My favorite slogan: Population ethics is aesthetics.
If the people living the future at the time would approve of it, but to you right now it seems awful (e.g. just repeating the same happy hour over and over for eternity), you’re totally within your rights to not want that future to happen. Not because of some super-deep further justification, but just because it’s okay for you to have preferences about what the future should look like.
I think that phrase is right “to zeroth order”: one can imagine an agent with any preferences about population ethics. Then “to first order”, I think the choice between average vs total utilitarianism does have a right answer (see link in my reply to Cleo). And then there are “second order” corrections like value of variety, which seem more subjective, but maybe there are right answers to be found about them as well.
My favorite slogan: Population ethics is aesthetics.
If the people living the future at the time would approve of it, but to you right now it seems awful (e.g. just repeating the same happy hour over and over for eternity), you’re totally within your rights to not want that future to happen. Not because of some super-deep further justification, but just because it’s okay for you to have preferences about what the future should look like.
I wrote a long post last year saying basically that.
I think that phrase is right “to zeroth order”: one can imagine an agent with any preferences about population ethics. Then “to first order”, I think the choice between average vs total utilitarianism does have a right answer (see link in my reply to Cleo). And then there are “second order” corrections like value of variety, which seem more subjective, but maybe there are right answers to be found about them as well.