Population Ethics

One's views on population policy may be influenced by choice of ethical framework. See also our analysis of determinants of fertility and environmental impacts of population.

Average Versus Total Well-Being

Following are major ethical frameworks in population ethics.

A totalism view would generally be more pronatalist than an average utility view. Sources: Hardin ¹, Tännsjö ². Totalism is more commonly held among philosophers ³.

An ethic centered on totalism may call for raising the population to the Earth's carrying capacity, even if this diminishes the average well-being of all people, a situation that Derek Parfit calls mere addition, or the repugnant conclusion ⁴. Averagism suffers from an opposite paradox, where a member of a group, whose life is good but not as good as the group's average, would cause harm to the group by bringing down the average ⁴.

Value of Existence

While it is generally agreed that a person with high well-being is preferable to a person with low well-being, all else being equal, a challenge for most philosophical systems is the incomparability between nonexistence and existence at any level of well-being. Several attempts to make this comparison are as follows.

Source: ⁵.

This situation is related to the nonidentity problem, that an action can be bad only if it harms an existing person ⁶. Building from the asymmetric person-affecting view, David Benatar argues a strong antinatalist view and that it would be best for humanity to come to extinction via non-reproduction ⁷, a view that has prompted disagreement ⁸, ⁹, ¹⁰.