Population ethics

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Population ethics (also sometimes more specifically population axiology, which is “the theory of when one state of affairs is better than another, where the states of affairs may differ over the number of people who ever live”)¹ is …

The causes one prioritizes is highly dependent on one’s values, and in particular on one’s views on population ethics. Instead of trying to argue strongly for one position or another on population ethics, it’s probably best to adopt a more “probabilistic” approach of value pluralism and “moral curve-fitting” by considering many different views and weighing them accordingly. This does mean more work when prioritizing causes, but the result is more likely to be useful to a wider audience. (See also Sensitivity analysis.)

For Eliezer Yudkowsky’s writings, see e.g. 31 Laws of Fun

Some books/papers to look into:

Weighing Lives by John Broome
Nick Beckstead’s On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future
‘Copenhagen Consensus 2012: Challenge Paper on “Population Growth”’ by Hans-Peter Kohler, cited by Greaves in her slideshow
“The intuition of neutrality and consequentialist thinking: potential antinatalist implications” by Karl Pettersson
“Broome and the Intuition of Neutrality”
“Rethinking the Person-Affecting Principle”
“Parfit, Reasons and Persons”
Michael Huemer defends the repugnant conclusion:

[E]very attempt to escape the Repugnant Conclusion lands us in worse trouble. If the situation were merely that every anti-RC theory anyone had devised so far had some implausible consequence or other, then we might hold out hope for some as-yet-undiscovered theory that would rescue us from the ‘paradoxes’ of population ethics. But in fact, we know there is no such theory, because any theory that avoids RC must reject the Modal Pareto Principle, Transitivity, or Non-anti-egalitarianism—and any of these options would make the theory strongly counterintuitive.

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“Comparing existence and nonexistence”↩