Torbjorn Tannsjo, Kristian Claëson Professor of Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University, asked me to share the following experience he recently had.
Dylan Matthews, a philosophically-minded editor at Vox.com, solicited Professor Tannsjo to write a piece for Vox on the "repugnant conclusion." More precisely, Mr. Matthews wrote:
I'm an editor for the US news site Vox.com, and we're trying to start a new series where philosophers and other thinkers argue for provocative and/or counterintuitive propositions that our readers might find intriguing.
I'm a big fan of your work from my undergraduate years — there aren't a lot of fellow hedonic utilitarians in philosophy! — and in particular found your argument for accepting the repugnant conclusion very compelling. It's a fascinating problem, and one that's fairly easy for lay readers to get into — people care about population size, and "We have a duty to make the world's population as large as possible" is a proposition that demands peoples' attention.
I'm writing to ask if you'd like to write up a popular version of your argument on this for Vox.
Prof. Tannsjo obliged, and produced this piece:
You should have kids. Not because it’s fun, or rewarding, or in your evolutionary self-interest.
You should have kids because it’s your moral duty to do so.
My argument is simple. Most people live lives that are, on net, happy. For them to never
exist, then, would be to deny them that happiness. And because I think we have a moral duty
to maximize the amount of happiness in the world, that means that we all have an obligation
to make the world as populated as can be.
Of course, we should see to it that we do not overpopulate the planet in a manner that
threatens the future existence of mankind. But we’re nowhere near that point yet, at least not
if we also see to it that we solve pressing problems such as the one with global warming. In
the mean time, we’re ethically obligated to make as many people as possible.
This idea, that having children is a moral obligation, is controversial, so much so that it’s
known in philosophy as the “repugnant conclusion.” But I don’t think it’s repugnant at all.
We have obligations to people who don’t exist yet
You might be thinking at this point, “Sure, more happiness sounds good. But morality is
about helping people, and creating more people helps ‘people’ who don’t exist, not yet
anyway.” This view is known as actualism. Only actual individuals have rights. We have not
done anything wrong, unless there is an actual person who has a legitimate complaint to
make against our action.
This means that, if I do not create a happy individual, even if I can do so, I do nothing wrong.
A merely hypothetical individual has no legitimate complaint to make. This is the great appeal
of actualism: it means that people have total freedom in choosing whether to reproduce or
not. My view suggests that we have a moral obligation to keep having children; actualism lets
people do as they like.
I can’t help finding all this problematic. Imagine for a second that the Genesis story is actually
true. Under the actualist view, Adam and Eve could have morally refrained from having
children, even if, had they decided differently, billions of billions of happy persons would have
been around!
Here is another consequence of the theory. Suppose I have a choice as to whether to have a
baby at 15 or at 35. If I have the baby at 15, I’ll earn much less money in my career, the baby
will go to worse schools and live in a worse neighborhood, and generally her life will be much
tougher. If I have her at 35, I’ll be able to adequately provide for the baby, pay for college,
and so forth. If I have the baby at 15, then, did I do anything wrong? I did not, by actualist
reasoning. There is no one there to complain about what I did. The baby is, after all, happy to
be around. By creating her, I did not violate her rights. And the hypothetical baby I would’ve
had at 35 isn’t around to complain. But this cannot be right. If these are the options I have, I
ought to wait. The world where I have a baby at 35 is just happier than the one where I have
a baby at 15.
Why a world with many more people wouldn’t be so bad
The idea that people are morally obliged to have as many children as possible has some
radical implications. The biggest is that a world in which many people — 20, 50, even 100
billion — are alive, but each has a life that’s only barely worth living, is preferable to a world
where only, say, 10 billion people are extremely happy. Let’s call these Big Bad World and
Small Happy World, respectively.
This conclusion may seem ludicrous. Of course you’d rather live in a world where everyone’s
happy than one where people are just scraping by! But this intuition is wrong.
Imagine that the end of Small Happy World is the end of humankind. Everyone’s as happy as
can be, and then they all die. Meanwhile, in Big Bad World, the human race continues on for
billions of years, at a level where life is worth living, but not spectacular. Would we not then
feel that the Small Happy World people are doing selfish? Rather than going on with the
human race, and accept the sacrifice that this means, they’re living high and not letting
anyone succeed them. This is clearly wrong.
Furthermore, it’s difficult to get a grasp of what Big Bad World would be like. But the way
people live there may be similar to the way we live. There are ups and downs in our lives.
Perhaps a typical human life often ends up with only a little happiness as its net sum.
Perhaps many lives end up with a negative sum. But then, is the Big Bad World so bad as
one may at first have thought? It’s quite possible that people in Big Bad World aren’t living in
abject poverty and misery, but instead have lives similar those of many affluent people living
in rich, developed countries today.
Similarly, it’s difficult to imagine what it would be like to live an extremely happy life,
containing much more happiness than our lives do now. It could be that the gap between a
barely-worthwhile life and the happiest life possible is quite small.
Have more kids!
We have an obligation to go on with humanity, as long as we can, and as long as we create
future individuals who live lives worth living. Procreative decisions are moral decisions, and
we ought to see to it that, by our procreative decisions, we maximize the sum total of
happiness. The popular idea that we may do as we see fit when we conceive children, as
long as there is no one there who can make a legitimate complaint against us, is mistaken.
We ought to take all easy measures to procreate, such as signing up for sperm banks,
having another child when we can take care of it, and so forth. Of course, we should see to it
that we do not by our procreative choices make existing lives worth not living nor make lives
worth not living. In the individual case, it is hard to know where to draw the line. But in many
cases, having more kids is clearly better.Torbjörn Tännsjö is Professor of Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University. He has
published extensively in moral philosophy, political philosophy and applied ethics. Among his
most recent books are Understanding Ethics, 3rd edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2013) and Taking Life: Three Theories on the Ethics of Killing (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2015), both available in the US from Oxford University Press. This article
draws on a chapter in Taking Life.http://leiterreports.typepad.com/files/you-should-have-kids-00000003.pdfAfter inquiring about its status after a period of silence, Prof. Tannsjo received the following from Mr. Matthews:
Afraid I have to be the bearer of bad news, Torbjörn. I ran the piece by some other editors and they weren't comfortable running it; I think the concern is that people will misinterpret it as implying opposition to abortion rights and birth control, which, while I know it's not your intent, is a real concern.
I'm sorry to waste your time; I really am a big fan of your work and appreciate your willingness to work with me.
As Prof. Tannsjo remarked to me this sorry affair illustrates "how sensitive abstract philosophical reasoning sometimes is"--and also, I might add, how difficult it is to translate it for a mass audience which apparently is more concerned with taking the "correct" view than with the reasoning.
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2015/08/so-much-for-trying-to-bring-philosophy-to-the-public.html
