World population is roughly 2x what it was in 1970, and life expectancy is significantly up, such that there’s probably 3-4x the number of anticipated future life-minutes of currently-living humans in 2019 than there was in 1970. In some views, this dwarfs any small change (positive OR negative) in the quality of those life-minutes.
The biggest benefit is going from not-living to living. Income levels are trivial in comparison.
There probably _is_ a point at which the repugnant conclusion becomes binding, and that incremental new lives aren’t worth the loss of quality to existing lives. But it’s many orders of magnitude out.
Why do you seem so sure about this? I see no moral argument for whether we should rather have a 7 billion humans or a thousand, all else being equal. (Of course, there’s also no acceptable way to move from the former to the latter.) (Both the availability of commons and the economies of scale for goods, services and research should not play a role in this moral calculus.)
The same way (and to the same level, which is to say “low certainty”) I’m sure about any moral calculus. It matches my intuitions within reasonable bounds, and it’s simple.
I prefer living to not-living, and most humans I’ve asked, observed, or heard about also prefer living over not. I don’t know precisely how to aggregate preferences, but I pretty strongly intuit that adding preferred to preferred never makes dispreferred.
World population is roughly 2x what it was in 1970, and life expectancy is significantly up, such that there’s probably 3-4x the number of anticipated future life-minutes of currently-living humans in 2019 than there was in 1970. In some views, this dwarfs any small change (positive OR negative) in the quality of those life-minutes.
The biggest benefit is going from not-living to living. Income levels are trivial in comparison.
There probably _is_ a point at which the repugnant conclusion becomes binding, and that incremental new lives aren’t worth the loss of quality to existing lives. But it’s many orders of magnitude out.
Why do you seem so sure about this? I see no moral argument for whether we should rather have a 7 billion humans or a thousand, all else being equal. (Of course, there’s also no acceptable way to move from the former to the latter.) (Both the availability of commons and the economies of scale for goods, services and research should not play a role in this moral calculus.)
The same way (and to the same level, which is to say “low certainty”) I’m sure about any moral calculus. It matches my intuitions within reasonable bounds, and it’s simple.
I prefer living to not-living, and most humans I’ve asked, observed, or heard about also prefer living over not. I don’t know precisely how to aggregate preferences, but I pretty strongly intuit that adding preferred to preferred never makes dispreferred.