Really enjoyed this piece! I do think the antinatalist position truly diminishes almost to the extent of ignoring the happiness / value in an additional person being created. This is a great post.
Question - is this a utilitarian approach? I thought so initially, but then certain parts of the post made me reconsider - it seems that the post takes value and happiness and moral worth into consideration. What would you categorize your approach as?
I am a little puzzled since it seems to me that this does rely on utilitarianism for it to work.
For example, the “extremely obvious” premise 2 implies that every human is an interchangeable unit, and that happiness is essentially a gauge that you can fill and only the sum total of all happiness matters -which is why it’s ok to remove some from one and give a lot to others. But some moral theorists already disagree with that.
For example, some might argue that rescinding a benefit is not the same as never having it. Just ask any star that fell from grace. Or you could say it's always wrong to steal even if the person was "given" something and even if you give others 10x more to compensate.
Some people might also argue with premise 1 because the creation of a person is not an event that can be computed as good or bad. Moral relativists might argue that good or bad exist only after your birth and there is no such thing as global good or bad but only personal and relative.
Thus the value of creating a person + giving benefits to another existing one is undetermined (in that framework).
I'm curious how this intersects with your belief that all possible people already exist - what benefit are you providing, exactly, if all these persons in question would just exist in other worlds if they weren't born here? Or are there actually people who do not come to exist because we don't procreate? And if so, why does God allow that value to be lost?
I have a problem with your second button that harms one person in order to provide a greater benefit to another person. I don't see this as obviously a good thing.
For example, suppose you were kidnapped, sedated, and woke up in a hotel room with a bag of ice on your abdomen, which hurts, You soon learn that one of your kidneys was surgically removed. You recover and get on with your life. Your kidney was sold by the gang who kidnapped you and implanted in a rich patient with end-stage kidney disease, saving his life. He goes on to live for another 15 years. You live a normal lifespan and never suffer any ill effects from the lack of a kidney.
The harm done to you is being the victim of an assault and a week or two of discomfort. The patient gains 15 years of a rich and satisfying life. The benefit to him is clearly greater than the harm experienced by you. Is this a good thing they did to you?
In my opinion the answer is no. And I believe my view is widely supported by the fact that what they did to you is considered a crime, and were the perps found and revealed the identity of the patient, he too would be charged with a crime
It seems to me that one can use this same sort of argument to justify slavery as well.
Later on you write:
It also doesn’t rely on the idea that you should harm a stranger to benefit your offspring. 2 is supposed to be pressed before the benefit has been given, so it’s not taking away a good from anyone, but just giving a good to your offspring rather than a stranger.
This is not how it was presented. It was presented as taking away someone from the first person to provide a greater benefit to another. And it was necessary that it be presented in that for your argument. Therefore this person is doing some heavy lifting here.
Yet in the final conclusion the first person is entirely absent. That's not kosher. The person is functioning as a catalyst like this:
Suppose we have a reaction A + B -> AB
This reaction is thermodynamically favored but doesn't happen withour a catalyst x
A + x -> Ax A binds with x
Ax + B -> AxB B binds with Ax to form AxB
AxB -> ABx AxB rearranges to form ABx,
ABx -> AB + x ABx disassociates
If sum these up the Ax, AxB, ABx, and x cancel out leaving
A + B -> AB
But this reaction doesn't happen without x. But x is nowhere to be found. Just because x canceled out doesn't mean x is not important to the reaction, its crucial. Similarly, just because person 1 canceled out doesn't mean his being granted a benefit which is then rescinded is not crucial.
"It also doesn’t rely on the idea that you should harm a stranger to benefit your offspring. 2 is supposed to be pressed before the benefit has been given, so it’s not taking away a good from anyone, but just giving a good to your offspring rather than a stranger."
1. You should press the first button that creates a happy person and makes an existing person better off.
2. You should press the second button that rescinds the benefit to the existing person and makes the newly created person vastly better off.
3. If you should press two buttons which collectively do X, then you should press one button that does X.
You state the second premise is extremely obvious.
It sounds to be like taking a small good from one (a small harm) to give a greater good (large benefit) to another. This does not strike me as extremely obviously good. But then you say:
It also doesn’t rely on the idea that you should harm a stranger to benefit the newly created person. 2 is supposed to be pressed before the benefit has been given…. OK, lets do that:
4. You should press the second button that rescinds the benefit to the existing person and makes the newly created person vastly better off.
