Critique of MacAskill’s “Is It Good to Make Happy People?”

Toby, Carl and Brian meet the next day, still looking very pale. They shake hands and agree to not do so much descriptive ethics anymore. 

Garbage answers to verbal elicitations on such questions (and real life decisions that require such explicit reasoning without feedback/experience, like retirement savings) are actually quite central to my views. In particular, my reliance on situations where it is easier for individuals to experience things multiple times in easy-to-process fashion and then form a behavioral response. I would be much less sanguine about error theories regarding such utterances if we didn't also see people in surveys saying they would rather take $1000 than a 15% chance of $1M, or $100 now rather than $140 a year later, i.e. utterances that are clearly mistakes.

Looking at the literature on antiaggregationist views, and the complete conflict of those moral intuitions with personal choices and self-concerned practice (e.g. driving cars or walking outside) is also important to my thinking. No-tradeoffs views are much more appealing outside our own domains of rich experience in talk. 

The idea that "the future might not be good" comes up on the forum every so often, but this doesn't really harm the core longtermist claims. The counter-argument is roughly:
- You still want to engage in trajectory changes (e.g. ensuring that we don't fall to the control of a stable totalitarian state)
- Since the effort bars are ginormous and we're pretty uncertain about the value of the future, you still want to avoid extinction so that we can figure this out, rather than getting locked in by a vague sense we have today

This post by Rohin attempts to address it. If you hold the asymmetry view then you would allocate more resources to [1] causing a new neutral life to come into existence (-1 cent) then later once they exist improve that neutral life (many dollars) than you would to  [2] causing a new happy life to come into existence (-1 cent). They both result in the same world.

In general you can make a dutch booking argument like this whenever your resource allocation doesn't correspond to the gradient of a value function (i.e. the resources should be aimed at improving the state of the world).

Thanks for your question, Michael :)

I should note that the main thing I take issue with in that quote of MacAskill's is the general (and AFAICT unargued) statement that "any argument for the first claim would also be a good argument for the second". I think there are many arguments about which that statement is not true (some of which are reviewed in Gloor, 2016; Vinding, 2020, ch. 3; Animal Ethics, 2021).

As for the particular argument of mine that you quote, I admit that a lot of work was deferred to the associated links and references. I think there are various ways to unpack and support that line of argument.

One of them rests on the intuition that ethics is about solving problems (an intuition that one may or may not share, of course).^[1] If one shares that moral intuition, or premise, then it seems plausible to say that the presence of suffering or miserable lives amounts to a problem, or a problematic state, whereas the absence of pleasure or pleasurable lives does not (other things equal) amount to a problem for anyone, or to a problematic state. That line of argument (whose premises may be challenged, to be sure) does not appear "flippable" such that it becomes a similarly plausible argument in favor of any supposed goodness of creating a happy life.

Alternatively, or additionally, one can support this line of argument by appealing to specific cases and thought experiments, such as the following (sec. 1.4):

we would rightly rush to send an ambulance to help someone who is enduring extreme suffering, yet not to boost the happiness of someone who is already doing well, no matter how much we may be able to boost it. ... Similarly, if we were in the possession of pills that could raise the happiness of those who are already happy to the greatest heights possible, there would be no urgency in distributing these pills, whereas if a single person fell to the ground in unbearable agony right before us, there would indeed be an urgency to help.

... if a person is in a state of dreamless sleep rather than a state of ecstatic happiness, this cannot reasonably be characterized as a disaster or a catastrophe. The difference between these two states does not carry great moral weight. By contrast, the difference between sleeping and being tortured does carry immense moral weight, and the realization of torture rather than sleep would indeed amount to a catastrophe. Being forced to endure torture rather than dreamless sleep, or an otherwise neutral state, would be a tragedy of a fundamentally different kind than being forced to “endure” a neutral state instead of a state of maximal bliss.

These cases also don't seem "flippable" with similar plausibility. And the same applies to Epicurean/Buddhist/minimalist views of wellbeing and value.

1. ^{^}

   An alternative is to speak in terms of urgency vs. non-urgency, as Karl Popper, Thomas Metzinger, and Jonathan Leighton have done, cf. Vinding, 2020, sec. 1.4.

For what it's worth, Magnus cites me, 2019 and Frick, 2020 further down.

My post and some other Actualist views support the procreation asymmetry without directly depending on any kind of asymmetry between goods and bads, harms and benefits, victims and beneficiaries, problems and opportunities or any kind of claimed psychological/consciousness asymmetries, instead only asymmetry in treating actual world people/interests vs non-actual world people/interests. I didn't really know what Actualism was at the time I wrote my post, and more standard accounts like Weak Actualism (see perhaps Hare, 2007, Roberts, 2011 or Spencer, 2021, and the latter responds to objections in the first two) or Spencer, 2021's recent Stable Actualism may be better. Another relatively recent paper is Cohen, 2019. There are probably other Actualist accounts out there, too.

I think Frick, 2020 also supports the procreation asymmetry without depending directly on an asymmetry, although Bykvist and Campbell, 2021 dispute this. Frick claims we have conditional reasons of the following kind:

I have reason to (if I do p, do q)

(In evaluative terms, which I prefer, we might instead write "it's better that (if p, then q)", but I'll stick with Frick's terminology here.)

Specifically in the case of procreation:

I have a moral reason to (if I create a new person, make it the case that this person’s life is at least neutral)

This gives us reason to prevent bad lives, but not reason to create good lives.

Bykvist and Campbell, 2021 criticize this and then steelman it into a contrastive reason (although to me the distinction seems kind of silly, and I think I normally think of reasons as contrastive, anyway):

I have a moral reason to (if I create a new person, make it the case that this person’s life is at least neutral) rather than not (if I create a new person, make it the case that this person’s life is at least neutral).

