2. From the Normative to the Evaluative Procreation Asymmetry: the Challenge
In Chapter 1 I argued in defense of
The Normative Procreation Asymmetry:
If a future person would foreseeably have a life that is not worth living, this in itself gives us a strong moral reason to refrain from bringing this person into existence.
By contrast, there is no moral reason to create a person whose life would foreseeably be worth living, just because her life would be worth living.
Notably, I defended the second conjunct of the Asymmetry for all levels of positive wellbeing that a potential future person might enjoy. That is, I claimed that however good a potential future person’s life could foreseeably be, this fact does not, in itself, give us a moral reason to bring this person into existence.
In addition, in discussing Parfit’s Non‑Identity Problem, I affirmed what I shall now call the
The Normative Same Number Claim:
If I have a choice between creating a new person with a life worth living at well‑being level W, and creating a new person with a life worth living at well‑being level V, where W > V, I have contrastive reason to bring
about the former rather than the latter outcome, if I am to create a new the present chapter, I shall explore the implications of embracing two corresponding evaluative claims, namely
The Evaluative Procreation Asymmetry:
It makes the world go worse, all else equal, to create a life that is foreseeably not worth living.
47 The Normative Same Number Claim combines the Maximization Requirement and the Selection Requirement defended separately in Chapter 1.
48 Throughout this chapter, I will phrase comparative evaluative claims in terms of which of two alternative courses of action “makes the world go better” or “produces the better outcome”. I employ these locutions instead of the more common “produces the better consequences” in order to make clear that the action itself is part of the evaluandum, and not just the end‑state that results from the action. However, for the sake of brevity or when paraphrasing other writers, I sometimes also speak simply in terms of which “outcome” is best. I will take it as read that in these instances, the evaluation of “outcomes” is meant to include the evaluation of associated actions.
Both these evaluative claims seem to me intuitively extremely plausible. The Evaluative Same Number Claim is very widely shared amongst population ethicists. It is entailed, for instance, by Derek Parfit’s Same Number Quality Claim, according to which “[i]f in either of two possible outcomes the same number of people would ever live, it will be worse if those who live are worse off, or have a lower quality of life, than those who would have lived.”49 The first conjunct of the Evaluative Procreation Asymmetry also seems incontrovertible. How could it not make the world go worse, all else equal, to add to it a life that is, on the whole, so miserable as to be not worth living? The second conjunct of the Evaluative Procreation Asymmetry, too, has struck many philosophers as highly plausible – even those who believe that they are ultimately forced to reject it for theoretical reasons. Thus, John Broome, in Weighing Lives claims to be strongly attracted to what he calls the “Intuition of Neutrality”, according to which there is a range of positive levels of well‑being at which adding a person to an existing population
is “ethically neutral”, in the sense that this person’s existence makes the world go neither better nor worse.50 (This is in contrast to the view that Broome ultimately adopts,
49 Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 360.
50 The neutral range can either be upwardly unbounded, in which case the Intuition of Neutrality entails the second conjunct of the Evaluative Procreation Asymmetry; or it can be upwardly bounded, such that lives whose level of wellbeing exceeds the upper bound of the neutral range make the world go better.
namely that there is only a single, albeit vague, level of lifetime well‑being at which the existence of a person makes the world go neither better nor worse).51
But, besides the inherent appeal of these evaluative propositions, there is a further reason why I set out to defend them in this chapter. Given that I have argued in support of the Normative Procreation Asymmetry and the Normative Same Number Procreation Claim in Chapter 1, I believe that I am committed to the corresponding evaluative claims.
In this, I differ from Michael Tooley, who attempts to uphold the Normative Procreation Asymmetry while denying the second conjunct of the Evaluative Asymmetry.52 Tooley maintains that although it would make the world better, all else equal, to create a new happy life, there is no moral reason – not even a pro tanto reason – to do so.
This is not a tenable combination of claims, I believe. It is part of the conceptual constraints on our concept “good” that it cannot be normatively irrelevant in this way.
The fact that one available course of action makes the world go better than the other must make at least a defeasible difference to what I have reason to do. I agree with Christine Korsgaard that the function of our concept “good” is “to mark out schematically the solutions to certain kinds of problems which we have to solve”.53
51 See John Broome, Weighing Lives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), chapters 10‑12.
52 See Michael Tooley, “Value, Obligation and the Asymmetry Question”, Bioethics, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1998), pp.
93‑110.
53 Christine Korsgaard, “On Having a Good” (unpublished manuscript), pp. 22‑3.
When inquiring which of two courses of action available to me makes the world go better, I believe that (at least part of) the problem to which claims about betterness provide the answer is “which course of action do I have more reason to choose?”.
Indeed, it is unclear what someone could mean who maintained that, although I have no reason – not even a defeasible pro tanto reason – to choose course of action A over course of action B, A would make the world go better than B, all things considered. In the absence of any normative implications, what could this claim about betterness possibly amount to?
I shall have more to say on the relationship between the goodness of outcomes and our reasons for action in Section 8. But, if my brief remarks above are plausible, they already support the following Bridge Principle between claims about what makes the world go better and claims about reasons for action:
Bridge Principle:
If, of two possible courses of action available to me, option A makes the world go better than option B all things considered, I have a defeasible pro tanto reason to choose option A rather than option B.
In putting forward this principle, I am not ruling out at this point that, even if A makes the world go better than B, my reason for choosing A rather than B can be outweighed, silenced, cancelled, etc. Nor am I claiming that if, of two courses of action available to me, I do not choose the one that makes the world go better, when this is also the option that I have most moral reason to perform, my action need be morally wrong. This presupposes a view about the relationship between moral reasons and wrongness – one
according to which it is always wrong not to do what I have stronger moral reason to do – that I reject.54 Finally, in putting forward the Bridge Principle, I am not committing myself to a view about the order of dependence between facts about the comparative goodness of outcomes and my reasons for action. The Bridge Principle states only a material implication; it makes no claims about grounding or priority.
The Bridge Principle and the second conjunct of the Normative Procreation Asymmetry together entail the second conjunct of the Evaluative Procreation Asymmetry. If I have no reason to create a new life just because it would be worth living, then, by the contrapositive of the Bridge Principle, creating such a new life does not make the world go better, all else equal. This means that someone who, like myself, embraces both conjuncts of the Normative Procreation Asymmetry must be prepared to defend both conjuncts of the Evaluative Procreation Asymmetry as well. But, as we shall see from the next section onwards, this is far from a trivial undertaking. Indeed, I believe that embracing the Evaluative Procreation Asymmetry together with the Evaluative Same Number Claim will ultimately give us reason to reject a very widely held view about the goodness of outcomes or ways the world can go: what Larry Temkin has called the Internal Aspects View of Outcome Goodness.
54 For instance, I believe that a course of action A can be supererogatory – in which case, I may have more moral reason to do A than B, yet it wouldn’t be wrong of me not to do A.