5. You should press the first button that creates a happy person and makes an existing person better off.
6. If you should press two buttons which collectively do X, then you should press one button that does X.
This argument is incoherent. You cannot take away that which has not been given.
My analogy to a catalyst apparently did not work. In the original argument goodness is established by granting a benefit. However you then change the argument to take away the benefit before it was ever given, which makes no sense. The only way for it to make sense is to just assert that no benefit is given in the first place, in which case 1 plays no role in the argument. So remove 1. The resulting argument is
7. You should press the second button that rescinds the benefit to the existing person and makes the newly created person vastly better off.
8. If you should press two buttons which collectively do X, then you should press one button that does X.
Point 7 now sounds a lot like “harm a stranger to benefit the newly created person” But since the benefit you rescind was never given in the first place, then it is not being rescinded either. So we can take that out too and the argument becomes
9. You should make the newly created person vastly better off.
You don’t really need the last statement as you already have the conclusion you were looking for. The problem is that there is no proof, just an assertion.
But you said "2 is supposed to be pressed BEFORE the benefit has been given"
So 2 is *not* layered on top of 1.
It is the giving of the benefit and *its receipt by person 1* that creates the good that drives the argument. To avoid taking it away you then assert that the two buttons are pushed together so nothing was either given or taken away. If nothing was received then no good was generated, the driver for the argument has been removed, leaving nothing left, which is what I was trying to show.
After button 1 has been pressed but before it has gone into effect. The effect of the buttons is determined by the sequence of them being pressed. That is to say, first you decide the buttons to press, then their effects happen.
As long as your units for harm and benefit are normalized for the greater weight we should place on suffering, then this seems to make sense to me.
But I still find negative utility convincing - the asymmetry there is what beckons the procreation asymmetry and you don't really contend with negative utility asymmetry here. At best, I think what that gets you is indifference between creating a happy person and not creating them...
For the real world, I don't think you can remotely argue that a new being, especially a rich western being with their outsized consumption, meat rich diet, emissions, leads to net positivity for the world. It may well for them, but we need to account for total utility too right?
Part of my reasoning for not wanting my own kids is impacted by the very fact that I am quite sure I could give them a good life. But with the same resources, I could probably improve the lives of a lot of strangers (or animals who are suffering intensely). Why should I care more, in the world we actually live in, about creating a new preference receptacle (which would require far more intense resources utilization to satisfy those preferences) than helping strangers?
My argument in the paper is for why it's very good to create a happy person and why you should create any person with net positive well-being. Not sure what asymmetry it's not arguing against.
I expect people to be positive for overall welfare because they reduce wild animal suffering.
I'm curious what your theory of change is for writing an article like this. Is it just something you do for fun? In which case, good for you I guess. Or do you think you are improving the world in some way? Do you think publishing an article like this actually causes more happy people to exist, and if so, what do you imagine the mechanism to be?
I'm not sure I followed everything, but I'm not convinced it works
I tried to make a negative version of the experiment:
- The first button creates a new person, Bob, who is going to live a normal life with normal amount of suffering. It also spares a huge amount of suffering to an existing person, Alice. Seems morally defensible.
- The second button rescinds the benefit to Alice, who will end up as bad as if nothing had happened. It also cancels all of Bob's suffering.
If you accept the asymmetry argument, you would never press the second button! Because that will avoid a normal amount of suffering for Bob and generate a huge amount of suffering for Alice.
Now you might say that negative utilitarianism doesn't work for some reason, and you may be right.
But if you do, you're back to endorsing something like positive utilitarianism or mean utilitarianism.
If positive utilitarianism is valid even in population ethics considerations, it's trivially true that creating more people is good! No buttons necessary.
And if mean utilitarianism is valid, didn't Parfit show that it leads to the same sort of conclusions as PU?
I sort of agree hypothetically, but I'd guess that the kind of person who does not want to bring more people this highly unsatisfactory world according to their lights is right not to do so. The person they person they would bring into the world is likely NOT to be very happy or to improve the wellbeing of others.
Small sample, but the childless (and catless) cat ladies I now did not bring any people into the works because they never found a male worth partnering with.
