I don’t think this argument makes sense. Of course the people who will be born are “imaginary”. If I choose between marrying Jane and Judith, then any future children in either event are at present “imaginary”. That would not be a good excuse for marrying Jane, a psychopath with three previous convictions for child murder. More generally, any choice involves two or more different hypothetical (“imaginary”) outcomes, of which all but one will not happen. Obviously, we have to think “what would happen if I do X”? It would be silly to say that this question is unimportant, because “all the outcomes aren’t even real!” That doesn’t change if the outcomes involve different people coming into existence.
I think the technical term you’re looking for is “imagination”.
If they will come into existence later, they have moral weight now. If I may butcher the concept of time, they already exist in some sense, being part of the weave of spacetime. But if they will never exist, it is an error to leap to their defense—there are no rights being denied. Does that make more sense?
The point is whether they exist conditional on us taking a particular action. If we do X a set of people will exist. If we do Y, a different set of people will exist. There’s not usually a reason to privilege X vs. Y as being “what will happen if we do nothing”, making the people in X somehow less conditional. The argument is “if we do X, then these people will exist and their rights (or welfare or whatever) will be satisfied/violated and that would be good/bad to some degree; if we do Y then these other people will exist, etc., and that would be good/bad to some degree.” It’s a comparison of hypothetical goods and bads—that’s the definition of a moral choice! So saying, “all these good/bads are just hypothetical” is not very helpful. It’s as if someone said “shall we order Chinese or pizza” and you refused to answer, because you can’t taste the pizza right now.
I don’t think this argument makes sense. Of course the people who will be born are “imaginary”. If I choose between marrying Jane and Judith, then any future children in either event are at present “imaginary”. That would not be a good excuse for marrying Jane, a psychopath with three previous convictions for child murder. More generally, any choice involves two or more different hypothetical (“imaginary”) outcomes, of which all but one will not happen. Obviously, we have to think “what would happen if I do X”? It would be silly to say that this question is unimportant, because “all the outcomes aren’t even real!” That doesn’t change if the outcomes involve different people coming into existence.
I think the technical term you’re looking for is “imagination”.
If they will come into existence later, they have moral weight now. If I may butcher the concept of time, they already exist in some sense, being part of the weave of spacetime. But if they will never exist, it is an error to leap to their defense—there are no rights being denied. Does that make more sense?
The point is whether they exist conditional on us taking a particular action. If we do X a set of people will exist. If we do Y, a different set of people will exist. There’s not usually a reason to privilege X vs. Y as being “what will happen if we do nothing”, making the people in X somehow less conditional. The argument is “if we do X, then these people will exist and their rights (or welfare or whatever) will be satisfied/violated and that would be good/bad to some degree; if we do Y then these other people will exist, etc., and that would be good/bad to some degree.” It’s a comparison of hypothetical goods and bads—that’s the definition of a moral choice! So saying, “all these good/bads are just hypothetical” is not very helpful. It’s as if someone said “shall we order Chinese or pizza” and you refused to answer, because you can’t taste the pizza right now.