The welfare economics of population

Abstract

Intuition suggests there is no value in adding people to the population if it brings no benefits to people already living: creating people is morally neutral in itself. This paper examines the difficulties of incorporating this intuition into a coherent theory of the value of population. It takes three existing theories within welfare economics–average utilitarianism, relativist utilitarianism, and critical-level utilitarianism–and considers whether they can satisfactorily accommodate the intuition that creating people is neutral.