And if we generalize:

I have reason to (if I do p, do q) rather than not (if I do p, do q)

Bykvist and Campbell, 2021 claim that this still fails to imply that we have no reason to create good lives. That's correct, but, as far as I can tell, there's no symmetric argument that gives us a reason to create good lives; I think you'd need to modify "if I do p, do q" in a way that's no longer an implication, and so not a "conditional reason" at all. So, this is a counterexample to MacAskill's claim. Then, to get the other side of the asymmetry, we could just claim that all reasons are of this general (contrastive) conditional kind, where p conditions on the existence of a moral patient or an interest and q refers to it/them.

This can also be used to defend antifrustrationism and negative preference utilitarianism in particular, since among allowable reasons (not necessarily all reasons would be of this form), we could let p be "allow some preference x to come to exist" and let q be "ensure that x is perfectly satisfied", so that it's better for a preference to not exist than go less than perfectly satisfied. If all reasons are of the conditional kind where p is like "allow preference x to come to exist" (or "some preference x exists" in evaluative terms), we have no inherent reason to ensure any preference exists at all.

Although Magnus doesn't mention it, I think you're aware of Bader's article on the asymmetry, which also supports the asymmetry without depending on an asymmetry, instead using "structural consistency".

Of course, I also just think that some asymmetries are directly intuitive, and that flipping them is not, as Magnus pointed out. The procreation asymmetry is one of my strongest intuitions. I don't have the intuition that pleasure is good in itself, but I have the intuition that (involuntary) suffering is bad. I find antifrustrationism and asymmetric preference-affecting views intuitive, also partly because ignoring an individual's own preferences to create and satisfy new ones in them seems pretty "perverse" to me; I discuss this a bit more here.

I think it does challenge the point but could have done so more clearly.

The post isn't broadly discussing "preventing bad things and causing good things", but more narrowly discussing preventing a person from existing or bringing someone into existence, who could have a good life or a bad life.

"Why should we not think that it’s good to bring into existence a flourishing life?"

Assuming flourishing means "net positive" and not "devoid of suffering", for the individual with a flourishing life who we are considering bringing into existence:

The potential "the presence of suffering" in their life, if we did bring them into existence, would be "bad and morally worth preventing"

while

The potential "absence of pleasure", if we don't being them into existence, "is not bad and not a problem".

The fundamental disagreement here is about whether something can meaningfully be good without solving any preexisting problem. At least, it must be good in a much weaker sense than something that does solve a problem.

I think such views have major problems, but I don’t talk about those problems in the book. (Briefly: If you think that any X outweighs any Y, then you seem forced to believe that any probability of X, no matter how tiny, outweighs any Y. So: you can either prevent a one in a trillion trillion trillion chance of someone with a suffering life coming into existence, or guarantee a trillion lives of bliss. The lexical view says you should do the former. This seems wrong, and I think doesn’t hold up under moral uncertainty, either. There are ways of avoiding the problem, but they run into other issues.)

It really isn't clear to me that the problem you sketched is so much worse than the problems with total symmetric, average, or critical-level axiology, or the "intuition of neutrality." In fact this conclusion seems much less bad than the Sadistic Conclusion or variants of that, which affect the latter three. So I find it puzzling how much attention you (and many other EAs writing about population ethics and axiology generally; I don't mean to pick on you in particular!) devoted to those three views. And I'm not sure why you think this problem is so much worse than the Very Repugnant Conclusion (among other problems with outweighing views), either.

I sympathize with the difficulty of addressing so much content in a popular book. But this is a pretty crucial axiological debate that's been going on in EA for some time, and it can determine which longtermist interventions someone prioritizes.

>The following is, as far as I can tell, the main argument that MacAskill makes against the Asymmetry (p. 172)

I’m confused by this sentence. The Asymmetry endorses neutrality about bringing into existence lives that have positive wellbeing, and I argue against this view for much of the population ethics chapter, in the sections “The Intuition of Neutrality”,  “Clumsy Gods: The Fragility of Identity”, and “Why the Intuition of Neutrality is Wrong”.

The arguments presented against the Asymmetry in the section “The Intuition of Neutrality” are the ones I criticize in the post. The core claims defended in “Clumsy Gods” and “Why the Intuition of Neutrality Is Wrong” are, as far as I can tell, relative claims: it is better to bring Bob/Migraine-Free into existence than Alice/Migraine, because Bob/Migraine-Free would be better off. Someone who endorses the Asymmetry may agree with those relative claims (which are fairly easy to agree with) without giving up on the Asymmetry.

Specifically, one can agree that it’s better to bring Bob into existence than to bring Alice into existence while also maintaining that it would be better if Bob (or Migraine-Free) were not brought into existence in the first place. Only “The Intuition of Neutrality” appears to take up this latter question about whether it can be better to start a life than to not start a life (purely for its own sake), which is why I consider the arguments found there to be the main arguments against the Asymmetry.

If you think that any X outweighs any Y, then you seem forced to believe that any probability of X, no matter how tiny, outweighs any Y. So: you can either prevent a one in a trillion trillion trillion chance of someone with a suffering life coming into existence, or guarantee a trillion lives of bliss.

It seems worth separating purely axiological issues from issues in decision theory that relate to tiny probabilities. Specifically, one might think that this thought experiment drags two distinct issues into play: questions/intuitions relating to value lexicality, and questions/intuitions relating to tiny probabilities and large numbers. I think it’s ideal to try to separate those matters, since each of them are already quite tricky on their own.

To make the focus on the axiological question clearer, we may “actualize” the thought experiment such that we’re talking about either preventing a lifetime of the most extreme unmitigated torture or creating a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion lives of bliss.

