The Existence Puzzles

Abstract

This book introduces newcomers to population ethics, a relatively new branch of moral philosophy that asks how moral law addresses distinctions in how many people, and just who, will exist in the future. This book also proposes a new way of thinking about the hard cases that population ethics is so widely known for. An intuitive first pass at what moral law has to say about the choice to bring new people into existence to begin with comes from Narveson. We are “in favour of making people happy” (we can call that the basic maximizing intuition) but are “neutral about making happy people” (the basic existential intuition). Ever since population ethics started attracting intense interest just a few decades ago, the dominant narrative has been that the two intuitions exist in high tension—that they are indeed inconsistent—and that, as between the two, it is the basic existential intuition that must go. That unfortunate conclusion ties our hands both in addressing climate change and establishing the moral permissibility of and constitutional right to contraception and earlier abortion. Moreover, it demands grave sacrifices on the part of many people in exchange for the bare chance to avoid human extinction indefinitely. This book takes a different tack. It considers hard cases to generate, not counterexamples disproving the basic existential intuition, but puzzles we can solve by application of the puzzle-solving rules we all understand: fitting the pieces together without throwing any of them out and within the confines of conceptual necessity.