Parfit by David Edmonds

Author:David Edmonds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2023-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

Parfit believed that we should be indifferent as between these two programmes. This and other examples led him to make the following claim. If in either of two outcomes, X and Y, the same number of people would live, we should choose the outcome in which the people have a higher quality of life. It makes no difference whether there are no particular people for whom the decision is bad.

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One tricky issue Parfit attempted to resolve was originally raised by Jan Narveson. Suppose a woman knew that, if she had a child, this child would have a terrible and painful life for a few years, and then die. It seems wrong, says Narveson, to have this child—in part (if not mainly) because it is bad for the child. Does it follow from this that, other things being equal, we have a reason to create—to bring into existence—a child whose life is worthwhile? This seems counterintuitive. Of course, once children exist, we should want their lives to go as well as possible. And we think that parents can have a variety of reasons for having or not having children—but benefiting a child by bringing them into existence is not one of these, nor is populating the planet with one more happy life.

It’s not easy to explain the Asymmetry Problem: the asymmetry between what Parfit called the Wretched Child and the Happy Child. And it draws us into the most intractable problem of all: what is the ideal population size? If the choice is between a future in which there is a happy life and a future in which there is an unhappy or a less happy life, we should choose the former. This is what Parfit calls a same-number problem. That’s easy. But different-number comparisons are far trickier.

What is the optimum population for a country, or a planet? Should we aim at the greatest possible total quantity of happiness, or the highest average level of happiness? Compare one scenario in which the world has five billion people, each with a high quality of life, with another in which there are twenty-five billion people, each with a much lower quality of life. Most of us would opt for the former world. We instinctively think that in this case average happiness is what matters; that is, quality rather than quantity. However, Parfit’s solution to the Non-Identity Problem seems to imply that a world with more people is preferable to a world with fewer people, so long as these people are happy. After all, if we have a reason to cause a better-off person to exist rather than a less well-off person, should I not have a reason to cause a well-off person to exist rather than no person?

Parfit also produced an inventive but dense argument, known as the Mere Addition Paradox, which rejects the average argument, and leads us down an apparently inexorable path that bumps us into his ‘Repugnant Conclusion’. Suppose there was a population A (see Fig. 1). The

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