The lexical view says that it is better to do the former. This seems reasonable to me. I do not think there is any need or ethical duty to create lives of bliss, let alone an ethical duty to create lives of bliss at the (opportunity) cost of failing to prevent a lifetime of extreme suffering. Likewise, I do not think there is anything about pleasure (or other purported goods) that render them an axiological counterpart to suffering. And I don’t think the numbers are all that relevant here, any more than thought experiments involving very large numbers of, say, art pieces would make me question my view that extreme suffering cannot be outweighed by many art pieces.

Regarding moral uncertainty: As noted in the final section above, there are many views that support granting a foremost priority to the prevention of extreme suffering and extremely bad lives. Consequently, even if one does not end up with a strictly lexical view at the theoretical level, one may still end up with an effectively lexical view at the practical level, in the sense that the reduction of extreme suffering might practically override everything else given its all-things-considered disvalue and expected prevalence.

I talk about the asymmetry between goods and bads in chapter 9 on the value of the future in the section “The Case for Optimism”, and I actually argue that there is an asymmetry: I argue the very worst world is much more bad than the very best world is good.

But arguing for such an asymmetry still does not address questions about whether or how purported goods can morally outweigh extreme suffering or extremely bad lives.

Of course, there's only so much one can do in a single chapter of a general-audience book, and all of these issues warrant a lot more discussion than I was able to give!

That is understandable. But still, I think overly strong conclusions were drawn in the book based on the discussion that was provided. For instance, Chapter 9 ends with these words:

All things considered, it seems to me that the greater likelihood of eutopia is the bigger consideration. This gives us some reason to think the expected value of the future is positive. We have grounds for hope. 

But again, no justification has been provided for the view that purported goods can outweigh severe bads, such as extreme suffering, extremely bad lives, or vast numbers of extremely bad lives. Nor do I think the book addresses the main points made in Anthony DiGiovanni’s post A longtermist critique of “The expected value of extinction risk reduction is positive”, which essentially makes a case against the final conclusion of Chapter 9.

The Asymmetry endorses neutrality about bringing into existence lives that have positive wellbeing, and I argue against this view for much of the population ethics chapter, in the sections “The Intuition of Neutrality”,  “Clumsy Gods: The Fragility of Identity”, and “Why the Intuition of Neutrality is Wrong”.

You seem to be using a different definition of the Asymmetry than Magnus is, and I'm not sure it's a much more common one. On Magnus's definition (which is also used by e.g. Chappell; Holtug, Nils (2004), "Person-affecting Moralities"; and McMahan (1981), "Problems of Population Theory"), bringing into existence lives that have "positive wellbeing" is at best neutral. It could well be negative.

The kind of Asymmetry Magnus is defending here doesn't imply the intuition of neutrality, and so isn't vulnerable to your critiques like violating transitivity, or relying on a confused concept of necessarily existing people.

on a range of views in moral philosophy, we should weight one unit of pain more than one unit of pleasure...

I'm struggling to interpret this statement? What is the underlying sense in which pain and pleasure are measures in the same units and are thus ‘equal even though the pain is morally weighted more highly?’

Knutson states the problem well IMO ^[1]

If happiness and suffering were factual attributes measurable on one ratio scale, one way to distinguish the views would be straightforward: weak negative views could give greater moral or evaluative weight to one factual unit of suffering than one factual unit of happiness, while non-negative views could give them equal weight. It would then be accurate to call such weak negative views ‘asymmetric’ and such non-negative views ‘symmetric.’ However, such measurability is highly controversial...

Maybe you have some ideas and intuition into how to think about this?

Thank you for clarifying!

Briefly: If you think that any X outweighs any Y, then you seem forced to believe that any probability of X, no matter how tiny, outweighs any Y.

This is true for utility/social welfare functions that are additive even over uncertainty (and maybe some other classes), but not in general. See this thread of mine.

This seems wrong, and I think doesn’t hold up under moral uncertainty, either. There are ways of avoiding the problem, but they run into other issues.

Is this related to lexical amplifications of nonlexical theories like CU under MEC? Or another approach to moral uncertainty? My impression from your co-authored book on moral uncertainty is that you endorse MEC with intertheoretic comparisons (I get the impression Ord endorses a parliamentary approach from his other work, but I don't know about Bykvist). 

It implies that there wouldn't be anything wrong with immediately killing everyone reading this, their families, and everyone else, since this supposedly wouldn't be destroying anything positive.

That's not how many people with the views Magnus described would interpret their views.

For instance, let's take my article on tranquilism, which Magnus cites. It says this in the introduction:

Tranquilism is not meant as a standalone moral theory, but as a way to think about well-being and the value of different experiences. Tranquilism can then serve as a building block for more complex moral views where things other than experiences also matter morally.

Further in the text, it contains the following passage:

As a theory limited to the evaluation of experienced well-being, tranquilism is compatible with pluralistic moral views where things other than experiences – for instance the accomplishment of preferences and life goals – can be (dis)valuable too.

And at the end in the summary:

Tranquilism is not committed to the view that cravings are all that matter. Our motivation is multifaceted, and next to impulsive motivation through cravings, we are also motivated by desires to achieve certain goals. People do not solely live for the sake of their personal well-being; we may also (or even exclusively) hold other goals, including goals about the welfare of others or goals about the state of the world. Thinking about morality in terms of goals (or “ends”) has inspired rationality-based accounts of cooperation such as Kantianism (arguably), contractualism, or coordinated decision-making between different value systems.28 Furthermore, if one chooses to regard the achievement of preferences or goals as valuable in itself, this can inspire moral axiologies such as preference-based consequentialism or coherent extrapolation, either as a complement or an alternative to one’s theory of well-being. (And of course, one’s goals may include many other components, including non-moral or non-altruistic ones.)

