11 Comments

Great article, very well argued!

However I still have a concern. If you are a utilitarian, what is the meta ethical basis for denying the value of additional life? Clearly if another person is born, average and total utility are subject to change. What grounds do you have for rejecting that besides not wanting to deal with the RC?

This isn’t a problem specifically with your theory, but with utilitarians in general, who create ad-hoc restrictions on utilitarian calculus without a sufficient basis for doing so (say, denying pleasure derived from immoral acts so as to not have to deal with the potential implications).

Expand full comment

I wrote a reply to your article -- here it is. https://benthams.substack.com/p/contra-eliason-on-totalism

Expand full comment
Nov 3, 2022Liked by Dawson Eliasen

Hello! Welcome to Substack. It's good to see a long and well-thought out article like this. Nice job for your first post.

I wrote 3 articles about Scott's population ethics because I found it so interesting:

1. https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/in-favor-of-underpopulation-worries

2. https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/scott-alexander-population-ethics

3. https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/population-ethics-meets-genetic-enhancement

If I understand you correctly, the view you seem to have adopted is sometimes called the person-affecting view. The issue with that is that if given the choice between creating a world filled with suffering people and a world filled with happy people, you are indifferent because the people do not exist yet. In practical terms, that means you don't have a moral reason to pick a healthy embryo or wait to get pregnant to avoid having a child with a disease. These all seem like rather unpalatable conclusions in my view. See #3. Most extreme would be something like "a single pinprick of an already existing child is worse than adding 100 billion new people to Hell for enternal torment." Which seems like a worse bullet to bite when compared to the RC.

Expand full comment

There's a third possible option: having children is morally neutral. If morality is about resolving conflicts between people, and about collective decision making, having children is a personal decision and not morally relevant. If course, that goes against utilitarianism, but utilitarianism is not known to be correct.

Expand full comment