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A portable defense of the Procreation Asymmetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Jake Earl
Jake Earl*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA
*
Email: jce27@georgetown.edu
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Abstract

The Procreation Asymmetry holds that we have strong moral reasons not to create miserable people for their own sakes, but no moral reasons to create happy people for their own sakes. To defend this conjunction against an argument that it leads to inconsistency, I show how recognizing ‘creation’ as a temporally extended process allows us to revise the conjuncts in a way that preserves their intuitive force. This defense of the Procreation Asymmetry is preferable to others because it does not require us to take on controversial metaphysical or metaethical commitments – in other words, it has the theoretical virtue of portability.

Keywords

Procreation Asymmetryharmingbenefitinglife worth livingmoral actualism

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Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 47 , Issue 2-3: Special issue: Ethics and Future Generations , 2017 , pp. 178 - 199
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2017

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