFQfhdK5xcsJm/shelly-kagan-readings-for-ethics-and-the-future-seminar

Themes & Concepts To Look Out For:
Broadly, population ethics divides into 'axiological' issues (How we should assign value) and 'normative' issues (How we should act). For example:

• Axiological: Is a world in which many people with good lives barely worth living better than a world with few people with excellent, flourishing lives?
• Normative: Do we have a duty to create many people with good lives barely worth living rather than create a world of few people with excellent, flourishing lives?

These are the difficult problems in population ethics:

• The non-identity problem: Because the existence of some future people depends on what we do now, actions that lower the welfare of future people are not straightforwardly bad because they may not otherwise exist. Improving the future entails bringing different people into existence.
• The mere addition paradox: A mere addition of positive wellbeing seems at least as good as no mere addition, and can lead us to the repugnant conclusion if we don't find reasons to endorse inequality.
• The repugnant conclusion: for any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living (Parfit 1984, 388).
• The procreation asymmetry: (i) We have moral reasons not to cause a person whose life would not be worth living to exist; (ii) We have no moral reason to cause a person whose life is worth living to exist. These two claims seem plausible, but it's hard to find a satisfying explanation of why we should accept both of them at once.

If you're interested in the axiological, this is a non-exhaustive list of competing theories of population ethics:

• The Total View: More total wellbeing is better
• The Average View: Higher average wellbeing is better
• Variable Value Theory: When the population is small, adopt a total view. When it is large, adopt an average view.
• Critical Level Theory: More total wellbeing is better provided it is above a certain level.
• Lexical Views: Basically, no amount of lizards pleasantly basking in the sun can replace a world without Mozart.

Normatively, you might instead be interested in:

• The intuition of neutrality: “We are in favour of making people happy, we are neutral about making happy people” (Narveson 1973)
• Person-affecting views: In a nutshell, "nothing can be good or bad unless it is good or bad for someone"