Conference Agenda

Aggregative moral theories, it is said, do not respect the separateness of persons because they allow severe burdens on one person to be outweighed by mild benefits to each member of a large group of people. There are many alternatives to aggregative moral theories that respect the separateness of persons, among them various MiniMax Complaints (MC). MC holds that we ought to choose the action that minimizes the maximal complaint among all those affected.

MC theories, however, struggle with risk imposition. When each of a large number of people is exposed to a small risk, it may be exceedingly likely that at least one of them will be harmed. However, each person presumably only has a weak complaint, because their individual risk to be harmed is low. MC may thus direct us to rather impose risks of harm than to harm identified individuals, even though we can expect more people to be harmed as a result. This paper presents an approach, Principle MC, that preserves the non-aggregative nature of MC while yielding plausible verdicts in cases involving identified and statistical lives by focusing on principles of risk imposition instead of focusing on individual acts that impose risks.

Consider the following two plausible claims grounded in common-sense morality:

1) Make Better: We have moral reasons to make the world better and to not make it worse.

2) Avoid Complaints: We have moral reasons to avoid personal complaints against our actions.

In this paper, I argue that these two claims, if true and properly specified, require us to reject the so-called Procreation Asymmetry (or just Asymmetry) in population ethics, but at the same time require us to hold onto a weaker version of it. This might bring us closer to a normative theory of population ethics that is both intuitively plausible and theoretically coherent.

According to a person-affecting theory of beneficence, our welfare-based reasons depend entirely on what is good or bad for individuals. This view can explain the Procreation Asymmetry, the claim that we do not have reasons to create individuals whose life would be good for them, but that we do have reasons to refrain from creating an individual whose life would be bad for them. But it struggles with the Non-Identity Problem: Why ought we create a better-off rather than a worse-off individual in a choice between two good lives? Recently, several authors have argued that we can provide a person-affecting answer to this question by appealing to asymmetries between the good and the bad: while we do not have reasons to promote the good, we do have reasons to avoid, prevent or reduce the bad. In the talk, I discuss and reject several versions of this proposal.

This talk discusses whether moral contractualists can solve the non-identity problem by appealing to the risk of a life not worth living. In a paradigmatic non-identity case, we can choose between creating a person with a good life and creating another person with a much worse but still positive life. It’s hard for contractualists to explain why we should, other things being equal, create the better-off person. Tim Henning (2022) has suggested a novel solution. He claims that if we deteriorate future living conditions or create a person with a serious medical condition, we usually also impose on these persons an increased risk to have overall bad lives. And this risk explains our obligations in non-identity cases. Henning’s proposal is insightful but, as I will argue, ultimately unsuccessful. I show that his view (i) relies on a dubious asymmetry between certain benefits and chances of benefit, thereby undermining a plausible ex ante understanding of risk, (ii) has implausible implications, and (iii) gives the intuitively wrong explanation of our obligations. On this basis, I suggest a revised understanding of the relevant risk-based objection. This results in a less ambitious solution to the non-identity problem but an overall more plausible view.