Defending the Procreation Asymmetry with Conditional Interests

If X would have a bad life, were X to exist, I take it we shouldn't create X.

Yes, because in the outcome where X exists, they would have a claim to not exist (by my assumption), so this would have been a mistake, and you would want to undo the choice, if you could. Therefore, it's not a rational choice to make.

But then why, if X were to have a good life, were X to exist, do we not to have reason to create X?

Not from a situation in which X does not and will not exist, as a person-affecting rule (my claim), since X would not exist to be able to have such a claim. So, if you chose for X not to exist, then you would have no reason to change your mind, since X will not be around to give you such a reason. If you did choose for X to exist (whether or not they exist yet), this would give you a reason to not change your mind, but this reason does not apply if you'd have already chosen otherwise, so your choice to not bring X into existence would be stable; you wouldn't change your mind. See also my discussion with Stijn.

You say you're 'agnostic' about whether those who would have good lives have an interest in existing, but I don't think you give a reason for this agnosticism, which would be the crucial thing to do.

This is just my personal view, since I'm uncertain about the matter, and the argument goes through either way. That those who would have a good life have an interest in existing is compatible with some of the example theories I gave, including even consequentialist theories that always assign a negative value to new individuals, all else equal.

Second, I didn't really understand the explication of Meacham's view - you said it 'solves' a cavalcade of issues on pop ethics but didn't spell out how it actually solves them. I'm also not sure if your view is different from Meacham's and, if so, how.

I didn't plan to explain all of that, since it was just a brief overview and a reason for readers to check out the paper themselves.

Meacham's system is a full utilitarian calculus, and so can be taken to be a full ethical system. What I present here is just an argument that could defend or motivate parts of the design choices in his system, e.g. that in an outcome in which an individual doesn't exist, the harm to them is 0.

Third, it would be useful if you could spell out what you take (some of) the practical implications of your view to be.

That's a good point. There's a lot that will depend on what other views you hold, but I think broadly, the views would be more present-focused with a narrow person-affecting view, and generally more suffering-focused (including future suffering) with a wide or narrow person-affecting view. They would probably reject the astronomical waste argument, so human extinction or slowed population growth could only look bad instrumentally, and may even look good, although this depends on empirical views about whether our presence would be useful for others.

If we use a wide person-affecting view and also accept empty individualism (and the independence of irrelevant alternatives), then our comparison of outcomes is basically strong negative utilitarianism, although it need not aggregate through a sum.

If instead we take a narrow person-affecting view, then there's still reason to prevent bad lives in the future, but we can't make future individuals better off otherwise, since they'd be different individuals. So, we might focus on individuals alive today, as well as future bad lives only to prevent their existence, since we wouldn't be able to make future bad lives better otherwise.

If, on top of the narrow view, we also accept empty individualism, then we can't make individuals who exist now better off either, and the only good we can do for anyone is prevent them from existing. We would focus only on preventing bad individual person-moments.

I'd need to think more about whether there are further important practical implications beyond just those implied by the Procreation Asymmetry.

Fourth, because you get stuck into the deep end quite quickly, I wonder if you should add a note that this is a relatively more 'advanced' forum post.

I was actually hoping it would be fairly accessible, because I think a lot of EAs might be committed to a totalist view without having thought much about arguments for the alternatives, even if they might have found the Procreation Asymmetry intuitive before.

It seems that with the formulation of the Comparative Interest principle, you already assume an asymmetry. Consider the symmetric (equally reasonable) formulation, by writing ‘better’ instead of ‘worse’ and switching X and Y

This is a good point, and I should have put more thought into this. I think there's a pretty good reason to accept my original principle that does not apply to the modified one: mine implies a kind of stability by focusing on arrow tails, while the modified one does not seem to. I did write "stable (in a sense somewhat similar to a decision/game-theoretic one)", but didn't expand further on this or consider your modified principle. I'll do that here.

We first consider the interests of those existing in the given outcome for person-affecting reasons and then only consider the interests in the opposite direction from the other outcome as a potential defeater if the first interests actually pointed towards the other outcome. This is to ensure we don't change our minds back and forth between the two outcomes. (I see now that we might want to extend the consideration of the interests in the opposite direction to cycles of length > 2.)

