Person-Based Consequentialism And The Procreation Obligation

The idea that agents ought to do the most good that they can has had a continuing resonance. Among the normative approaches, maximizing forms of consequentialism are grounded in this idea in a particularly clear way. But maximizing consequentialism has had its critics. In particular, the approach has been charged with failing adequately to take into account important issues of equality by focusing too much on maximization of an aggregate good and too little on how that good is to be distributed. To my mind, an equally serious charge has been that the approach ‱ again, by virtue of its focus on maximization of an aggregate good ‱ fails adequately to take into account the obligations that agents have in respect of persons as individuals and in particular the obligation that agents have in some circumstances to create additional good for such persons. That failure has led, I believe, to the “repugnant conclusion,” according to which vast numbers of lives only barely worth living may somehow represent a morally better ‱ and perhaps a morally obligatory ‱ option as compared to a smaller number of lives all of which are well worth living.