My aim in this post is to respond to the arguments presented in Richard Yetter Chappell’s “Rethinking the Asymmetry”. Chappell argues against the Asymmetry in population ethics, which roughly holds that the addition of bad lives makes the world worse, whereas the addition of good lives does not make the world better (other things being equal).
“Awesome Lives”
To refute the Asymmetry, Chappell relies on the following claim as a core premise:
Awesome Lives: It is (intrinsically) good or desirable that Awesome Lives come to exist. (Chappell, 2017, p. 168)
Chappell defines an awesome life as “one that exhibits a very high quality of life, along whatever dimensions you take to be normatively relevant” (Chappell, 2017, p. 168).
He continues:
Awesome Lives is, I think, intuitively highly plausible. When we think about what makes for a good state of affairs, the quality of life for the sentient beings contained therein is surely a (if not the) primary factor. A world full of awesome, flourishing lives is (intuitively) better than a world that lacks these good lives. (Chappell, 2017, p. 168)
This intuition is, of course, rejected by many views, including all views that belong to the broader category of minimalist axiologies — i.e. views centered on the alleviation of bads, which include certain Buddhist axiologies, as well as axiologies inspired by Epicureanism (see also Schopenhauer, 1819; 1851; Benatar, 1997; 2006; Fehige, 1998; Gloor, 2017; Knutsson, 2022b).
Furthermore, those who endorse minimalist axiologies may have plausible explanations as to why Awesome Lives can seem intuitively plausible, even to those who ultimately favor minimalist axiologies.
For instance, we may intuitively feel that it is good to bring “awesome lives” into existence, not because we endorse such a thing as positive intrinsic value, but instead because our intuitions fail to respect the radical assumption of “other things being equal” that (counterintuitively) is supposed to rule out all positive externalities.
That is, we may be inclined to endorse the creation of new “awesome lives” chiefly because of the positive roles that these lives would (intuitively) have for others. And such positive external effects may be why we rightly intuit that there is such a thing as positive lives, even if there is no such thing as positive intrinsic value, nor such a thing as positive lives in total isolation.
If we reframed Awesome Lives in terms that made it unmistakably clear that the lives in question have no effects on their surroundings — such as by positing that they are isolated matrix lives — the plausibility of Awesome Lives may be considerably reduced for many people. (To highlight the difference between “awesome lives” that have beneficial effects on others versus “awesome lives” that are thought to be worthwhile for their own sake, I will refer to the latter as “intrinsically awesome lives”.)
Another class of views that would reject Chappell’s Awesome Lives thesis are views centered on conditional interests. Such views hold that it is good that individuals have a high quality of life and that they have their interests and preferences satisfied conditional on their existence, while also maintaining that the addition of new such lives and interests does not make an outcome better, other things being equal (see e.g. St. Jules, 2019; Frick, 2020).
Do the “intrinsically awesome lives” contain suffering or other bads?
An important question to clarify is whether the “intrinsically awesome lives” contain significant bads. After all, Chappell’s Awesome Lives thesis is seemingly meant to apply to real-world lives in the world of today — not to purely hypothetical or future utopian lives. Specifically, when Chappell writes about these lives having “a very high quality of life”, it seems that he refers to “a very high quality of life” by contemporary standards (Chappell, 2017, p. 168).
Yet the reality is that even the best lives contain significant bads, including (for the most part) significant suffering. And when we consider all these unfortunate aspects of the “intrinsically awesome lives” — e.g. their heartbreaks, losses, sufferings, failures, and eventual death — it becomes even less clear that it is, on the whole, intrinsically good or desirable that such lives come to exist, especially when the absence of these lives causes no problem.
In particular, one could argue that even if the “intrinsically awesome lives” do contain positive intrinsic value, this positive value still cannot outweigh all the worst parts of these lives, such as their most intense suffering, their death, or their worst moral failures (some axiological views hold that the latter also contribute directly to people’s wellbeing, see e.g. Hurka, 2001; Knutsson, 2022a).
