You’re presented with a red button. If you press this red button, you’ll bring person A into existence. Person A, however, is guaranteed to live a miserable life, a life not worth living.
Would you press the button? It seems sadistic and immoral to do so, as you’re bringing someone into a life of extreme misery and suffering; having a potential person with 0 utility is still preferable to having a person with negative utility. If you could press that red button and materialize an entire civilization of 10 billion highly miserable people leading torturous lives, you wouldn’t want to do so.
Creating someone to inflict a life of suffering upon them is morally bad, and it’s quite safe to say that pressing the red button is a morally abhorrent act.
Now, consider another button, this time colored blue. If you press this blue button, you’ll bring person B into existence. Person B is guaranteed to live an extremely joyous and happy life, a life extremely worth living.
Obviously, you would press the button. It’s always great to have an extra person that you know for sure is going to be happy—and since person B is guaranteed such high utility, you’d be refusing to let person B live a great life at the cost of pressing a single button. Scaling this scenario up, pressing a blue button to create 10 billion extraordinarily happy people is something you’d always want to do.
But if you refused to press the blue button, would you be doing something morally bad?
I would argue that, though pressing the blue button is morally good, the obligation to press said button is much weaker than your obligation to abstain from pressing the red button.
Firstly, procreation symmetry views run into a non-identity problem.
“What is bad must be bad for someone”.
If you were to bring into existence a miserable person, you are responsible for placing them in a situation of harm—if you don’t bring into existence a happy person, you shouldn’t be responsible for that person missing out on a chance to exist and fulfill a positive-utility life. Harm necessitates a victim that is harmed, while not aiding someone doesn’t require a potential beneficiary who missed out; any equivalent moral obligation to procreate is unable to fulfill the identity requirement for moral wrongness.
Secondly, pain and pleasure are also inherently asymmetrical.
If someone had a life with 50 units of happiness and 50 units of suffering, should I remove the suffering or double the happiness? Even if we set aside the evolutionary basis of negativity biases and the disproportionate impact negative experiences have on our welfare, there is a clear asymmetric divide between being happy and not being miserable—notice that the former is a positive state, while the latter is a neutral state, not a negative one (seems a little asymmetric).
Alleviating misery from a person means that the person was in a state of misery before; removing their suffering creates a change in state that relieves them from the pain they were just experiencing. Creating happiness for a person doesn’t have a concrete implication of their past state. Furthermore, I miss out on positive-utility events all the time—if not going to an event that would give me 1 unit of happiness was the same as experiencing an event that gave me 1 unit of suffering, I, along with almost everybody, would be in extreme misery. You can’t incur the same type of negative effect from missing out on something good as you would from experiencing something bad.
This explains why we view a change in state from one of suffering to one of neutrality as a positive occurrence that we then can feel positively towards (making us happy), but we don’t view the inability to change to a positive state as someone we should feel negatively towards—at least not to the same degree. It’s easier to achieve highly positive utility by removing suffering from one’s life as opposed to squeezing in more happiness.
Doesn’t accepting this lead to some abominable conclusions?
If the removal of negativity is the best way to achieve maximum utility, and a planet has 10 billion people, each with 50 units of suffering and 10 units of happiness, you would be forced to advocate for blowing up the planet and destroying every last bit of it over doubling the happiness of every person to 20 units each.
When you destroy every human on that planet, you’re alleviating 500 billion units of suffering at the cost of 100 billion units of happiness—not destroying the planet and doubling everybody’s happiness only yields an extra 100 billion units of happiness.
This objection fails in two ways.
It fails to realize the telos of alleviating misery and suffering, which is to return to a preferable state of utility. Wiping anybody who is suffering off the map is a fruitless attempt at increasing welfare; they now have no chance of being in a neutral or positive state. If this were indeed the case, any individual who experiences even slightly more pain than pleasure should be forcefully euthanized.
Whether or not the person with 50 units of suffering and 10 units of happiness should be dead is simply a subjective preference that overrides any utility calculations; you don’t kill them if they still want to live, even assuming that their condition won’t improve. The only concession that someone weighing suffering solvency over bringing about pleasure is that preventing suffering is a stronger obligation. Minus 1 unit of suffering can be weighted more than 1 unit of happiness, without prioritizing resolving suffering in every possible scenario.
There seems to be a clear divide between the destruction of suffering that’s already there and the creation of happiness. Such an asymmetry is why we should press a button to give someone a great life if given the option to, but there is no strong obligation to do so; on the contrary, there’s a much stronger obligation not to press the button that creates a person destined for a miserable life.
You have an obligation not to create miserable people, but you don’t have the same degree of obligation to create happy people.
I’ll have an article out by Saturday, tearing apart this one, arguing for a procreation symmetry view. If you have any ideas on how to tear this article into shreds, comment on it, and I’ll likely incorporate it into my draft.
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