September 30, 2023: Population Ethics

Good afternoon. Today we will return to a topic that I have discussed many times before—human population—and this time review some ethical considerations. This will be one of my more abstract posts. It will also be a highly selective choice of topics, rather than an attempt to be comprehensive, as the topic is much too big to be comprehensive.

First, we should comment on utilitarianism, which is the larger framework that encompasses most of what I will write about today. An ethical framework is like what water proverbially is to a fish: because it is so all-encompassing, its importance is is often unseen. Utilitarianism is a leading ethical framework today among academic ethics. While the field matured in the 19th century with Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and later Henry Sidgwick, precursor ideas go back centuries.

Peter Singer is a contemporary philosopher who is very much associated with the utilitarian tradition, and one whose work I would like to discuss in detail at a later date. He characterizes utilitarianism as follows.

The core precept of utilitarianism is that we should make the world the best place we can. That means that, as far as it is within our power, we should bring about a world in which every individual has the highest possible level of well-being.

This short, succinct description of utilitarianism raises all sorts of questions. What are the “individuals” who have moral relevance? How is “well-being” characterized? The two sentences refer to “the world” and “every individual” respectively; are they the same thing? There are many fundamental issues on which viewpoints regarding these questions diverge, and population ethics are one of them. Henry Sidgwick observed the basic problem, in the context of ethical issues surrounding population growth.

Assuming, then, that the average happiness of human beings is a positive quantity, it seems clear that, supposing the average happiness enjoyed remains undiminished, Utilitarianism directs us to make the number enjoying it as great as possible. But if we foresee as possible that an increase in numbers will be accompanied by a decrease in average happiness or vice versa, a point arises which has not only never been formally noticed, but which seems to have been substantially overlooked by many Utilitarians. For if we take Utilitarianism to prescribe, as the ultimate end of action, happiness on the whole, and not any individual's happiness, unless considered as an element of the whole, it would follow that, if the additional population enjoy on the whole positive happiness, we ought to weigh the amount of happiness gained by the extra number against the amount lost by the remainder.

The disagreement would be formalized in two traditions regarding population ethics: totalism (total utilitarianism) and averagism (average utilitarianism).

Totalism is the view that the morally relevant quantity is the sum of well-being across all people. Among philosophers who consider this question, totalism is the most widely held view today. The greatest challenge for totalism is what Derek Parfit posed in his book, Reasons and Persons, and called the mere addition paradox, often called the repugnant conclusion. In what he describes as repugnant, Parfit argues that it follows from totalism that the ethically best outcome is for population to rise to the subsistence level, whereby the number of people is maximized, but the well-being of the average person is hardly better than neutral, if the increased number of people outweighs the decreased well-being. See the Wikipedia page for more details on how Parfit derives this conclusion.

The mere addition paradox is not the dispositive zinger against totalism that some might believe. The paradox is often misunderstood as saying that a higher population number is necessarily better, even if it comes at the cost of average well-being, so long as average well-being remains even slightly positive. But under totalism, the relevant quantity is the product of average well-being and total numbers, and this framework is not challenged by Parfit’s construction. Thus a policy that increases population by 50% and halves average well-being should be rejected; one that increases population by 150% and halves average well-being should be accepted; and one that increases population by 100% and halves average well-being should be treated with indifference (to be fair, Parfit does acknowledge this point and does not make a naive quantity-over-quality argument). It would thus seem that the ethically optimum population would not be the one that maximizes average well-being, but neither would it be one that pushes a society to the subsistence level.

Michael Huemer argues that the very name, the Repugnant Conclusion, implies a moral intuition that should be rejected. Tännsjö Torbjörn argues a similar point. Quantifying well-being is an obvious problem. What does it mean above to “halve average well-being”? One can approach this problem in many different ways. If one takes a view that existence is a good thing, and that there is comparatively little difference in the well-being of two people who exist, then something close to the subsistence level would indeed be optimal. If one takes the view that average well-being is close to zero and has significant variance, then average well-being looks to be more important than population size. Another problem becomes apparent: given how difficult it is to quantify these values, totalism (and indeed, utilitarian frameworks in general) offer too much freedom to craft a framework that allows a conclusion to match pre-existing moral intuitions. See also, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for some additional approaches to the mere addition paradox.

Aside from totalism, averagism is a framework that holds that average well-being, regardless of overall numbers, is the morally relevant quantity. Averagism avoids the repugnant conclusion, but it introduces problems of its own. For example, consider a scenario where there are two societies, A and B, that are completely isolated from each other. Both societies are well off, but A has a slightly higher average well-being than B. Under averagism, it would be ethically good to destroy society B, because this would raise the average well-being of the entire population. In The Tragedy of the Commons (1968), Garrett Hardin uses an averagist framework without further justification. Hardin was one of several prominent thinkers at this time who were worried about overpopulation; a few years later, he wrote the bluntly titled Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor.