A very clever argument, bravo. But the whole process of painstakingly explaining every minor detail made me want to pull my hair out or thank non-existent gods that not everyone is a philosophy VIP :)
I'm very sympathetic to this line of argument, but I do think your targets are likely to resist premise three.
In general, Non consequentialist normative theories often end up having to reject what look like very attractive abstract formal principles about permissibility: stuff like the independence of irrelevant alternatives, for instance. (I remember reading a paper developing some version of contractarianism, and being pleased
when I'd convinced myself that I had a powerful objection to the effect that it had to reject IIA. Then to my dismay, in a footnote the author acknowledged that of course like other versions of contractoranism he has to reject IIA.) This feels very similar. To say that you ought to do A given the options {A, ~A}, and B given the options {B, ~B}, is not yet to say you ought to do AB given the options {AB, ~AB, A~B, ~A~B}.
To be clear I don't like this response. But I think the non consequentialist types who are drawn to the procreation asymmetry are generally already committed to it.
Yeah, I guess it seems really weird that you should press a buttons A and B but not a single button that pushes a paper clip down to press buttons A and B. But I give two other reasons this is insufficient in the paper.
First, as I explain, so long as better than is transitive, this can't work against the axiological asymmetry. If it's better for button 1 to be pressed than neither and better for buttons 1& 2 to be pressed than just button 1, then by transitivity them both being pressed is better.
Also, it's weird if the asymmetry is true that we have strong reasons to take a sequence of actions that simply creates a happy person.
Really enjoyed this piece! I do think the antinatalist position truly diminishes almost to the extent of ignoring the happiness / value in an additional person being created. This is a great post.
Question - is this a utilitarian approach? I thought so initially, but then certain parts of the post made me reconsider - it seems that the post takes value and happiness and moral worth into consideration. What would you categorize your approach as?
My view doesn't require commitment to any specific normative theory.
I like that. I feel as though many people in the Philosophical world that I've seen try to fit into a worldview.
To be clear: I'm a utilitarian, but my argument doesn't require being one.
I am a little puzzled since it seems to me that this does rely on utilitarianism for it to work.
For example, the “extremely obvious” premise 2 implies that every human is an interchangeable unit, and that happiness is essentially a gauge that you can fill and only the sum total of all happiness matters -which is why it’s ok to remove some from one and give a lot to others. But some moral theorists already disagree with that.
For example, some might argue that rescinding a benefit is not the same as never having it. Just ask any star that fell from grace. Or you could say it's always wrong to steal even if the person was "given" something and even if you give others 10x more to compensate.
Some people might also argue with premise 1 because the creation of a person is not an event that can be computed as good or bad. Moral relativists might argue that good or bad exist only after your birth and there is no such thing as global good or bad but only personal and relative.
Thus the value of creating a person + giving benefits to another existing one is undetermined (in that framework).
I'm releasing a series on this soon if you are interested. Excited to read this.
I'm curious how this intersects with your belief that all possible people already exist - what benefit are you providing, exactly, if all these persons in question would just exist in other worlds if they weren't born here? Or are there actually people who do not come to exist because we don't procreate? And if so, why does God allow that value to be lost?
Yeah nah, antinatalism is far more convincing, sorry
I have a problem with your second button that harms one person in order to provide a greater benefit to another person. I don't see this as obviously a good thing.
For example, suppose you were kidnapped, sedated, and woke up in a hotel room with a bag of ice on your abdomen, which hurts, You soon learn that one of your kidneys was surgically removed. You recover and get on with your life. Your kidney was sold by the gang who kidnapped you and implanted in a rich patient with end-stage kidney disease, saving his life. He goes on to live for another 15 years. You live a normal lifespan and never suffer any ill effects from the lack of a kidney.
The harm done to you is being the victim of an assault and a week or two of discomfort. The patient gains 15 years of a rich and satisfying life. The benefit to him is clearly greater than the harm experienced by you. Is this a good thing they did to you?
In my opinion the answer is no. And I believe my view is widely supported by the fact that what they did to you is considered a crime, and were the perps found and revealed the identity of the patient, he too would be charged with a crime
It seems to me that one can use this same sort of argument to justify slavery as well.
