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Anglin on the Obligation to Create Extra People

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Peter Singer
Peter Singer*
Affiliation:
Monash University
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Extract

Bill Anglin has an ingenious argument in support of the classical utilitarian view that there is an obligation to create extra people if the people thus created will, on balance, be happy, and creating them will not reduce the happiness of others by a comparable amount. Ingenious as it is, I believe the argument is fallacious.

Anglin's argument rests on a case in which a woman has a choice between having a child whose expected level of happiness is zero or undergoing a minor operation, involving only a tiny amount of unhappiness for herself, and then having a child certain to be very happy. Anglin assumes that the woman ought to have the operation, and I do not think we should quarrel with this assumption.

The remainder of the argument is swiftly stated. First Anglin claims that for a utilitarian it must be morally indifferent whether one brings into existence an extra person who would experience neither happiness nor unhappiness at any time in his life, or does not bring anyone into existence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , September 1978 , pp. 583 - 585
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1978

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References

1 ‘The Repugnant Conclusion’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7 (1977), pp. 745–55.

2 ‘A Utilitarian Population Policy’, in M. Bayles, (ed.) Ethics and Population (Cambridge, Mass., 1976).Google Scholar See also Narveson, Jan ‘Utilitarianism and New Generations’, Mind 76 (1967), pp. 62–72Google Scholar and ‘Moral Problems of Population’, Monist 57 (1973) and reprinted in Bayles (ed.) Ethics and Population.

3 ‘On Doing the Best for Our Children’, in Bayles (ed.) Ethics and Population.