Rethinking the Asymmetry

Abstract

According to the Asymmetry, we’ve strong moral reason to prevent miserable lives from coming into existence, but no moral reason to bring happy lives into existence. This procreative asymmetry is often thought to be part of commonsense morality, however theoretically puzzling it might prove to be. I argue that this is a mistake. The Asymmetry is merely prima facie intuitive, and loses its appeal on further reflection. Mature commonsense morality recognizes no fundamental procreative asymmetry. It may recognize some superficially similar theses, but we will see that they derive from more familiar principles, and are compatible with there being moral reason to bring happy lives into existence.

Why Not Effective Altruism?

“…This can explain why avoiding human extinction should be a very high priority on a wide range of reasonable, life-affirming views, without depending on anything as extreme as total utilitarianism. Some mistakenly fear that life-affirming longtermism entails 32 McMahan (2013); Chappell (2017).…”

The Procreation Asymmetry Destabilized: Analogs and Acting for People's Sake

“…Contrastive evidence is particularly important because the asymmetry intuition itself is not universally shared. Instead, some find the reason claim intuitive: there is a reason to create a happy life just because it would be happy (Chappell 2017;Rüger 2020; see also Algander 2012). 6 Various proponents of the procreation asymmetry explicitly acknowledge the lack of contrastive evidence (see e.g.…”

Reply to Spears’s ‘The Asymmetry of Population Ethics’

“…2 Various © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press 1 For (non-experimental) criticisms of the received view, see Crisp (2007) and Chappell (2017). On the distinction between internal and external validity in experimental philosophy see Mukerji (2019: 131-145).…”