Another question is how we consider the well-being of potential future people, relative to actual people, or the question of person-affecting views. I’ll try to explain the issue, but if this explanation is confusing, then I confess that I don’t understand the issue very well myself. I’ll use an example of my own contriving to illustrate how I think this works.

Assume that going to college is a good thing, and that due to the high cost of higher education, any children that I might have will require financial assistance to afford tuition. If I have a child, then it is a clear ethical good for me to forego some consumptive spending and save that money for the child’s higher education. It is good for someone. If I don’t have children and am considering whether to, then person-affecting views come into play; creation of a child is not good or bad for someone who exists now. Suppose that I don’t have children now, but fully intend to. Saving for that future child’s education is good for someone, regardless of person-affecting views, because that person will exist regardless of the decision to save. Thus a strict person-affecting view does not necessarily imply that actions that affect the far future, after all currently living people have died, are of no moral significance.

Where I get confused is in this scenario. Suppose I am not sure whether to have children, and finances are a reason for doubt. If I save for the child’s education now, and having these savings might bear on my decision to have children, then is the saving good for an actual person? This seems ambiguous to me. If you are confused and want to get unconfused, you can try Stanford again and their treatment of the related nonidentity problem.

There is much that could be said about person-affecting views, but in the interest of space, I will focus on David Benatar’s treatment, as he is a rather notorious figure in the field. Benatar wrote Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, where he articulates an asymmetric person-affecting view. To bring a life into existence that will experience pain is an ethical harm, but to bring a life into existence that will experience pleasure is of no ethical consequence. Thus procreation can only be harmful. Since it is impossible to guarantee that a future person will not experience a bad life, procreation should always be regarded as an unethical act. The most ethical outcome would be for humanity to cease procreating and go extinct.

It hardly needs to be said that Benatar’s ideas are controversial, but it is worth delving into why. First, it is not at all clear what justification there is for asymmetry, and several authors have disputed it. Second, while the use of pleasure and pain as a basis for utilitarian calculus is hardly novel to Benatar, and it in my judgment is a major weakness of the utilitarian framework in general, the problem becomes particularly blatant with Benatar’s usage. Consider this paper by Brooke Alan Trisel, which considers perspectives on meaning and value in life that goes beyond the pleasure/pain framework.

Among other arguments, Benatar cites two passages from the Bible: Ecclesiastes 6:1-6 and Ecclesiastes 4:1-3, which would seem to carry strong antinatalist messages. But Jesse Peterson argues that Benatar’s citation of these passages is a selective and inaccurate representation of what Qoheleth (the preacher quoted in these passages) is saying, let alone a broad biblical approach to natalism. Aside from what obviously appears to be proof-texting, Benatar is an atheist, and his non-belief in any meaning to human life beyond pleasure and pain and non-belief in an afterlife are essential to his argument. Thus Benatar’s attempt to put his antinatalism on theological grounds doesn’t work.

To summarize thus far, while a utilitarian framework may help to organize concepts, there are so many unquantifiable variables in population ethics as to make the framework useless for deriving actionable conclusions.

We shouldn’t imagine, though, that utilitarianism is the only usable framework. The Western tradition has Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative, natural law, and many other traditions. James Delaney, for instance, considers population ethics and the nonidentity problem from a natural law perspective.

That’s enough on this subject for now. If this post was rather confusing, then it is because I find the subject to be difficult, and I don’t have a sense of what should be considered to be the most sensible perspective.

Quick Hits

Here is Caspian Report again, reviewing the geopolitical implications if Ukraine were to join NATO.

The Council on Foreign Relations explains the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, including Azerbaijan’s latest actions in the region and the impending dissolution of the Republic of Artsakh. Fearing ethnic cleansing, over 100,000 ethnic Armenians have fled the region since the offensive earlier this month.

While we’re on the subject of conflicts between former Soviet countries, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan have had conflicts in 2021 and 2022 over border and water issues, with a risk of additional conflict. This has been the subject of documented human rights abuses. Alex Little in the National Interest argues that the United States, which has (sort of) backed Tajikistan in the conflict, has few interests at stake and should back off from supply Tajikistan with military equipment.

I have been running this blog (on Substack now and on Tumblr earlier) for more than three years, and I have only missed weekly posts when I was physically unable to write. In recent months, I have started putting work into an additional, not-yet-public project that explains some recent changes. That project is still too early in development to make public, but I will probably talk about it some more as I try to figure out the next steps.