I generally think EAs are too fond of single-minded conceptions of morality. I see ethics as being largely about people's interests/goals. On that perspective, it would be preposterous to kill people against their will to prevent future suffering.

That said, people's "goals" are often under-defined, and population ethics as a whole is under-defined (it isn't fixed how many people there will be or what types of goals new people will have), so there's also room for an experience-focused "axiology" like tranquilism to deal with cases that are under-defined according to goal-focused morality.

I think there's a bit of confusion around the conclusion "there's nothing with intrinsic value." You seem to be assuming that the people who come to this conclusion completely share your framework for how to think about population ethics and then conclude that where you see "intrinsic value," there's nothing in its place. So you interpret them as thinking that killing people is okay (edit: or would be okay absent considerations around cooperation or perhaps moral uncertainty). However, when I argue that "nothing has intrinsic value," I mostly mean "this way of thinking is a bit confused and we should think about population ethics in an entirely different way." (Specifically, things can beconditionally valuable if they're grounded in people's interests/goals, but they aren't "intrinsically valuable" in the sense that it's morally pressing to bring them about regardless of circumstances.)

[the view that intrinsically positive lives do not exist] implies that there wouldn't be anything wrong with immediately killing everyone reading this, their families, and everyone else, since this supposedly wouldn't be destroying anything positive.

This is not true. The view that killing is bad and morally wrong can be, and has been, grounded in many ways besides reference to positive value.^[1]

First, there are preference-based views according to which it would be bad and wrong to thwart preferences against being killed, even as the creation and satisfaction of preferences does not create positive value (cf. Singer, 1980; Fehige, 1998). Such views could imply that killing and extinction would overall be bad.

Second, there are views according to which death itself is bad and a harm, independent of — or in addition to — preferences against it (cf. Benatar, 2006, pp. 211-221).

Third, there are views (e.g. ideal utilitarianism) that hold that certain acts such as violence and killing, or even intentions to kill and harm (cf. Hurka, 2001; Knutsson, 2022), are themselves disvaluable and make the world worse.

Fourth, there are nonconsequentialist views according to which we have moral duties not to harm or kill, and such duties may be combined with a wide range of axiologies, including those that deny positive intrinsic value. ("For deontologists, a killing is a wrong under most circumstances, and its wrongness does not depend on its consequences or its effects on overall welfare." Sunstein & Vermeule, 2005.) Such duties can, yet need not, rest on a framework of moral rights.

As for experientialist minimalist views in particular (i.e. views that say that the reduction of experienced bads is all that matters), I would highly recommend reading Teo Ajantaival's essay Peacefulness, nonviolence, and experientialist minimalism. It provides an elaborate discussion of cessation/non-creation implications from the perspective of that specific class of minimalist views.

Teo's post also makes the important point that offsetting consequentialist views (e.g. classical utilitarianism) arguably have worse theoretical cessation implications than do minimalist experientialist views (see also the footnote below). Last but not least, the post highlights the importance of distinguishing purely hypothetical questions from practical questions, and highlights the strong reasons to not only pursue a cooperative approach, but also ("as far as is possible and practicable") a nonviolent and nonaggressive approach. 

these semi-nihilistic views

I would strongly resist that characterization. For instance, a Buddhist axiology focused on the alleviation of suffering and unmet needs on behalf of all sentient beings is, to my mind at least, the Kryptonite opposite of nihilism. Its upshot, in essence, is that it recommends us to pursue a deeply meaningful and compassionate purpose, aimed at alleviating the burdens of the world. Indeed, not only do I find this to be positively anti-nihilistic, but also supremely beautiful.

(Perhaps also see this post, especially the final section on meaning and motivation.)

as long as we're reviving old debates, readers may be interested in Toby Ord's arguments against many of these views (and e.g. this response).

I have recently written a point-by-point reply to Ord's essay.

1. ^{^}

   And, FWIW, I think reference to positive value is not a promising way to ground the view that killing is wrong. As many have noted, moral views that ground the wrongness of killing purely in, say, the loss of pleasurable experiences tend to be vulnerable to elimination arguments, which say that we should, at least in theory, kill people if we can replace them with happier beings.

   Thus, to borrow from your comment (in bold), one could likewise make the following claim about classical utilitarianism:

   "It implies that there wouldn't be anything wrong with immediately killing everyone reading this, their families, and everyone else, if we could in turn create isolated matrix lives that experience much more pleasure. Indeed, unlike suffering-focused views, classical utilitarianism would allow each of these killings to involve vast amounts of unrelenting torture, provided that 'sufficiently many' happy matrix lives are created in turn."

   I take this to be a worse implication. Of course, a classical utilitarian would be quick to highlight many nuances and caveats here, and not least to highlight the hypothetical nature of this scenario. But such points will generally also apply in the case of experientialist minimalist views.

edit: I wrote this comment before I refreshed the page and I now see that these points have been raised!

Thanks for flagging that all ethical views have bullets to bite and for pointing at previous discussion of asymmetrical views!

However, I'm not really following your argument.

Several of your arguments are arguments for the view that "intrinsically positive lives do not exist,"  [...] It implies that there wouldn't be anything wrong with immediately killing everyone reading this, their families, and everyone else, since this supposedly wouldn't be destroying anything positive.

• This doesn't necessarily follow, as Magnus explicitly notes that "many proponents of the Asymmetry argue that there is an important distinction between the potential value of continued existence (or the badness of discontinued existence) versus the potential value of bringing a new life into existence." So given that everyone reading this already exists, there is in fact potential positive value in continuing our existences.
• However, I may have missed some stronger views that Magnus mentions that would lead to this implication. The closest I can find is when Magnus writes, some "views of wellbeing likewise support the badness of creating miserable lives, yet they do not support any supposed goodness of creating happy lives. On these views, intrinsically positive lives do not exist, although relationally positive lives do." As I understand that, though, this means that there can be positive value in lives, specifically lives that are interacting with others?

