Home
hamburger menu icon

Population Ethics

One's views on population policy may be influenced by choice of ethical framework. See also our analysis of determinants of fertility and environmental impacts of population.

Average Versus Total Well-Being

Following are major ethical frameworks in population ethics.

Ethics of Population Size
Ethical ViewDescriptionMajor Advocates
Average utility / well-being (averagism)Average well-being across people is the morally relevant value.Hardin
Aggregate well-being (totalism)Sum of total well-being across people is relevantTännsjö

A totalism view would generally be more pronatalist than an average utility view. Sources: Hardin 1, Tännsjö 2. Totalism is more commonly held among philosophers 3.

An ethic centered on totalism may call for raising the population to the Earth's carrying capacity, even if this diminishes the average well-being of all people, a situation that Derek Parfit calls mere addition, or the repugnant conclusion 4. Averagism suffers from an opposite paradox, where a member of a group, whose life is good but not as good as the group's average, would cause harm to the group by bringing down the average 4.

Value of Existence

While it is generally agreed that a person with high well-being is preferable to a person with low well-being, all else being equal, a challenge for most philosophical systems is the incomparability between nonexistence and existence at any level of well-being. Several attempts to make this comparison are as follows.

Ethics of Potential Future People
ViewpointWeight for Hypothetical Future People
Strict person-affecting viewNone
Moderate person-affecting viewsome but not full
Wide or impersonalFul, or no disticntion between hypothetical and real people
Asymmetric person-affecting viewCreating a person with a bad life is bad, and creating a person with a good life is neutral

Source: 5.

This situation is related to the nonidentity problem, that an action can be bad only if it harms an existing person 6. Building from the asymmetric person-affecting view, David Benatar argues a strong antinatalist view and that it would be best for humanity to come to extinction via non-reproduction 7, a view that has prompted disagreement 8, 9, 10.

References

  1. Hardin, G. "The Tragedy of the Commons". Science 162(3859), pp. 1243-1248. December 1968. ↩

  2. Tännsjö, T. "Why We Ought To Accept The Repugnant Conclusion". In: Tännsjö T., Ryberg J. (eds) The Repugnant Conclusion. Library Of Ethics And Applied Philosophy, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. 2004. ↩

  3. Greaves, H. "Population axiology". Philosophy Compass 12(11), e12442. November 2017. ↩

  4. Parfit, D. "Reasons and Persons". Oxford University Press, USA, ISBN-13 : 978-0198249085. 1986. ↩ ↩2

  5. Beckstead, N. "On the overwhelming importance of shaping the far future". Rutgers University Library, Ph. D. thesis. May 2013. ↩

  6. Roberts, M. A. "The Nonidentity Problem". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Summer 2019. ↩

  7. Benatar, D. Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence. Oxford University Press. 2008. ↩

  8. Palazzi, F. "A Set of Objections to David Benatar's Anti-Natalism". British Journal of Undergraduate Philosophy 8(1), pp. 12-36. Autumn 2014. ↩

  9. Peterson, J. "Is Coming into Existence Always a Harm? Qoheleth in Dialogue with David Benatar". Harvard Theological Review 112(1), pp. 33-54. 2019. ↩

  10. Trisel, B. A. "How Human Life Matters in the Universe: A Reply to David Benatar". Journal of Philosophy of Life 9(1), pp. 1-15. June 2019. ↩