Is the procreation asymmetry intuitively supported? According to a recent article in this journal, an experimental study suggests the opposite. Dean Spears (2020) claims that nearly three-quarters of participants report that there is a reason to create a person just because that person’s life would be happy. In reply, I argue that various confounding factors render the study internally invalid. More generally, I show how one might come to adopt the procreation asymmetry for the wrong reasons by misinterpreting one’s intuitions.
Is there a pro tanto moral reason to create a life merely because it would be good for the person living it? Proponents of the procreation asymmetry claim there is not. Defending this controversial no reason claim, some have suggested that it is well in line with other phenomena in the moral realm: there is no reason to give a promise merely because one would keep it, and there is no reason to procreate merely to increase the extent of justice in the world. Allegedly, some analogs extend so far as to support a unified theory of the no reason claim and the nonidentity thesis, that is, the view that of two persons leading lives of positive wellbeing, there is a reason to create the person with higher wellbeing. I dismantle the proposed analogs and show that they fail to meet various desiderata. Moreover, I refute Johann Frick's argument that the no reason claim follows from the assumption that reasons of beneficence are reasons to act for the sake of people. By criticizing attractive defenses for the no reason claim, I weaken its plausibility.
Why is life better if episodic well-being gradually rises from an unhappy childhood to happiness in old age than if it descends from early bliss to late misery? Some have attributed the significance of the shape of our well-being to narrative relations that typically underlie it. For example, our lives improve if times of suffering and sacrifice are not just superfluous appendages of our lives but pay off in later success. I will not only defend this approach against several forceful objections but also provide a new explanation for why narrative relations matter. They imply that our lives are less burdened by deprivation, understood in a counterfactual sense. In turn, a life without narrative relations is worse because it is more deprived, just as death is worse the better the future it withholds from us.
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