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.6 The watershed moment came in 1984 with the publication of Parfit’s book Reasons and Persons.
Population ethics is crucial for longtermism because it greatly affects how we should evaluate the end of civilisation.--William MacAskill (2022) What We Owe The Future, p. 168.
This is the fourth post on MacAskill's book. (The first one is here which also lists some qualities about the book that I admire; the second one is here; the third here.) MacAskill's note 6 refers to the Mohists, who are not treated as population ethicists because "they did not discuss the intrinsic and instrumentalist benefits and costs of increasing population." (307) Let me grant, for the sake of argument, that such an economic analysis (costs/benefits) is intrinsic to population ethics.
It's unclear why we should exclude non-secular population ethicists (starting with Plato, but not least Berkeley, Malthus, and Nassau Senior all of whom shaped the early utilitarians), although (recall) Parfit has soft-Nietzschean reasons for doing so, but it is left unclear whether MacAskill endorses these. Even so, MacAskill's historical claim is odd. Some of the most important innovations in early twentieth century social and biological sciences and statistical technique (associated with names like Galton, Pearson, Fisher, Edgeworth, and Haldane)* are intertwined with population ethics (and eugenics). I am almost inclined to joke that in their age we even developed a fallacy, 'the naturalistic' one so as to avoid tainting doctrines with their sordid origins.
While undoubtedly some early utilitarians were pioneering population ethicists, it seems unfair to ignore the pre-utilitarian population ethicists of imperialists political arithmeticians like William Petty (seventeenth century), who put the art of managing populations by modern states on a more scientific footing while terrorizing the Irish. The managing of the size and quality of populations was an intrinsic part of the (quite 'secular') art of government in the reason of state tradition of the sixteenth century, too. In fact, civilizations (including feudal orders) that emphasize 'good breeding' (a phrase that had a positive connotation until quite recently) are generally self-consciously engaged in population ethics (even if their cost-benefit analysis deviates from MacAskill's).
Of course, MacAskill's focus is not on the past, but the future. It's notable that population ethics is said to be essential to longtermism. This is by no means intuitive. If one is attached to, say, the survival of civilization, or one wishes to evaluate if one ought to be concerned with it, one need not articulate this or defend it in terms of (a) population ethics focused on wellbeing. MacAskill often writes as if it's the only ethical long game in town. But, as Itai Sher notes, there are passages where MacAskill allows for "non-welfarist, non-utilitarian values" but that means that either his population ethics is itself a mixed (ad hoc) bag or not intrinsic to longtermism.
To be sure, in between the lines, MacAskill is aware that some wish to promote perpetual peace (which he seems to associate with Steve Pinker, see p. 297 n. 60), but as I noted before (in part 2), he treats this possibility not in terms of, say, a regime of human rights enforcement, but exclusively in terms of "world government" and, so, as undesirable. (158) Of course, there may be other ends (e.g., elimination of hunger, the promotion of leisure, or, more elitist, the arts and sciences) that might make the extension of civilization worth having. Or, perhaps, civilization is intrinsically caught up in social domination, and the anarchists are right that we should aim to abolish it in the long run.
What's odd about doubling down on population ethics is that it both encourages us to take an unhealthy amount of interest in the quality of lives of other people's children and that it encourages us to make calculations that are without any solid ground. On the latter, Itai Sher (who is much more sympathetic to the project than I am) observes that the book makes "too many heroic assumptions and tries to estimate too many things that can't be estimated." That is, MacAskill is completely unwilling to take the significance of Keynesian and Knightian uncertainty seriously at all. Keynes (who had a non-trivial interest in population ethics) wrote in 1937:
In some respects, perhaps, our judgments have become more optimistic (we have tools that can help us estimate, say, the price of copper a few decades out), Keynes' general underlying outlook strikes me as sound. Very long-term forecasting is very difficult. In fact, often the short term calculations are difficult, too. Recently, Peter Singer was unusually sober when asked to comment on the significance of the collapse of FTX and its implications on earning-to-give:
“I think in general, a lot more good has been done by earning-to-give than harm, at least up until the collapse of FTX, which has certainly caused a lot more harm than any other [example]” says Singer. “It’s very hard to reckon up the total balance sheet on that.”--The Guardian (December 23).+
There is an ambiguity here in whether Singer thinks it's difficult to do a cost-benefit analysis on earning-to-give or on the collapse of FTX. But for my present purposes that's irrelevant. If we find it so difficult indeed to weigh up the net costs and benefits of known actions today, how much more difficult does it become when we look into the downstream effects of the very long future. (I return to MacAskill's promotion of earning-to give (pp 232-233) some other time.)
It is worth noting, especially because Itai is too polite to do so, that MacAskill (nearly always) plays the 'uncertainty card' in the opposite direction: "uncertainty cuts both ways" (89) Outcomes may sneak up on us before we anticipate it. And this observation is turned into a carte blanche by MacAskill to posit all kinds of estimates (with incredible precision and confidence), for example "I don't think one could reasonably go lower than a 10 percent chance of AGI in the next fifty years." (91) As I remarked on his use of the Solow-Swan model, it is notable that such claims are not even made (pro forma) as ceteris paribus judgments. (All the more striking because MacAskill co-authored a highly regarded work on moral uncertainty.)