I wouldn't be surprised if I'd just missed the relevant view that you are describing here, so I'd appreciate if you could point to the specific quotes that you were thinking of.

Finally, you are implicitly assuming hedonism + consequentialism — so if it turned out that happiness had no intrinsic value, there’s no reason to continue life. But you could hold a suffering-focused view that cares about other values (e.g. preference satisfaction), or a form of non-consequentialism that sees intrinsic value in life beyond happiness. (Thanks to Sean Richardson for making this point to me!)

The Procreative Asymmetry is very widely held, and much discussed, by philosophers who work on population ethics (and seemingly very common in the general population). If anything, it's the default view, rather than a niche position (except among EA philosophers). If you do a quick search for it on philpapers.org there's quite a lot there. 

You might think the Asymmetry is deeply mistaken, but describing it as a 'niche position' is much like calling non-consequentialism a 'niche position'. 

Max_Daniel @ 2022-08-23T17:01 (+15)

The Asymmetry is certainly widely discussed by academic philosophers, as shown by e.g. the philpapers search you link to. I also agree that it seems off to characterize it as a "niche view".

I'm not sure, however, whether it is widely endorsed or even widely defended. Are you aware of any surveys or other kinds of evidence that would speak to that more directly than the fact that there are lot of papers on the subject (which I think primarily shows that it's an attractive topic to write about by the standards of academic philosophy)? 

I'd be pretty interested in understanding the actual distribution of views among professional philosophers, with the caveat that I don't think this is necessarily that much evidence for what view on population ethics should ultimately guide our actions. The caveat is roughly because I think the incentives of academic philosophy aren't strongly favoring beliefs on which it'd be overall good to act on, as opposed to views one can publish well about (of course there are things pushing in the other direction as well, e.g. these are people who've thought about it a lot and use criteria for critizing and refining views that are more widely endorsed, so it is certainly some evidence, hence my interest).

FWIW my own impression is closer to:

• The Asymmetry is widely held to be an intuitive desideratum for theories of population ethics.
  • As usual  (cf. the founding impetus of 'experimental philosophy'), philosophers don't usually check whether the intuition is in fact widely held, and recent empirical work casts some doubt on that.
  • As usual, there are also at least some philosophers trying to 'explain away' the intuition (e.g. in this case Chappell 2017).
• However, it turns out that it is hard to find a theory of population ethics that rationalizes the Asymmetry without having other problems. My sense is that this assessment – in part due to prominent impossibility theorems – is widely shared, and that there is likely no single widely held specific view that implies the Asymmetry.
• This is basically the kind of situation that tends to spawn an 'industry' in academic philosophy, in which people come up with increasingly complex views that avoid known problems with previous views, other people point out new problems, and so on. And this is precisely what happened.
• Overall, it is pretty hard to tell from this how many philosophers 'actually believe' the Asymmetry, in part because many participants in the conversation may not think of themselves as having any settled beliefs on the matter and in part because the whole language game seems to often involve "beliefs" that are at best pretty compartmentalized (e.g. don't explain an agent's actions in the world at large) and at worst not central examples of belief at all (perhaps more similar to how an actor relates to the beliefs of a character while enacting a play).

I think in many ways, the Asymmetry is like the view that there is some kind of principled difference between ideas and matter or that humans have free will of some sort – a perhaps widely held intuition, and certainly a fertile ground for long debates between philosophers, from which, however, it is hard to draw any clear conclusion if you are an agent who (unlike the debating philosophers) faces a high-stakes, real-world action depending on the matter. (It's also different in some ways, e.g. it seems easier to agree on a precise statement of the Asymmetry than for some of these other issues.)

Curious how well this impression matches yours? I could imagine that the impression one gets (like me) primarily from reading the literature may be somewhat different from e.g. the vibe at conferences.

Lukas_Gloor @ 2022-08-23T18:40 (+12)

I agree with the 'spawned an industry' point and how that makes it difficult to assess how widespread various views really are.

As usual (cf. the founding impetus of 'experimental philosophy'), philosophers don't usually check whether the intuition is in fact widely held, and recent empirical work casts some doubt on that.

Magnus in the OP discusses the paper you link to in the quoted passage and points out that it also contains findings we can interpret in support of a (weak) asymmetry of some kind. Also, David (the David who's a co-author of the paper) told me recently that he thinks these types of surveys are not worth updating on by much [edit: but "casts some doubt on" is still accurate if we previously believed people would have clear answers that favor the asymmetry] because the subjects often interpret things in all kinds of ways or don't seem to have consistent views across multiple answers. (The publication itself mentions in the "Supplementary Materials" that framing effects play a huge role.)

Max_Daniel @ 2022-08-23T22:44 (+4)

Thank you, that's interesting and I hadn't seen this.

David_Althaus @ 2022-08-24T11:00 (+6)

(I now wrote a comment elaborating on some of these inconsistencies here.)

MichaelPlant @ 2022-08-24T14:16 (+8)

This impression strikes me as basically spot on. It would have been more accurate for me to say it's taken to be a "widely held to be an intuitive desideratum for theories of population ethics". It does have its defenders, though, e.g. Frick, Roberts, Bader. I agree that there does not seem to be any theory that rationalises this intuition without having other problems (but this is merely a specific instance of the general case that there seems to be no theory of population ethics that retains all our intuitions - hence Arrhenius' famous impossibility result).

I'm not aware of any surveys of philosophers on their views on population ethics. AFAIT, the number of professional philosophers who are experts in population ethics - depending on how one wants to define those terms - could probably fit into one lecture room.

