Abstract
It is often said that while we have a strong reason not to create someone who will be badly off, we have no strong reason for creating someone who will be well off. In this paper I argue that this asymmetry is incompatible with a plausible principle of independence of irrelevant alternatives, and that a more general asymmetry between harming and benefiting is difficult to defend. I then argue that, contrary to what many have claimed, it is possible to harm or benefit someone by bringing her into existence.
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Notes
This view is very widely held in the population ethics literature. For a prominent recent statement, see Broome (2004, p. 144).
Thanks to Elizabeth Brake, Sarah Stroud and Tyler Doggett for pressing this point.
For a recent defense of this view see Benatar (2006); also see Benatar, “Still Better Never to Have Been: A Reply to (More of) My Critics,” in this issue of The Journal of Ethics.
Ingmar Persson argues against this sort of explanation of the asymmetry (Persson 2009).
This view is similar to a “weak asymmetry” principle defended by Arrhenius and Bykvist (1995, p. 97).
Maybe there are also non-welfare-related reasons for and against actions. I am focusing on welfare-related reasons.
See A. Sen’s “basic contraction consistency” principle (Sen 2002, p. 128). The principle to which I am appealing is not quite the same; Sen’s principle merely entails that if (3a) must be chosen, then so must (2), whereas my principle entails that the relative strengths of (3a) and (3b) must be the same as (2) and (2″). The spirit behind the principles is the same. Sen argues that there are counterexamples to contraction consistency (Sen 2002, pp. 129–130). I find his counterexamples unconvincing. See Neumann (2007) for a response to Sen; see Broome (1991, pp. 94–117), for discussion of important related issues concerning the individuation of alternatives and outcomes. Depending on how finely we individuate alternatives, it could turn out that (3a) and (2) are not the same alternative, so contraction consistency would not pose a problem for the asymmetry (Arrhenius 2009, p. 308). This is sometimes the right move to make, but it strikes me as implausible in the example I give here; (3a) and (2) seem like clearly the same alternative, though I cannot here defend a general principle of individuation of alternatives that yields this result. On the other hand, one might reject contraction consistency on the grounds that it rules out the asymmetry, but this strikes me as a bad move in this context.
This argument is sufficiently general that it might apply to the view that the asymmetry is explained by appeal to rights. Such views must appeal to a difference in rights-violations between procreative and individual-affecting decisions; but if there is such a difference, then the relative strengths of two options change depending on the existence of an independent third option.
I prefer not to discuss harm, when possible, because it is not clear to me what harm is. See Bradley (forthcoming).
Holtug argues that it is a good feature of prioritarianism that it implies this moderate asymmetry (Holtug 2010, p. 259).
Note that if we understand the moderate view in this way, it follows that certain ways of analyzing well-being in terms of reasons must be rejected. If the value of something for someone is just the reason we have, for that person’s sake, to promote or prevent it, then if some bit of positive and negative well-being make same-sized but opposite impacts on someone’s well-being, there must be same-sized reasons to promote or prevent them. Perhaps this result could be avoided by distinguishing between different sorts of reasons. Thanks to Justin D’Arms for discussion of this point.
For discussion of this question, see Griffin (1979, p. 53).
Here Shiffrin is distinguishing benefits for already existing people from benefits for people who do not yet, or might not, exist.
For discussion of lexical views and reasons to reject them, see Arrhenius and Bykvist (1995).
This has been widely noticed, but for two recent discussions see Bradley (forthcoming) and Hanser (2008, p. 434).
‘This’ is ambiguous, but I follow Johansson (2010, p. 286) in taking it to refer to the world of the antecedent, rather than the actual world.
One might think that even if well-being is not intrinsic, it requires the possession of intrinsic properties, even if desire satisfactionism is true, since intrinsic properties are necessary for having desires. This is true, but leaves open the question of when the individual is well- or badly-off in virtue of having those desires. It often seems wrong to say that it is when the desire takes place. (See Bradley 2009, pp. 18–30 for discussion of this and related issues.) In any case, the point about intrinsicness is not to establish that it is possible to have well-being at a world at which one never exists, but to forestall a possible argument against that possibility. Thanks to Jens Johansson for discussion of this point.
As Broome argues, it is possible to treat goodness for a person, or well-being, as “a relation that the person has to a history, rather than as a property she has in a history” (Broome 2004, pp. 63–64). Nevertheless, for reasons that are unclear to me, Broome chooses to think of well-being as a property a person has, and he thus claims that “a history in which a person does not exist is neither better nor worse for her than any other history… the person’s value function will not assign any value to a history in which the person does not exist” (Broome 2004, p. 65).
See Arrhenius (2009, p. 299) for a similar thought.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the participants at NOISE 2 at Tulane in February 2011 and the Population Ethics workshop at McGill in April 2011. Special thanks to Gustaf Arrhenius, Ralf Bader, Elizabeth Brake, Eric Cave, Justin D’Arms, Tyler Doggett, Dale Dorsey, Iwao Hirose, Dan Jacobson, Jens Johansson, Melinda Roberts, David Shoemaker, and Sarah Stroud.
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Bradley, B. Asymmetries in Benefiting, Harming and Creating. J Ethics 17, 37–49 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-012-9134-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-012-9134-6