Reply to Spears’s ‘The Asymmetry of Population Ethics’

Jonas H. Aaron

Economics and Philosophy, 2023, vol. 39, issue 3, 507-513

Abstract: Is the procreation asymmetry intuitively supported? According to a recent article in this journal, an experimental study suggests the opposite. Dean Spears (2020) claims that nearly three-quarters of participants report that there is a reason to create a person just because that person’s life would be happy. In reply, I argue that various confounding factors render the study internally invalid. More generally, I show how one might come to adopt the procreation asymmetry for the wrong reasons by misinterpreting one’s intuitions.

Date: 2023
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