To expand on my own view, by creating an agent and making them happy to exist overall, we’ve already helped them relative to not creating them in the first place. There are still countless potential agents who do not even exist at all in our world and who would want to exist. Why would we have an obligation to further help the former set of agents (by giving them more resources/rights/welfare), and not the latter (by bringing them into existence)? That would seem rather unfair to the latter.
But if we did have an obligation to help the latter, where does that obligation stop? We can obviously spend an unlimited amount of resources to bring additional agents into existence and giving them things, and there’s no obvious stopping point, nor an obvious way to split resources between giving existing agent more things and bringing new agents into existence. Whatever stopping point and split we decide could turn out to be a bad mistake. Given all this, I don’t think we can be blamed too much if we say “we’re pretty confused about what our values and/or obligations are; let’s conserve our resources and keep our options open until we’re not so confused anymore.”
To expand on my own view, by creating an agent and making them happy to exist overall, we’ve already helped them relative to not creating them in the first place. There are still countless potential agents who do not even exist at all in our world and who would want to exist. Why would we have an obligation to further help the former set of agents (by giving them more resources/rights/welfare), and not the latter (by bringing them into existence)? That would seem rather unfair to the latter.
But if we did have an obligation to help the latter, where does that obligation stop? We can obviously spend an unlimited amount of resources to bring additional agents into existence and giving them things, and there’s no obvious stopping point, nor an obvious way to split resources between giving existing agent more things and bringing new agents into existence. Whatever stopping point and split we decide could turn out to be a bad mistake. Given all this, I don’t think we can be blamed too much if we say “we’re pretty confused about what our values and/or obligations are; let’s conserve our resources and keep our options open until we’re not so confused anymore.”