Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-11T16:20:34.948Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Asymmetry of population ethics: experimental social choice and dual-process moral reasoning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2019

Dean Spears Open the ORCID record for Dean Spears [Opens in a new window]
Dean Spears*
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin, 2225 Speedway, Austin, TX 78712; Indian Statistical Institute – Delhi; IFFS; IZA
*
Email: dspears@utexas.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Population ethics is widely considered to be exceptionally important and exceptionally difficult. One key source of difficulty is the conflict between certain moral intuitions and analytical results identifying requirements for rational (in the sense of complete and transitive) social choice over possible populations. One prominent such intuition is the Asymmetry, which jointly proposes that the fact that a possible child’s quality of life would be bad is a normative reason not to create the child, but the fact that a child’s quality of life would be good is not a reason to create the child. This paper reports a set of questionnaire experiments about the Asymmetry in the spirit of economists’ empirical social choice. Few survey respondents show support for the Asymmetry; instead respondents report that expectations of a good quality of life are relevant. Each experiment shows evidence (among at least some participants) of dual-process moral reasoning, in which cognitive reflection is statistically associated with reporting expected good quality of life to be normatively relevant. The paper discusses possible implications of these results for the economics of population-sensitive social welfare and for the conflict between moral mathematics and population intuition.

Keywords

population ethicsexperimental social choicethe Asymmetrydual-process moral reasoningquestionnaire-experimental method
Type
Article
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , November 2020 , pp. 435 - 454
Check for updates
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arrhenius, G. 2000. An impossibility theorem for welfarist axiologies. Economics and Philosophy 16, 247–266.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bargh, J.A. and Chartrand, T.L.. 1999. The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist 54, 462.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benatar, D. 2017. The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blackorby, C., Bossert, W. and Donaldson, D. 1995. Intertemporal population ethics: critical-level utilitarian principles. Econometrica 63, 1303–1320.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Blackorby, C., Bossert, W. and Donaldson, D. 1997. Critical-level utilitarianism and the population-ethics dilemma. Economics and Philosophy 13, 197–230.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blackorby, C., Bossert, W. and Donaldson, D. 2005. Population Issues in Social Choice Theory, Welfare Economics, and Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bradley, B. 2013. Asymmetries in benefiting, harming and creating. Journal of Ethics 17, 37–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broome, J. 2004. Weighing Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broome, J. 2012. Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World. New York, NY: Norton.Google Scholar
Buhrmester, M., Kwang, T. and Gosling, S.D.. 2011. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: a new source of inexpensive, yet high-quality data? Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, 3–5.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dasgupta, P. 1998. Population, consumption and resources: ethical issues. Ecological Economics 24, 139–152.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
de Lazari-Radek, K. and Singer, P. 2012. The objectivity of ethics and the unity of practical reason. Ethics 123, 9–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deaton, A. 2013. The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Decancq, K, Fleurbaey, M. and Schokkaert, E. 2015. Happiness, equivalent incomes and respect for individual preferences. Economica 82(s1), 1082–1106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Earl, J. 2017. A portable defense of the Procreation Asymmetry. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47, 178–199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fleurbaey, M. 2009. Beyond GDP: the quest for a measure of social welfare. Journal of Economic Literature 47, 1029–1075.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frederick, S. 2005. Cognitive reflection and decision making. Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, 25–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frick, J.D. 2014. ‘Making People Happy, Not Making Happy People’: A Defense of the Asymmetry Intuition in Population Ethics. PhD dissertation, Harvard.Google Scholar
Gaertner, W. and Schokkaert, E. 2011. Empirical Social Choice: Questionnaire-Experimental Studies on Distributive Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greaves, H. 2017. Population axiology. Philosophy Compass 12, e12442.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greene, J. 2014 a. Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them. London: Penguin Press.Google Scholar
Greene, J.D. 2014 b. Beyond point-and-shoot morality: why cognitive (neuro) science matters for ethics. Ethics 124, 695–726.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holtug, N. 2001. On the value of coming into existence. Journal of Ethics 5, 361–384.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kahneman, D. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Kuziemko, I., Norton, M.I., Saez, E. and Stantcheva, S. 2015. How elastic are preferences for redistribution? Evidence from randomized survey experiments. American Economic Review 105, 1478–1508.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lawson, N. and Spears, D. 2018. Optimal population and exhaustible resource constraints. Journal of Population Economics 31, 295–335.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McMahan, J. 1981. Problems of population choice. Ethics 92, 96–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McMahan, J. 2009. Asymmetries in the morality of causing people to exist. In Harming Future Persons: Ethics, Genetics and the Nonidentity Problem, eds Roberts, M. and Wasserman, D.. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Narveson, J. 1973. Moral problems of population. The Monist 57, 62–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oppenheimer, D.M., Meyvis, T. and Davidenko, N. 2009. Instructional manipulation checks: detecting satisficing to increase statistical power. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45, 867–872.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paolacci, G., Chandler, J. and Ipeirotis, P.G. 2010. Running experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Judgement and Decision Making 5, 411–419.Google Scholar
Parfit, D. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford.Google Scholar
Paxton, J.M., Ungar, L. and Greene, J.D. 2012. Reflection and reasoning in moral judgement. Cognitive Science 36, 163–177.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rachels, S. 2004. Repugnance or intransitivity: a repugnant but forced choice. In The Repugnant Conclusion, ed. Tännsjö, T. and Ryberg, J., 163–186. Dordrecht: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rini, R.A. 2013. Making psychology normatively significant. Journal of Ethics 17, 257–274.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, M.A. 2011 a. The Asymmetry: a solution. Theoria 77, 333–367.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, M.A. 2011 b. An asymmetry in the ethics of procreation. Philosophy Compass 6, 765–776.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scovronick, N., Budolfson, M.B., Dennig, F., Fleurbaey, M., Siebert, A., Socolow, R.H., Spears, D. and Wagner, F. 2017. Impact of population growth and population ethics on climate change mitigation policy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 114, 12338–12343.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Singer, P. 1976. A utilitarian population principle. In Ethics and Population, ed. Bayles, M.D., 81–99. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman.Google Scholar
Singer, P. 2005. Ethics and intuitions. Journal of Ethics 9, 331–352.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spears, D. 2017. Making people happy or making happy people? Questionnaire experimental studies of population ethics and policy. Social Choice and Welfare 49, 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stanovich, K.E and West, R.F. 2000. Advancing the rationality debate. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23, 701–717.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tännsjö, T. 2002. Why we ought to accept the repugnant conclusion. Utilitas 14, 339–359.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Temkin, L.S. 2012. Rethinking the Good: Moral Ideals and the Nature of Practical Reasoning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Unger, P.K. 1996. Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yaari, M.E and Bar-Hillel, M. 1984. On dividing justly. Social Choice and Welfare 1, 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Spears supplementary material

Statistical Appendix

Download Spears supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 165 KB