Rethinking the Person Affecting Approaches in Population Ethics

Abstract

In population ethics, a new version of the Person Affecting Approaches (PAA) has gained prominence among influential writers. The new PAA hold that having a life of a certain quality can be better or worse for a person than nonexistence, and embrace the Wide Person Affecting Restriction (WPAR): if an outcome A is ethically better than B, A would be better than B for someone that would exist if either A or B were realized. However, these approaches encounter several critical challenges. Firstly, the new PAA fail to uphold the Neutrality intuition central to the original PAA, which regard creating happy people as ethically neutral. Secondly, coupled with certain plausible principles, the new PAA imply the Repugnant Conclusion: a large population with lives barely worth living could be ethically preferable to a smaller population with high-quality lives. Thirdly, while the new PAA exclude certain moral theories, this exclusion can also be achieved through the more plausible Mere Addition principle. Lastly, accepting that existence can be better or worse for a person than nonexistence leads to either metaphysical absurdities or semantic difficulties, weakening the intuitive appeal of WPAR. Given these issues, the new PAA lack strong motivation, and ethicists may well need to reconsider basing their views on this framework.departmental bulletin pape