Population Ethics: Weighing Potential Lives and Repugnant Conclusions

How do you measure the value of lives that don’t yet exist? In this episode, we dive into the strange and fascinating world of population ethics—the branch of philosophy wrestling with questions that shape our future without us even noticing. From the old maritime logic of the “Birkenhead drill” to today’s climate and economic policies, we explore how decisions made now affect not only the well-being of future people, but how many of them there will be. We unpack the “neutrality intuition,” the puzzle that says creating happy lives is neither good nor bad, and the troubling “repugnant conclusion,” where a vast population with miserable lives could be judged morally superior to a smaller, flourishing one. Why are potential future generations almost never factored into our political calculations? And what would change if they were?https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2022/12/20/should-we-care-about-people-who-need-never-exist