Adding Happy People

Almost every week there’s a headline about our planet’s population explosion.  For instance Indian officials confirmed recently that India is projected to overtake China in just over a decade – to become the most populous country on Earth.  Many are worried that the planet is becoming increasingly overpopulated.  Whether it is overpopulated, underpopulated, or appropriately populated is a challenging ethical question.

Let’s suppose a ‘happy life’ is one that would be on balance very well worth living from the point of view of the person living it.  Is it good to add people with happy lives to the world?  This question divides into two more specific ones:  First, is it good to add happy people, in virtue of the good effects of doing so for us already existing people?  Second, is it good to add happy people, independently of any effects on the already existing?  The latter is by far the more intriguing.

The Canadian philosopher Jan Narveson famously answered this question in the negative.  He says, “We are in favor of making people happy, but neutral about making happy people.”  Whether this stance is correct has a wide range of practical implications for procreation, resource conservation, climate change, and existential risks.  Some of the implications are absolutely profound:  since there are very many happy future people who could exist, if morality were in favor of making happy people we’d have an overwhelmingly strong reason to promote the colonization of other planets by our descendants; we’d have very little if any reason to do this if Narveson were right.

But Narveson was blind to an important part of morality.  In addition to being about making people happy, morality is about making happy people.  By adding happy people we in one way make the world a better place, and we have significant reason to do so.  This significant reason would entail that we should add happy people, if there were absolutely no downside to doing so.  Of course, it may be that adding happy people to the current population of Earth would have serious environmental and social downsides, and be a bad thing all-things-considered.

Instead suppose I could push a button that would create billions of happy people living on several large and lush Eden-like planets.  These people would in turn produce further generations of happy people, who would do likewise, and so on… for the foreseeable future.  Pushing the button would cost me nothing, and do no harm or wrong.  Would it be wrong of me not to push the button, in this case?  Yes, I believe it would.

There is a range of arguments that philosophers have offered in favor of adding happy people.  I’ll sketch just two sorts of argument.

The most fascinating argument is based on a kind of skepticism about the moral significance of the boundaries between persons, according to which persons are at most mere containers of what really matters, happiness.  On this view, it doesn’t matter in and of itself where a fixed amount of happiness is placed.  Whether we put it in this or that container, or build a new container to put it in, is in itself irrelevant.  Thus, on this view, making people happy and making happy people are equally morally important, other things being equal.

There are different routes to such skepticism about the moral significance of the boundaries between persons.  One is purely metaphysical:  there simply are no separate persons; there are only sets of experiences.  There’s a set of experiences here where this blog is being written, and another set over there, and there, where it’s being read.  But there are no entities above and beyond these experiences, who have them.  This sort of view is advocated by Buddhists.  Another route is only ‘metaphysically-inspired’, and is consistent with the belief that there really are separate persons.  The idea here is that when we study certain challenging cases within the literature on the metaphysics of persons and personal identity, it appears very difficult to maintain the moral significance of these notions, either in general or within particular parts of morality.  For examples of what I have in mind, see the work of Derek Parfit, me, Jake Ross, Tim Campbell, Rachael Briggs and Daniel Nolan, and Caspar Hare.  A paper in which I take a ‘metaphysically-inspired’ approach to adding happy people was included at recent conferences in San Diego and Oslo.

The most fascinating sort of argument in favor of adding happy people isn’t, in my estimation, the most compelling one.  Suppose we grant that it matters whether some amount of happiness is located in the life of an already existing person rather than that of a merely possible person.  Still, a simple and forceful thought is that adding happiness is good to some extent, wherever it’s placed.  It is very hard to deny the analogous claim about suffering:  that adding suffering is bad to some extent, wherever it’s placed.  Surely it would be bad to bring in a life of relentless and insufferable pain.  Several philosophers have attempted to defend the following asymmetry:  while it’s bad to add suffering by adding miserable people, it’s not good to add happiness by adding happy people.  None of these attempts looks promising.  But don’t take my word for it; have a think for yourself, and read some of the excellent work in this area, such as this recent paper by Melinda Roberts.  My sense is that it remains as baffling as ever to think that it could be bad to add miserable people but not good to add happy people.

Largely because I think the asymmetry can’t be defended, I think the world would in one way be made better, by the addition of happy people to it.  I believe this gives us very strong reason to colonize a variety of planets throughout the galaxy, bringing about trillions of happy lives.  How much reason?  I suppose about as much reason as we’d have to prevent trillions of miserable lives from coming into existence.