On doing the best for our children

Abstract

Standard forms of a person-affecting principle, which prioritize actions that benefit or harm existing individuals, encounter difficulties when applied to population ethics. They fail to adequately address long-term consequences of policies, particularly those affecting future generations who would not exist under alternative policies. A revised “Reinterpreted Principle,” accommodating different possible individuals, proves inadequate for population policy decisions involving varying numbers of people. Two “Core Principles” derived from this principle, one emphasizing the best-off P people where P is the minimum population size, and the other using a fixed “hard core” of P people, both lead to intransitive preferences and contradictory recommendations. Neither principle offers a consistent basis for evaluating long-term population policies, ultimately proving unsuitable for guiding decisions in this complex domain. – AI-generated abstract.