Later on you write:
It also doesn’t rely on the idea that you should harm a stranger to benefit your offspring. 2 is supposed to be pressed before the benefit has been given, so it’s not taking away a good from anyone, but just giving a good to your offspring rather than a stranger.
This is not how it was presented. It was presented as taking away someone from the first person to provide a greater benefit to another. And it was necessary that it be presented in that for your argument. Therefore this person is doing some heavy lifting here.
Yet in the final conclusion the first person is entirely absent. That's not kosher. The person is functioning as a catalyst like this:
Suppose we have a reaction A + B -> AB
This reaction is thermodynamically favored but doesn't happen withour a catalyst x
A + x -> Ax A binds with x
Ax + B -> AxB B binds with Ax to form AxB
AxB -> ABx AxB rearranges to form ABx,
ABx -> AB + x ABx disassociates
If sum these up the Ax, AxB, ABx, and x cancel out leaving
A + B -> AB
But this reaction doesn't happen without x. But x is nowhere to be found. Just because x canceled out doesn't mean x is not important to the reaction, its crucial. Similarly, just because person 1 canceled out doesn't mean his being granted a benefit which is then rescinded is not crucial.
To quote the article:
"It also doesn’t rely on the idea that you should harm a stranger to benefit your offspring. 2 is supposed to be pressed before the benefit has been given, so it’s not taking away a good from anyone, but just giving a good to your offspring rather than a stranger."
Your first argument:
1. You should press the first button that creates a happy person and makes an existing person better off.
2. You should press the second button that rescinds the benefit to the existing person and makes the newly created person vastly better off.
3. If you should press two buttons which collectively do X, then you should press one button that does X.
You state the second premise is extremely obvious.
It sounds to be like taking a small good from one (a small harm) to give a greater good (large benefit) to another. This does not strike me as extremely obviously good. But then you say:
It also doesn’t rely on the idea that you should harm a stranger to benefit the newly created person. 2 is supposed to be pressed before the benefit has been given…. OK, lets do that:
4. You should press the second button that rescinds the benefit to the existing person and makes the newly created person vastly better off.
5. You should press the first button that creates a happy person and makes an existing person better off.
6. If you should press two buttons which collectively do X, then you should press one button that does X.
This argument is incoherent. You cannot take away that which has not been given.
My analogy to a catalyst apparently did not work. In the original argument goodness is established by granting a benefit. However you then change the argument to take away the benefit before it was ever given, which makes no sense. The only way for it to make sense is to just assert that no benefit is given in the first place, in which case 1 plays no role in the argument. So remove 1. The resulting argument is
7. You should press the second button that rescinds the benefit to the existing person and makes the newly created person vastly better off.
8. If you should press two buttons which collectively do X, then you should press one button that does X.
Point 7 now sounds a lot like “harm a stranger to benefit the newly created person” But since the benefit you rescind was never given in the first place, then it is not being rescinded either. So we can take that out too and the argument becomes
9. You should make the newly created person vastly better off.
You don’t really need the last statement as you already have the conclusion you were looking for. The problem is that there is no proof, just an assertion.
//This argument is incoherent. You cannot take away that which has not been given.//
You calculate what the buttons do after deciding how many of them have been pressed. So the second button's effect is layered on top of the first's.
But you said "2 is supposed to be pressed BEFORE the benefit has been given"
So 2 is *not* layered on top of 1.
It is the giving of the benefit and *its receipt by person 1* that creates the good that drives the argument. To avoid taking it away you then assert that the two buttons are pushed together so nothing was either given or taken away. If nothing was received then no good was generated, the driver for the argument has been removed, leaving nothing left, which is what I was trying to show.
After button 1 has been pressed but before it has gone into effect. The effect of the buttons is determined by the sequence of them being pressed. That is to say, first you decide the buttons to press, then their effects happen.
Then what you have done is promise to provide a benefit that you have no intention of actually providing. That is not good.
As long as your units for harm and benefit are normalized for the greater weight we should place on suffering, then this seems to make sense to me.
But I still find negative utility convincing - the asymmetry there is what beckons the procreation asymmetry and you don't really contend with negative utility asymmetry here. At best, I think what that gets you is indifference between creating a happy person and not creating them...