That is, if X is worse than Y in my way, and you choose X, you would realize it was a mistake after considering the interests in X that you actually observe and you would wish for Y to have happened instead, and may even try to make the future closer to Y, undoing the work you did for X. In my view, it's absurd to choose outcomes which you know you will prefer to not have happened. I think we can defend this on grounds of rationality, e.g. avoiding things like money pumps and Dutch books.

On the other hand, with your modified principle, if X is better than Y, and Y happens, the interests of the individuals in X are not the same as the interests in Y, which is the outcome that actually happened. Supposing you choose Y, if there's a pull from Y to X that would cause you to change your mind about choosing Y, I claim now that it should be from the individuals in Y as they are in Y because that's your reality (the individuals in X may not even exist), but the modified principle considers overall interests from Y only in the opposite direction (for Y > X), so it has nothing to say about this.

For example (to illustrate or defend the Procreation Asymmetry directly, but I should probably not defend Comparative Interests in this way to defend the Procreation Asymmetry), if people decide to have a child they know will be forever miserable because they don't count the harm ahead of time, once the child is born (or the decision to have the child is made), the parent(s) may decide to euthanize (abort, etc.) them for the child's sake. And then, they could do this again and again and again, knowing they'll change their minds at each point, because at each point, although they might recognize the harm, they don't count it until after the decision is made. This is basically a money pump for the parents, and the modified principle allows this, while mine does not.

On the other hand, if people decide to not have a child instead of a happy one, there's no child in that outcome whose interests would push them to have the child. The child with interests in existing is in an outcome that didn't happen. The child won't be around to tell them they messed up by not bringing them into existence. So, there's no money pump.

I have another defense, based on my theory of variable critical level utilitarianism (https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2018/02/24/variable-critical-level-utilitarianism-as-the-solution-to-population-ethics/). This is a critical level utilitarianism, where now everyone is free to choose their own critical level. The condition is: everyone should be willing to accept a life at the chosen critical level. This means that no-one will choose a negative critical level. Critical levels always have to be positive. That introduces an asymmetry between the positive and the negative, and this asymmetry is at the root of the procreation asymmetry.

If people are choosing their own critical levels, shouldn't we just redefine negative existence and positive existence in terms of the situations/identities that correspond to those critical levels? I.e. we didn't actually put 0 at the right place in the first place, and if we did so, there would be no need to subtract a critical level. I suppose if we want to define negative and positive existence in terms of hedonistic utility (or some other values), but define critical level preferentially, this would make sense.

I think I had something basically sharp in mind when I wrote this, but I don't think sharpness is essential. Rocks have no interests at all or only extremely weak ones that are very easy to outweigh. From the point of view of the rock as a rock, becoming a happy human doesn't necessarily seem better at all even assuming a symmetric theory of welfare. It could depend on exactly how you think about "interests", though, but I wouldn't use any account on which rocks have non-negligible interests as long as they remain rocks, since they care at most negligibly about anything.

We can apply Comparative Interests:

Comparative Interests: An outcome X is in one way worse than an outcome Y if, conditional on X, the individuals in X would have a stronger overall interest in outcome Y than in X and, conditional on Y, the individuals in Y would not have an equally or even stronger overall interest in X than in Y.

Suppose in X, the rock remains a rock, and in Y, the rock becomes a happy human. In X, the rock cares at most negligibly about anything, so I would say Y is at most negligibly better for the rock than X (although I'm not sure it is better at all), and this difference is small enough to be so easily outweighed that it can be ignored in practice. So, whether or not X is worse than Y basically doesn't depend on any interests the rock might have, because of how weak they'd be.

Do you have any thoughts on how to weigh between "choose the morality that uses simpler-seeming assumptions" v.s. "choose the morality that matches my immediate feelings about what it means to improve the world?" I'm unsure, though I currently lean toward the former.

I don't think there's really any good, non-arbitrary, principled and objective way to weigh these things. I guess I decide by cases on whatever just feels more right to me (although am often uncertain about that) and I try to at least avoid inconsistency. You could try to approximate something like a Kolmogorov complexity prior, but even then, you'd have a bunch of arbitrary choices to make.

Thanks for pointing that out.

I think you can still treat persons as morally relevant, on top of their interests. In particular, you could think that we should weight interests within a person differently from how we weight them across persons, so that personal and interpersonal trade-offs can be treated differently. The principle of Comparative Interests I put forward doesn't make any claims about how interests should be weighted.

If you accept empty individualism, then you might just respond that each interest (or preference or experience, etc.) should be its own person, so that all trade-offs are interpersonal.