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.

Keywords:

• Asymmetry
• population ethics
• partiality
• demandingness
• variabilism
• actualism

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Greg Currie, Johan Gustafsson, Stephen Holland, Christian Piller, Peter Singer, Catherine Wilson, Helen Yetter-Chappell, an anonymous referee, and the participants in the ‘New Work in Population Ethics’ panel of the 2015 MANCEPT workshop, for helpful comments and discussion.

Notes

1 I hear this a lot in conversation. For an example in print, see Piller (2014, 189): ‘saying that more lives are better than fewer lives [] offends the deeply held asymmetry of our attitudes to creation and destruction of human life: destruction is forbidden; creation is not obligatory’.

2 What of people who want to have children anyway? The first thing to note is that so long as some would (reasonably) find it excessively burdensome, then we can deny that there is any general requirement to procreate. But even for those who are happy to procreate, I think it is most intuitive to still deny that they are thereby required to do so. A putative requirement may be ‘too demanding’, in the relevant (broad) sense, simply in virtue of inappropriately intruding upon an agent’s autonomy to decide a deeply personal matter for themselves. Common sense holds that individuals are sovereign over their own bodies and central life projects. These personal prerogatives cannot easily give way to duties even if this violation of one’s autonomy and bodily integrity would not be a ‘cost’, in the traditional sense, to one’s welfare. Compare, e.g. a putative obligation to have sex. The obligation might be excessively burdensome, even if the sex itself (if voluntarily undertaken) would not be. Likewise, I think, for the ‘burden’ – or unacceptable intrusiveness – of procreative obligations. Thanks to Christian Piller for pressing me on this point.

3 Trevor Hedberg tells me that he is independently developing a similar line of argument in a paper to be called ‘Unraveling the Asymmetry in Population Ethics’.

4 At least, this is so in ordinary cases. It is interesting to imagine a case where refraining from creating a miserable child somehow imposes a significant cost on the agent. It may be that a level of burden sufficient to permit refraining from creating an awesome life is not yet sufficient to permit creating a miserable one. Intuitively, the reasons (or prima facie obligations) we have to refrain from creating miserable lives are more stringent than those we have to create awesome ones; this is an instance of the Weak Asymmetry noted earlier. But again, I’m happy to grant that. My claim here is just that we do in fact have prima facie obligations both to prevent miserable lives and to create awesome ones, but that in practice, only the latter prima facie obligation is demanding enough to be defeated.

5 One reason to prefer formulating the case in terms of refraining from preventing existence is to minimize any confounding influence from the distinction between positive and negative duties. Since refraining from bringing a miserable life into existence is most naturally understood as a putative negative duty (do anything but this: procreate [given that the kid would turn out miserable]), it would stack the deck unduly to contrast it with a putative positive one (do precisely this: procreate [given that the kid would turn out happy]). That is not the way to test for a fundamental normative asymmetry between good and bad possible lives. We do better to consider a parallel putative negative duty involving good possible lives, as the Distant Realm case does.Also, it’s important that we’re talking about intrinsic moral reasons to promote the existence of Awesome Lives, by which I mean reasos that stem just from the intrinsic nature of the possible lives in question. Even proponents of the Asymmetry could recognize moral reasons of an extrinsic sort to refrain from preventing procreation in certain circumstances. e.g. we’ve moral reason to refrain from sterilizing people against their will. But this reason stems from respect for the would-be parents’ autonomy, rather than stemming from the value of the possible new lives. In the Distant Realm scenario, by contrast, I trust that the intuitive reason to refrain from eating the apple does stem from the value of the possible Awesome Lives whose existence is at stake.

6 This could be seen as an impartial expansion of Harman (2009)’s observation that parents, for example, can reasonably be attached to the actual identity-shaping conditions and histories of their children, even over higher welfare alternative histories (e.g. hearing for a deaf child).

7 It’s important to distinguish Partiality Towards the Antecedently Actual from the full-blown Actualism – holding that only (timelessly) actual persons have any moral signifiance – that Hare (2007) resoundingly refutes. It is closer to what Singer (2011, 88) calls ‘the prior existence view’, only again less extreme insofar as it merely involves partial rather than zero weighting for those whose existence is not guaranteed independently of our current deliberations.

8 Might there be cases where it is impossible to avoid acting regrettably? So long as we understand regret here in comparative terms – i.e. it’s regrettable that the agent performed this action rather than some particular alternative option – then acting impartially should avoid such regret. For example, while there’s obviously something unavoidably regrettable about a situation in which you have to bring one of two possible (equally) miserable lives into existence, neither choice would be comparatively regrettable, or worse, from an impartial perspective. To conform to this principle in such a case then, it suffices to be impartial in one’s concern for the two possible individuals (rather than, say, being partial towards whoever ends up existing). Further, any residual concerns about the logical feasibility of the principle can be addressed by appending ‘when possible’ to the proscription.

9 Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting the following case.