For the real world, I don't think you can remotely argue that a new being, especially a rich western being with their outsized consumption, meat rich diet, emissions, leads to net positivity for the world. It may well for them, but we need to account for total utility too right?
Part of my reasoning for not wanting my own kids is impacted by the very fact that I am quite sure I could give them a good life. But with the same resources, I could probably improve the lives of a lot of strangers (or animals who are suffering intensely). Why should I care more, in the world we actually live in, about creating a new preference receptacle (which would require far more intense resources utilization to satisfy those preferences) than helping strangers?
My argument in the paper is for why it's very good to create a happy person and why you should create any person with net positive well-being. Not sure what asymmetry it's not arguing against.
I expect people to be positive for overall welfare because they reduce wild animal suffering.
I'm curious what your theory of change is for writing an article like this. Is it just something you do for fun? In which case, good for you I guess. Or do you think you are improving the world in some way? Do you think publishing an article like this actually causes more happy people to exist, and if so, what do you imagine the mechanism to be?
I fail to see how this challenges a defender of the the asymmetry.
-If you foresee that you wouldn’t push the second button, you should indeed push the first, since doing so will costlessly benefit an existing person.
-If you foresee that you would press the second button, you have no reason to push the first, since the existing person will not benefit.
Interesting
I'm not sure I followed everything, but I'm not convinced it works
I tried to make a negative version of the experiment:
- The first button creates a new person, Bob, who is going to live a normal life with normal amount of suffering. It also spares a huge amount of suffering to an existing person, Alice. Seems morally defensible.
- The second button rescinds the benefit to Alice, who will end up as bad as if nothing had happened. It also cancels all of Bob's suffering.
If you accept the asymmetry argument, you would never press the second button! Because that will avoid a normal amount of suffering for Bob and generate a huge amount of suffering for Alice.
Now you might say that negative utilitarianism doesn't work for some reason, and you may be right.
But if you do, you're back to endorsing something like positive utilitarianism or mean utilitarianism.
If positive utilitarianism is valid even in population ethics considerations, it's trivially true that creating more people is good! No buttons necessary.
And if mean utilitarianism is valid, didn't Parfit show that it leads to the same sort of conclusions as PU?
So this seems kind of circular to me
Cool paper! A worry tho. Sequential desirability seems undesirable in the way you state it. Doesn’t it imply Cowen’s iterative gambling paradox?
Great stuff
A wordy piece to say that kids are the greatest gift to the world 😉
I sort of agree hypothetically, but I'd guess that the kind of person who does not want to bring more people this highly unsatisfactory world according to their lights is right not to do so. The person they person they would bring into the world is likely NOT to be very happy or to improve the wellbeing of others.
Small sample, but the childless (and catless) cat ladies I now did not bring any people into the works because they never found a male worth partnering with.
A very clever argument, bravo. But the whole process of painstakingly explaining every minor detail made me want to pull my hair out or thank non-existent gods that not everyone is a philosophy VIP :)
What if childless cat ladies have kids but then give them up for adoption? Is it still a net good?
I'm very sympathetic to this line of argument, but I do think your targets are likely to resist premise three.
In general, Non consequentialist normative theories often end up having to reject what look like very attractive abstract formal principles about permissibility: stuff like the independence of irrelevant alternatives, for instance. (I remember reading a paper developing some version of contractarianism, and being pleased
when I'd convinced myself that I had a powerful objection to the effect that it had to reject IIA. Then to my dismay, in a footnote the author acknowledged that of course like other versions of contractoranism he has to reject IIA.) This feels very similar. To say that you ought to do A given the options {A, ~A}, and B given the options {B, ~B}, is not yet to say you ought to do AB given the options {AB, ~AB, A~B, ~A~B}.
To be clear I don't like this response. But I think the non consequentialist types who are drawn to the procreation asymmetry are generally already committed to it.
Yeah, I guess it seems really weird that you should press a buttons A and B but not a single button that pushes a paper clip down to press buttons A and B. But I give two other reasons this is insufficient in the paper.
First, as I explain, so long as better than is transitive, this can't work against the axiological asymmetry. If it's better for button 1 to be pressed than neither and better for buttons 1& 2 to be pressed than just button 1, then by transitivity them both being pressed is better.
Also, it's weird if the asymmetry is true that we have strong reasons to take a sequence of actions that simply creates a happy person.