'Making people happy, not making happy people': A defense of the asymmetry intuition in population ethics

Abstract

This dissertation defends the Procreation Asymmetry, the intuition that there’s a strong moral reason to avoid creating a life that will be worse than non-existence, but no reason to create a life simply because it would be worth living. The work reconciles this asymmetry with Derek Parfit’s Non-Identity Problem by rejecting a teleological view of well-being as something to be promoted. Instead, it proposes a conditional view, where our reasons to confer well-being are tied to the existence of the individual. This framework also explains the structural parallels between seemingly disparate normative phenomena like procreation and promising. The dissertation further connects the normative claim of the Procreation Asymmetry to evaluative claims about the goodness of outcomes produced by procreative decisions, proposing a “biconditional buck-passing view” that links outcome goodness to our reasons for bringing them about. This view allows for deriving an Evaluative Procreation Asymmetry and provides a novel solution to Parfit’s Mere Addition Paradox. Finally, the dissertation rebuts key objections to the Procreation Asymmetry by showing its compatibility with a concern for human survival and its non-commitment to anti-natalism.