A Risk Sensitive Approach to Population Ethics

Abstract

Is it better if more (or fewer) people live? Is it better to make people happy than to make happy people? How many people should there ever be? Answering these questions could help inform important decisions impacting the number of people in existence, from an individual’s decision to have children to a government’s decision to implement “natalist” policies to even a worldwide decision to colonize other planets in the not-too-distant future. Philosophers in the field of population ethics have taken on this weighty project, but have been stuck for decades on the dilemma posed by the “Repugnant Conclusion.” The arguments for it are difficult to refute, but as the name suggests, the Repugnant Conclusion is intuitively unacceptable for many. I argue that we can have our cake and eat it too if we recognize a key difference between abstract thought experiments and real-world decisions: while we can operate with certainty in the former, the latter involves considerable uncertainty, and the risk of something going badly wrong must be taken into account. My proposed “risk-sensitive” approach aims to preserve the theoretical strength of the Repugnant Conclusion while limiting the unintuitive consequences of accepting it, and, if successful, perhaps illuminates a way forward for the field.