NunoSempere @ 2022-08-23T11:47 (+10)

and seemingly very common in the general population

 

So consider the wording in the post:

bringing a miserable life into the world has negative value while bringing a happy life into the world does not have positive value — except potentially through its instrumental effects and positive roles

If we do a survey of 100 Americans on Positly, with that exact wording, what percentage of randomly chosen people do you think would agree? I happen to respect Positly, but I am open to other survey methodologies.

I was intuitively thinking 5% tops, but the fact that you disagree strongly takes me aback a little bit.

Note that I think you were mostly thinking about philosophers, whereas I was mostly thinking about the general population.

Larks @ 2022-08-23T14:49 (+24)

I was intuitively thinking 5% tops

I'm surprised you'd have such a low threshold - I would have thought noise, misreading the question, trolling, misclicks etc. alone would push above that level.

NunoSempere @ 2022-08-24T09:20 (+2)

You can imagine survey designs which would filter trolls &c, but you right I should have been slightly higher based on that.

Magnus Vinding @ 2022-08-23T13:57 (+19)

It might also be worth distinguishing stronger and weaker asymmetries in population ethics. Caviola et al.'s main study indicates that laypeople on average endorse at least a weak axiological asymmetry (which becomes increasingly strong as the populations under consideration become larger), and the pilot study suggests that people in certain situations (e.g. when considering foreign worlds) tend to endorse a rather strong one, cf. the 100-to-1 ratio.

NunoSempere @ 2022-08-23T14:02 (+6)

Makes sense.

Lukas_Gloor @ 2022-08-23T12:24 (+12)

Wow, I'd have said 30-65% for my 50% confidence interval, and <5% is only about 5-10% of my probability mass. But maybe we're envisioning this survey very differently.

NunoSempere @ 2022-08-23T13:52 (+87)

Did a test run with 58 participants (I got two attempted repeats):

So you were right, and I'm super surprised here.

Stefan_Schubert @ 2022-08-23T14:47 (+27)

There is a paper by Lucius Caviola et al of relevance:

We found that people do not endorse the so-called intuition of neutrality according to which creating new people with lives worth living is morally neutral. In Studies 2a-b, participants considered a world containing an additional happy person better and a world containing an additional unhappy person worse. 

Moreover, we also found that people's judgments about the positive value of adding a new happy person and the negative value of adding a new unhappy person were symmetrical. That is, their judgments did not reflect the so-called asymmetry—according to which adding a new unhappy person is bad but adding a new happy person is neutral. 

The study design is quite different from Nuno's, though. No doubt the study design matters.

MathiasKB @ 2022-08-23T14:33 (+26)

Words cannot express how much I appreciate your presence Nuno.

Sorry for being off-topic but I just can't help myself. This is comment is such a perfect example of the attitude that made me fall in with this community.

Pablo @ 2022-08-23T11:16 (+9)

It is "very widely held" by philosophers only in the sense that it is a pre-theoretic intuition that many people, including philosophers, share. It is not "very widely held" by philosophers on reflection.

MichaelPlant @ 2022-08-23T11:37 (+27)

The intuition seems to be almost universally held. I agree many philosophers (and others) think that this intuition must, on reflection, be mistaken. But many philosophers, even after reflection, still think the procreative asymmetry is correct. I'm not sure how interesting it would be to argue about the appropriate meaning of the phrase "very widely held". Based on my (perhaps atypical) experience, I guess that if you polled those who had taken a class on population ethics, I expect about 10% would agree with the statement "the procreative asymmetry is a niche position".

David Mathers @ 2022-08-23T13:24 (+3)

Which version of the intuition? If you just mean 'there is greater value in preventing the creation of a life with X net utils of suffering than in creating a life with X net utils of pleasure', then maybe. But people often claim that 'adding net-happy people is neutral, whilst adding net-suffering people is bad' is intuitive, and there was a fairly recent paper claiming to find that this wasn't what ordinary people thought when surveyed: https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/12537/the-asymmetry-of-population-ethics-experimental-social-choice-and-dual-process-moral-reasoning   

I haven't actually read the paper to check if it's any good though...

Lukas_Gloor @ 2022-08-23T11:46 (+18)

I upvoted this comment because I think there's something to it.

That said, see the comment I made elsewhere in this thread about the existence of selection effects. The asymmetry is hard to justify for believers in an objective axiology, but philosophers who don't believe in an objective axiology likely won't write paper after paper on population ethics.

Another selection effect is that consequentialists are morally motivated to spread their views, which could amplify consensus effects (even if it applies to consequentialists on both sides of the split, one group being larger and better positioned to start with can amplify the proportions after a growth phase). For instance, before the EA-driven wave of population ethics papers, presumably the field would have been split more evenly?

Of course, if EA were to come out largely against any sort of population-ethical asymmetry, that's itself evidence for (a lack of) convincingness of the position. (At the same time, a lot of EAs take moral realism seriously* and I don't think they're right – I'd be curious what a poll of anti-realist EAs would tell us about population-ethical asymmetries of various kinds and various strengths.)

*I should mention that this includes Magnus, author of the OP. I probably don't agree with his specific arguments for there being an asymmetry, but I do agree with the claim that the topic is underexplored/underappreciated.

David Mathers @ 2022-08-23T13:08 (+3)

What exactly do you mean by "have an objective axiology" and why do you think it makes it (distinctively) hard to defend asymmetry? (I have an eccentric philosophical view that the word "objective" nearly always causes more trouble than it's worth and should be tabooed.) 

Lukas_Gloor @ 2022-08-23T14:07 (+10)

The short answer:

Thinking in terms of "something has intrinsic value" privileges particular answers. For instance, in this comment today, MichaelPlant asked Magnus the following:

[...] why do we have reason to prevent what is bad but no reason to bring about what is good?"

