To claim it’s not a good thing to eliminate the possibility of more future people is to claim there is a moral obligation to produce children. I could be mistaken, but this seems like a reasonable if/then claim. It’s not a claim I make, as I don’t claim it’s not a good thing to eliminate the possibility of more future people.
BTW, what would people here think of the following argument? If refraining from having children is good/rational/moral/[insert applause light here], then good/rational/moral/[insert applause light here] will do so; bad/irrational/immoral/[insert boo light here] will have more children than them, and (to the extent that badness is inheritable—not just genetically but also memetically) in the next generation there will be a larger fraction of bad people. That doesn’t sound like a good outcome; good actions predictably leading (causally and/or acausally) to bad outcomes means that your ethics system is broken; therefore, the assumption that refraining from having children is good must be wrong.
(I tentatively endorse it, but not with very much confidence.)
BTW, what would people here think of the following argument? If refraining from having children is good/rational/moral/[insert applause light here], then good/rational/moral/[insert applause light here] will do so; bad/irrational/immoral/[insert boo light here] will have more children than them, and (to the extent that badness is inheritable—not just genetically but also memetically) in the next generation there will be a larger fraction of bad people. That doesn’t sound like a good outcome; good actions predictably leading (causally and/or acausally) to bad outcomes means that your ethics system is broken; therefore, the assumption that refraining from having children is good must be wrong.
(I tentatively endorse it, but not with very much confidence.)