A Distant Realm
Chappell notes that massive investments are required to create an “intrinsically awesome life”, whereas no investment is required to avoid creating a miserable life, and he argues that this practical asymmetry is one of the main explanations of asymmetric intuitions in population ethics.
In support of his claim, Chappell presents the following example:
A Distant Realm: You learn that a new colony of awesome, happy, flourishing people will pop into existence in some distant, otherwise-inaccessible realm, unless you pluck and eat a particular apple. (Chappell, 2017, p. 170)
He continues:
It strikes me as intuitively clear that you have good reason, in this case, to refrain from plucking and eating the particular apple in question. This suffices to refute the Asymmetry – we can have moral reason to bring good lives into existence (or refrain from preventing their existence, which I take to amount to much the same thing in this context). (Chappell, 2017, p. 170)
But again, the question raised in the previous section needs to be raised here as well: Do these “awesome, happy, flourishing people” experience bads that are similar to those experienced by people who have a “very high quality of life” in our world, e.g. significant suffering, loss, death, etc?
If they do not experience such bads, we should be clear that our evaluation of the creation of these lives has limited relevance to procreative decisions that concern beings in the real world who do experience such bads. And one may further argue that the creation of these lives could in any case never be better than their non-creation (for their own sake), even if these lives were intrinsically perfect in every way (cf. Schopenhauer, 1819; 1851; Benatar, 1997; 2006; Fehige, 1998; Breyer, 2015; Gloor, 2017; St. Jules, 2019; Frick, 2020; Ajantaival, 2021/2022; Knutsson, 2022b).
If the lives in question do contain significant bads — meaning that we focus on a version of the thought experiment that does have real-world relevance — then one could argue that we have no compelling reason to refrain from plucking and eating the apple. Indeed, one could argue that we have strong reasons in favor of plucking the apple, seeing that it would prevent all the significant bads that would be entailed by these lives (e.g. their frustrated preferences, losses, sufferings, failures, and eventual deaths), while the non-creation of the distant realm would cause no problem whatsoever.
Opportunity costs in terms of reducing suffering
Another important question is whether the creation of “intrinsically awesome lives” can ever be justified given the massive opportunity costs it would involve. That is, even if we disregard the suffering and other bads entailed by the “intrinsically awesome lives” themselves, and even if we grant that it can be good to bring “intrinsically awesome lives” into existence for their own sake, it may still be unjustifiable to prioritize the creation of “intrinsically awesome lives” given the opportunity costs in terms of wretched lives and suffering that one could otherwise have prevented (cf. Rachels, 2014; Benatar, 2020).
For example, one may hold that extreme suffering and extremely bad lives can never be outweighed by the addition of “intrinsically awesome lives”, even if the latter are thought to be good in isolation (cf. Wolf, 1996; 1997; 2004; Mayerfeld, 1999, p. 178). On a purely consequentialist framework, this would mean that we should devote our resources toward the prevention of extreme suffering and extremely bad lives over the creation of “intrinsically awesome lives”.
Chappell offers no arguments as to why we should think that the addition of “intrinsically awesome lives” can justify or outweigh the — always very real — opportunity cost of failing to prevent extreme suffering and extremely bad lives, and he has therefore not established that the creation of “intrinsically awesome lives” (for their own sake) can ever be justified in practice.
Of course, such claims may lie beyond the scope of Chappell’s paper, but we should in any case be clear that his argument has limited practical significance. Specifically, it is worth being clear that Chappell provides no case against a practical Asymmetry according to which we can never justify creating “intrinsically awesome lives” at the expense of failing to prevent extreme suffering and extremely bad lives. Such a practical Asymmetry seems both highly reasonable and wholly unaffected by the arguments provided by Chappell.
Acknowledgments
For helpful comments, I am grateful to Teo Ajantaival, Anthony DiGiovanni, Simon Knutsson, Winston Oswald-Drummond, and Michael St. Jules.
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