The comment presupposes that there's "something that is bad" and "something that is good" (in a sense independent of particular people's judgments – this is what I meant by "objective"). If we grant this framing, any arguments for why "create what's good" is less important than "don't create what's bad" will seem ad hoc!

Instead, for people interested in exploring person-affecting intuitions (and possibly defending them), I recommend taking a step back to investigate what we mean when we say things like "what's good" or "something has intrinsic value." I think things are good when they're connected to the interests/goals of people/beings, but not in some absolute sense that goes beyond it. In other words, I only understand the notion of (something like) "conditional value," but I don't understand "intrinsic value."

The longer answer:

Here's a related intuition:

• There’s a tension between the beliefs “there’s an objective axiology” and “people are free to choose their life goals.”

In my post, "Population Ethics Without [an Objective] Axiology," I defended a specific framework for thinking about population ethics. From the post:

Many effective altruists hesitate to say, “One of you must be wrong!” when one person cares greatly about living forever while the other doesn’t. By contrast, when two people disagree on population ethics “One of you must be wrong!” seems to be the standard (implicit) opinion. I think these two attitudes are in tension. To the degree people are confident that life goals are up to the individual to decide/pursue, I suggest they lean in on this belief. I expect that resolving the tension in that way – leaning in on the belief “people are free to choose their life goals;” giving up on “there’s an axiology that applies to everyone” – makes my framework more intuitive and gives a better sense of what the framework is for, what it’s trying to accomplish.

If there were an objective axiology, I might be making a mistake in how I plan to live a fulfilled, self-oriented life. Namely, if the way I chose to live my life doesn't give sufficient weight to things that are intrinsically good according to the objective axiology, then I'm making some kind of mistake. I think it's occasionally possible for people to make "mistakes" about their goals/values if they're insufficiently aware of alternatives and would change their minds if they knew more, etc. However, I don't think it's possible for truly-well-informed reasoners to be wrong about what they think they deeply care about, and I don't think "becoming well-informed" leads to convergence of life goals among people/reasoners.

I'd say that the main force behind arguments against person-affecting views in population ethics is usually something like the following:

"We want to figure out what's best for morally relevant others. Well-being differences in morally relevant others should always matter – if they don't matter on someone's account, then this particular account couldn't be concerned with what's best for morally relevant others."

As you know, person-affecting views tend to come out in such a way that they say things like "it’s neutral to create the perfect life and (equally) neutral to create a merely quite good life." (Or they may say that whether to create a specific life depends on other options we have available, thereby violating the axiom of independence of irrelevant alternatives.)

These features of person-affecting views show that well-being differences don't always matter on those views. Some people will interpret this as "person-affecting views are incompatible with the goal of ethics – figuring out what's best for morally relevant others."

However, all of this is begging the question. Who says that the same ethical rules should govern existing (and sure-to-exist) people/beings as well as possible people/beings? If there's an objective axiology, it's implicit that the same rules would apply (why wouldn't they?). However, without an objective axiology, all we're left is the following:

• Ethics is about interests/goals.
• Nothing is intrinsically valuable, but various things can be conditionally valuable if grounded in someone’s interests/goals.
• The rule “focus on interests/goals” has comparatively clear implications in fixed population contexts. The minimal morality of “don’t be a jerk” means we shouldn’t violate others’ interests/goals (and perhaps even help them where it’s easy and our comparative advantage). The ambitious morality of “do the most moral/altruistic thing” has a lot of overlap with something like preference utilitarianism. (Though there are instances where people's life goals are under-defined, in which case people with different takes on "do the most moral/altruistic thing" may wish to fill in the gaps according to subjectivist "axiologies" that they endorse.)
• On creating new people/beings, “focus on interests/goals” no longer gives unambiguous results: (1) The number of interests/goals isn’t fixed (2) The types of interests/goals aren’t fixed
• This leaves population ethics under-defined with two different perspectives: that of existing or sure-to-exist people/beings (what they want from the future) and that of possible people/beings (what they want from their potential creators).
• Without an objective axiology, any attempt to unify these perspectives involves subjective judgment calls.

So, without an objective axiology, there are these two separate perspectives. We can view person-affecting views as making the following statement:

"'Doing the most moral/altruistic thing' isn't about creating new people with new interests/goals. Instead, it's about benefitting existing (or sure-to-exist) people/beings according to their interests/goals."

In other words, person-affecting views concentrate their caring budget on one of two possible perspectives (instead of trying to design an axiology that incorporates both). That seems like a perfectly defensible approach to me!

Still, we're left with the question, "If your view focuses on existing (and sure-to-exist) people, why is it bad to create a miserable person?"

Someone with person-affecting views could reply the following:

"While I concentrate my caring budget on one perspective (existing and sure-to-exist people/beings), that doesn't mean my concern for the interests of possible people/beings is zero. My approach to dealing with merely possible people is essentially 'don't be a jerk.' That's exactly why I'm sometimes indifferent between creating a medium-happy possible person and a very happy possible person. I understand that the latter is better for possible people/beings, but since I concentrate my caring budget on existing (and sure-to-exist) people/beings, bringing the happier person into existence usually isn't a priority to me. Lastly, you're probably going to ask 'why is your notion of 'don't be a jerk' asymmetric?.' I.e., why not 'don't be a jerk' by creating people who would be grateful to be alive (at least in instances where it's easy/cheap to do so)? To this, my reply is that creating a specific person singles out that person (from the sea of possible people/beings) in a way that not creating them does not. There's no answer to 'What do possible people/beings want?' that applies to all conceivable beings, so I cannot do right by all of them, anyway. By not giving an existence slot to someone who would be grateful to exist, I admit that I'm arguably failing to benefit a particular subset of possible people/beings (the ones who would be grateful to get the slot). Still, other possible people/beings don't mind not getting the spot, so there's at least a sense in which I didn't disrespect possible people/beings as a whole interest group. By contrast, if I create someone who hates being alive, saying 'Other people would be grateful in your spot' doesn't seem like a defensible excuse. 'Not creating happy people' only means I'm not giving maximum concern to possible people/beings, whereas 'creating a miserable person' means I'm flat-out disrespecting someone specific, who I chose to 'highlight' from the sea of all possible people/beings (in the most real sense) – there doesn't seem to be a defensible excuse for that."

