I knew that my most recent post on MacAskill's What we Owe the Future -- where I link his project to a certain kind of eugenic program (here) -- would be controversial and would be read more widely and carefully than many of my other posts. Since I expected controversy, and also knew that I was at the edge of part of my expertise, I decided to build up to this post by first writing a piece on a key passage in Parfit (here), and then three other digressions (The first here; the second one is here; the third here.) Even so I received two kinds of criticisms by highly regarded experts that may be worth responding to. Today I will respond to the more specialist concern about the nature and use of 'population ethics.'
First, 'population ethics' is a technical term. For example, here is how Gustaf Arrhenius (one of my critics) uses, perhaps even defines the term in a high-profile place:
Population ethics is then the effort to theorize about "the moral value of states of affairs where the number of people, the quality of their lives (or their life-time welfare or well-being—we shall use these terms interchangeably here), and their identities may vary." Let's call this 'the technical version of population ethics.' I have no problem with this enterprise in the seminar room or esoteric journal article. When this project is conducted in terms of highly abstract end states, it may well be illuminating about various kinks in and tensions in the moral theories we might use in action guiding or policy contexts without itself being implicated in policy. Of course, such technical population ethics is, to some degree, part and parcel of climate ethics and projects (often conducted in terms of intergenerational justice). But since, as I noted, MacAskill is not much focused on climate ethics, I leave it aside here.
However, even in this technical version, the concern with the quality of lives of future people may well generate what I call an 'undue interest in other people's children.' And so, while the technical version can be done in highly abstract and unproblematic ways, it is not defined in a way that prevents such undue interest altogether. In fact, if one thinks that the technical version reveals what is obligatory for us, I don't see how one can avoid what I call such undue interest. (Of course, moral theory may convince you such interest is obligatory, even if defeasible.) But if, in practice, one is primarily interested in comparing different highly abstract states of affairs (post facto or hypothetically) then what I call the undue interest never arises. Of course, this interest might well arise (as I noted in my fourth post on MacAskill) through all kinds of areas of bio-ethics, including what is known as 'liberal eugenics,' and so in some respects this train has left the station (about which another time more).
Now, it is worth noting that both Parfit and MacAskill explicitly present population ethics as something "secular" something emphasized by MacAskill) in a passage I quoted:
Parfit inaugurated several new areas of moral philosophy. The one that has most shaped my worldview, and which is covered in this chapter, is population ethics—the evaluation of actions that might change who is born, how many people are born, and what their quality of life will be. Secular discussion of this topic is strikingly scarce: despite thousands of years of ethical thought, the issue was only discussed briefly by the early utilitarians and their critics in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it received sporadic attention in the years that followed. (168)
Parfit uses 'atheist' where MacAskill uses 'secular'. This is, in fact, orthogonal to the technical version of population ethics (even if, in practice, the technical version is conducted through the norms of what one might call public reason and so secular in character). And, as Gustaf Arrhenius pointed out to me, Parfit did not use the phrase 'population ethics' in Reasons and Persons. (This fits with my construal that Parfit saw his own project as a fresh start, but not as wholly new. See also my post on him.)
Now, MacAskill offers a definition of what he means by population ethics: "the evaluation of actions that might change who is born, how many people are born, and what their quality of life will be." (168) This is, I think, the first use of the term 'population ethics' in MacAskill's What We Owe to the Future. And MacAskill goes on to suggest that this is what "the arguments of others in the field of population ethics" are about. (169) Let's call MacAskill's definition the 'popular version of population ethics."
It is clear that the popular version deviates from the technical version: first, there is a focus on (concrete) actions and not(abstract) states of affairs or highly stylized possible worlds. Second, the first focus (because mentioned first) is, in fact, on births and this automatically introduces questions of reproduction and what I call the undue interest in other people's children into the fold. (Of course, I have not given any argument that it is undue when no force is involved except to hint that it may end up reinforcing structural injustices, and so this may be thought question begging.) In the technical version the number of people is pertinent, too, but how to operationalize it is left quite open. So, one can work, in principle, in the technical version of population ethics and deny any undue interest in other people's children. I grant this, and if I misled any of my readers about this my apologies. Of course, once one starts thinking about policy derived from the technical version of population ethics, one may still run into problems. But that is downstream.
A further key difference between the technical and popular version is that MacAskill is willing to entertain the content of desirable traits (cultural and genetic) that should be part of future populations. In fact, in his presentation this consideration is presented in chapters before he discusses his version of population ethics (it's really a major theme of chapter 3, especially after p. 55). And MacAskill clearly argues that the the preponderance of such traits is under human control. So, I think the natural reading of MacAskill's popular version of population ethics is that among the salient actions that is under our control are the traits that shape the quality of lives of those that are born and through their lives.
Now in fairness to MacAskill he is much more focused on cultural traits than genetic ones.+ (While the text suggests an interest in enhancement, I see no evidence he has an interest in racial characteristics.) And, as I noted, he explicitly denies that he wants to limit abortion and reproductive rights. (This is common among so-called liberal eugenicists.) But as I suggested the devil is in the detail because the unequal distribution of techniques of enhancement and IVF may well prevent reproduction among some sub-populations and promote it among others (and so generate or reinforce structural injustices).
So, if I were doing technical population ethics, I would be worried that MacAskill's popular version came to be confused with the technical kind. And I would be annoyed that MacAskill's version was the one that first appeared in a popular discussion of the subject. However, I also suspect that from MacAskill's perspective popular population ethics just is a subset of the technical kind one that is inevitable once one focuses on public policy to get from here to various end states or to prevent certain outcomes that the technical kind has established as inferior.*
+Because MacAskill is not especially interested in promoting certain genetic traits, I ignore to what degree his position is compatible with removing harmful genetic traits from a population. For some consequentialists this is not problematic at all.
* I am grateful to Liam Kofi Bright and Gustaf Arrhenius for comments on an earlier draft.
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