Minimalist views of value hold that “the less of a given bad, the better”, and further hold that the only form of positive value that exists is the reduction of bads (e.g. unmet needs). Negative utilitarianism is an example of a minimalist view, which specifically says “the less suffering, the better”.
An objection sometimes raised against negative utilitarianism and similar minimalist views is that they would (supposedly) imply the wrong choice between the following populations: [...]
In “The Worseness of Nonexistence”, Theron Pummer makes an interesting argument that suggests that a failure to create new people can be as bad as cutting an existing person’s life short. I here briefly sketch out a reply to Pummer that can be made, in some version, from a variety of different views.
The primary aim of Pummer’s essay is to defend comparativism, the view that things can be better or worse for merely possible persons. I agree with Pummer that we should accept some version of comparativism — for example, it seems obvious to me that a state of affairs in which a single person is brought into existence only to be tortured for their entire life is worse than a state of affairs in which no individual is brought into existence (non-comparativists cannot say this, as they hold that the two states of affairs are not comparable). [...]