The long answer: My post Population Ethics Without ((an Objective)) Axiology: A Framework.

David Mathers @ 2022-08-23T15:00 (+3)

I'm not sure I really follow (though I admit I've only read the comment, not the post you've linked to.) Is the argument something like we should only care about fulfilling preferences that already exist, and adding people to the world doesn't automatically do that, so there's no general reason to add happy people if it doesn't satisfy a preference of someone who is here already? Couldn't you show that adding suffering people isn't automatically bad by the same reasoning, since it doesn't necessarily violate an existing preference? (Also, on the word "objective": you can definitely have a view of morality on which satisfying existing preference or doing what people value is all that matters, but it is mind-independently true that this is the correct morality, which makes it a realist view as academic philosophers classify things, and hence a view on which morality is objective in one sense of "objective". Hence why  I think "objective" should be tabooed.) 

Lukas_Gloor @ 2022-08-23T15:24 (+6)

Is the argument something like we should only care about fulfilling preferences that already exist, and adding people to the world doesn't automatically do that, so there's no general reason to add happy people if it doesn't satisfy a preference of someone who is here already?

Pretty much, but my point is only that this is a perfectly defensible way to think about population ethics, not that I expect everyone to find it compelling over alternatives.

As I say in the longer post:

Just like the concept “athletic fitness” has several defensible interpretations (e.g., the difference between a 100m sprinter and a marathon runner), so (I argue) does “doing the most moral/altruistic thing.”

I agree with what you write about "objective" – I'm guilty of violating your advice.

(That said, I think there's a sense in which preference utilitarianism would be unsatisfying as a "moral realist" answer to all of ethics because it doesn't say anything about what preferences to adopt. Or, if it did say what preferences to adopt, then it would again be subject to my criticism – what if objective preference utilitarianism says I should think of my preferences in one particular way but that doesn't resonate with me?)

Couldn't you show that adding suffering people isn't automatically bad by the same reasoning, since it doesn't necessarily violate an existing preference?

I tried to address this in the last paragraph of my previous comment. It gets a bit complicated because I'm relying on a distinction between "ambitious morality" and "minimal morality" ( = "don't be a jerk") which also only makes sense if there's no objective axiology.

I don't expect the following to be easily intelligible to people used to thinking within the moral realist framework, but for more context, I recommend the section "minimal morality vs. ambitious morality" here. This link explains why I think it makes sense to have a distinction between minimal morality and ambitious morality, instead of treating all of morality as the same thing. ("Care morality" vs. "cooperation morality" is a similar framing, which probably tells you more about what I mean here.) And my earlier comment (in particular, the last paragraph in my previous comment) already explained why I think minimal morality contains a population-ethical asymmetry.

MichaelStJules @ 2022-08-23T21:12 (+6)

I'd guess contractualists and rights-based theorists (less sure about deontologists generally) would normally take the asymmetry to be true, because if someone is never born, there are no claims or rights of theirs to be concerned with.

I don't know how popular it is among consequentialists, virtue ethicists or those with mixed views. I wouldn't expect it to be extremely uncommon or for the vast majority to accept it.

I understand that you feel that the asymmetry is true

Just to clarify, I wouldn't say that. :)

and as such it feels ok not to have addressed it in a popular book.

But the book does briefly take up the Asymmetry, and makes a couple of arguments against it. The point I was trying to make in the first section is that these arguments don't seem convincing.

The questions that aren't addressed are those regarding interpersonal outweighing — e.g. can purported goods morally outweigh extreme suffering? Can happy lives morally outweigh very bad lives? (As I hint in the post, one can reject the Asymmetry while also rejecting interpersonal moral outweighing of certain kinds, such as those that would allow some to experience extreme suffering for the pleasure of others, or those that would allow extremely miserable lives to be morally outweighed by a large number of happy lives, cf. Vinding, 2020, ch. 3.) 

These questions do seem of critical importance to our future priorities. Even if one doesn't think that they need to be raised in a popular book that promises a deep dive on population ethics, they at least deserve to be discussed in depth by aspiring effective altruists.

That doesn't seem true to me (see MichaelPlant's comment).

Also, there's a selection effect in academic moral philosophy where people who don't find the concept of "intrinsic value" / "the ethical value of a life" compelling won't go on to write paper after paper about it. For instance, David Heyd wrote one of the earliest books on "population ethics" (the book was called "Genethics" but the term didn't catch on) and argued that it's maybe "outside the scope of ethics." Once you said that, there isn't a lot else to say. Similarly, according to this comment by peterhartree, Bernard Williams also has issues with the way other philosophers approach population ethics. He argues for his position of reasons anti-realism, which says that there's no perspective external to people's subjective reasons for action that has the authority to tell us how to live.

If you want an accurate count on philosophers' views on population ethics, you have to throw the net wide to include people who looked at the field, considered that it's a bit confused because of reasons anti-realism, and then moved on rather than repeating arguments for reasons anti-realism. (The latter would be a bit boring because you'd conclude by saying something like "different positions on population ethics are similarly defensible – it depends on what people care to emphasize.")