In general, population ethics generates an unhealthy interest in other people's reproductive choices. And so, it is no surprise that population ethics is repeatedly entangled in eugenics and race science. And folk who are attracted to this topic tend to take pride in their own steadfast ability to look cold facts into the eyes and their capacity for plain speaking. MacAskill himself is a lot more cautious, and treats such topics in terms of 'fitness landscapes' and organism's and cultural 'traits.'
The key issue is, of course, how MacAskill proposes to achieve the dominance of certain traits. When it comes to action MacAskill never explicitly suggests that others are directly forced to join in. (He is clearly more interested in building a voluntary social movement.) But it does not mean coercion is absent from the framework. For, MacAskill does promote "political activism" and "voting" (233) to get governments on board with his program. But he is not transparent about how much coercion governments can use subsequently to promote particular fitness landscapes alongside growing populations. (Here it does look like the ends will justify most means.)
Sometimes one is told that inattention to population ethics is also a (de facto) population policy. That's true enough. But there is an also a cost (even an opportunity cost) involved in paying too much attention to population ethics. After all, most population ethicists of the past were unduly worried about the quality of other people's children (the poor, the Irish, the Jews, etc.).
At first sight, MacAskill really does better: he phrases his claims primarily in terms of population size (more is better). In fact, throughout the book there is an argument for having more children. And this, in turn, is justified consequentially, "when children grow up they contribute to public goods through their taxes, they build infrastructure, and they develop and champion new ideas about how to live and how to structure society." (187; he goes on to suggest that sufficiently good lives are also good for children (188)). It is worth noting that, alas, in some political contexts not all children of all political demographics are perceived as future taxpayers (in some contexts this might even count as a dog whistle).
In the text, MacAskill is explicit that governments should not "restrict people's reproductive rights by...limiting access to contraception or banning abortion." (188) But one need not be a careful logician to realize that this leaves it wide open for a community of longtermists or, if they can persuade them, governments to engage in population policies that either enhance the posited desirable traits of desirable children (that is, future tax payers, infrastructure builders, and idea generators) or privilege those sub-populations that are taken as would-be-good breeders for the desired fitness landscape. (The latter is not science fiction because parental 'risk factors' on the child's future welfare are already often incorporated into, say, IVF policies.) One suspects MacAskill is strategically, even wisely, silent here.**
*In a footnote MacAskill acknowledges this about Haldane (p. 292).
+Trivial aside: I do wonder whether reflecting on SBF's Bahamian apartment, Singer had just recalled Flavius Josephus on King Solomon's palace: " it is very hard to reckon up the magnitude, and the variety of the royal apartments; how many rooms there were of the largest sort; how many of a bigness inferior to those; and how many that were subterraneous and invisible; the curiosity of those that enjoyed the fresh air; and the groves for the most delightful prospect; for the avoiding the heat, and covering of their bodies."
**It does not mean he has no interest in the topic as is witnessed by a paragraph on the regional variation of attitudes toward "new biomedical technologies such as cloning and genetic enhancement," (62)
It's worth noting that the kind of population ethics MacAskill would be most familiar with (i.e., the population ethics taught in analytic philosophy departments in places like Oxford and Cambridge) is typically taught without drawing any actual connection with the topic of *population*, or with the overlapping histories of Malthusianism, social Darwinism, and eugenics. See, for example, the Stanford Encyclopedia's definition on its article on the Repugnant Conclusion: population ethics studies 'the moral value of states of affairs where the number of people, the quality of their lives, and their identities may vary.' Everything is so abstractly defined and abstractly discussed; only the name of the discipline, 'population ethics', hints at a connection with questions about population.
But, of course, you are correct that these abstract reflections about the ethics of 'states of affairs' have (historically) emerged from thinking about concrete population issues, and are (still today) deeply linked with these kinds of issues in not-too-savoury ways. My point is just that MacAskill may never have thought about it in these terms, because of the way population ethics is taught nowadays.
This, of course, has to do with Parfit's immense influence: I think you're not sufficiently harsh on MacAskill's historical claim that Parfit 'inaugurated' population ethics, but it's true that as far as MacAskill's philosophy is concerned, Parfit *might as well* have invented population ethics. As you mention, Parfit had his own reasons to try to 'screen off' the influence of religious ethics on his work; separately but for similar reasons, he also tried to abstract away from the neo-Malthusianism undertones of the questions he was asking. And so you get things like a draft explicitly entitled 'Overpopulation' being turned into a journal article and then book section about the (much more abstract) topic of 'Future Generations'.
But whatever Parfit's intentions, one of the consequences of this is that longtermism and 'existential risk' studies have been left with a rather unhealthy concern with ideas about population. Superficially, this can be seen in the recently-unveiled, utterly disgusting email Nick Bostrom wrote in the 1990s about race and IQ; but there's deeper connections to be drawn, too (some of which I drew in my MPhil dissertation).
Posted by: Peter McLaughlin | 01/13/2023 at 04:05 PM
"uncertainty cuts both ways" - is that another way of saying "yeah, but you can't prove it *won't*"?
Posted by: Phil | 03/07/2023 at 06:10 PM