The only way to solve this, as I see it, is to count all unsatisfied preferences negatively. You’d end up with negative total preference-utiltiarianism, which usually has quite strong reasons against bringing beings into existence.
A potential major problem with this approach has occurred to me, namely, the fact that people tend to have infinite or near infinite preferences. We always want more. I don’t see anything wrong with that, but it does create headaches for the ethical system under discussion.
The human race’s insatiable desires makes negative total preference-utilitarianism vulnerable to an interesting variant of the various problems of infinity in ethics. Once you’ve created a person, who then dies, it is impossible to do any more harm. There’s already an infinite amount of unsatisfied preferences in the world from their existence and death. Creating more people will result in the same total amount of unsatisfied preferences as before: infinity. This would render negative utilitarianism as always indifferent to whether one should create more people, obviously not what we want.
Even if you posit that our preferences are not infinite, but merely very large, this still runs into problems. I think most people, even anti-natalists, would agree that it is sometimes acceptable to create a new person in order to prevent the suffering of existing people. For instance, I think even an antinatalist would be willing to create one person who will live a life with what an upper-class 21st Century American would consider a “normal” amount of suffering, if doing so would prevent 7 billion people from being tortured for 50 years. But if you posit that the new person has a very large, but not infinite amount of preferences (say, a googol) then it’s still possible for the badness of creating them to outweigh the torture of all those people. Again, not what we want.
Hedonic negative utilitarianism doesn’t have this problem, but it’s even worse, it implies we should painlessly kill everyone ASAP! Since most antinatalists I know believe death to be a negative thing, rather than a neutral thing, they must be at least partial preference utilitarians.
Now, I’m sure that negative utilitarians have some way around this problem. There wouldn’t be so many passionate advocates for it if it could be killed by a logical conundrum like this. But I can’t find any discussion of this problem after doing some searching on the topic. I’m really curious to know what the proposed solution is, and would appreciate it if someone told me.
A potential major problem with this approach has occurred to me, namely, the fact that people tend to have infinite or near infinite preferences. We always want more. I don’t see anything wrong with that, but it does create headaches for the ethical system under discussion.
The human race’s insatiable desires makes negative total preference-utilitarianism vulnerable to an interesting variant of the various problems of infinity in ethics. Once you’ve created a person, who then dies, it is impossible to do any more harm. There’s already an infinite amount of unsatisfied preferences in the world from their existence and death. Creating more people will result in the same total amount of unsatisfied preferences as before: infinity. This would render negative utilitarianism as always indifferent to whether one should create more people, obviously not what we want.
Even if you posit that our preferences are not infinite, but merely very large, this still runs into problems. I think most people, even anti-natalists, would agree that it is sometimes acceptable to create a new person in order to prevent the suffering of existing people. For instance, I think even an antinatalist would be willing to create one person who will live a life with what an upper-class 21st Century American would consider a “normal” amount of suffering, if doing so would prevent 7 billion people from being tortured for 50 years. But if you posit that the new person has a very large, but not infinite amount of preferences (say, a googol) then it’s still possible for the badness of creating them to outweigh the torture of all those people. Again, not what we want.
Hedonic negative utilitarianism doesn’t have this problem, but it’s even worse, it implies we should painlessly kill everyone ASAP! Since most antinatalists I know believe death to be a negative thing, rather than a neutral thing, they must be at least partial preference utilitarians.
Now, I’m sure that negative utilitarians have some way around this problem. There wouldn’t be so many passionate advocates for it if it could be killed by a logical conundrum like this. But I can’t find any discussion of this problem after doing some searching on the topic. I’m really curious to know what the proposed solution is, and would appreciate it if someone told me.