The procreation asymmetry is wrong.

Neither the weak or strong variants hold up; you are just as obligated to create happy individuals.

We have a moral obligation to create happy people—an obligation just as strong as our obligation not to create miserable people.

Pressing a button to materialize a person who will live a miserable life (negative utility) would be cruel and unnecessary for that person; therefore, we have a moral obligation not to press that button. Pressing a button to materialize a person destined to live an extremely happy life (positive utility) would be fantastic for that person; therefore, we have a moral obligation to press that button.

The two syllogisms below imply that we should be obligated to procreate if it means creating happy people, so long as the person has positive utility, causing a positive hedonistic trade-off.

P1. Any action that causes a negative hedonistic trade-off implies an obligation not to perform that action.

P2. Creating a miserable person causes a negative hedonistic trade-off.

Conclusion: We have an obligation not to create a miserable person.

P1. Any action that causes a positive hedonistic trade-off implies an obligation to perform that action.

P2. Creating a happy person causes a positive hedonistic trade-off.

Conclusion: We have an obligation to create a happy person.

It’s intuitive—so intuitive, in fact, that proponents of the procreation asymmetry are forced to attack premise 1. The argument only relies on a single assumption, which is that we’re obligated to perform actions that cause positive hedonistic trade-offs. The way they challenge this is through adopting person-affecting views (PAVs) or pointing to a type of inherent asymmetry between pain and pleasure.

Person-affecting views assume that what is bad must be bad for someone, and anyone adopting PAVs must, on top of affirming the procreation asymmetry, assume that an outcome can only be better or worse than another outcome based on its effects on an existing moral agent.

Here are 3 counterintuitive conclusions that come with accepting person-affecting views.

#1 Transitivity paradoxes.

It’s a mathematical rule that if A = B and B > C, A must also be greater than C. PAVs violate this basic rule of numerical transitivity. Picture 3 worlds—World A, B, and C:

1. World A has 10 people, all at 100% happiness.

2. World B has the same 10 people at 100% happiness, along with 1 new person at 100% happiness.

3. World C has the same 10 people at 200% happiness, but the 1 new person now has -10% happiness.

PAVs necessitate that World A is equivalent to World B, since procreating must not serve any utility; if this weren’t the case, the procreation asymmetry is false. World B also has to be better than World C, since World C sequentially creates a miserable person, as the 1 new person from World B is a miserable new person. But how about World A? Since it’s just as good as World B, and World B has higher moral value than World C, this entails that World A also has higher moral value than World C.

This, however, is not the case. Due to the 11th person now being an existing moral agent, PAVs now default to a utility calculus—since World C creates much more happiness (2x) for 10 people while simply sacrificing the happiness of the 11th person, it’s better under total utilitarianism and average utilitarianism. Having a network where A = B, B > C, and A < C is mathematically impossible.

Similar to Bentham’s Bulldog’s sequence argument, the underlying mechanism behind the transitivity paradox is the transition from a procreated moral agent to an existing moral agent, the gap in which leads to wildly counterintuitive conclusions.

#2 Fission problems.

Creating extra people has no value under person-affecting views; there are scenarios where creating ‘extra’ people also assumes the continuity of the moral agent that creates the extra agents.

Alice is currently living at 70% happiness. She can split herself into 2 identical, smaller copies, each with the same level of moral agency as Alice—these 2 copies will live at 80% happiness. Alice splitting into two versions of herself is now the preferable option under total utilitarianism and average utilitarianism. Both of these copies, denoted by Alice₁ and Alice₂, must be continuous versions of Alice; they both have Alice’s consciousness and moral attributes, while we can only grasp at arbitrary standards when deciding which one of the copies is the real Alice.

In fission scenarios, any defender of PAVs is put into a double-bind. Either they:

1. Accept that you shouldn’t perform the fission since replication is some type of procreation. This entails that you would prefer an individual at 70% happiness over 2 of that individual, both with the same moral worth and agency, at 80% happiness each.

2. Accept that the fission isn’t procreation, and you should perform it—this means that we are obligated to split ourselves into morally valuable copies so long as the copies have higher utility than their larger predecessor(s). Such a conclusion is dubbed the ‘Repugnant Fission’.

#3 The Non-identity problem.

Imagine a purple pill that, if taken, will have active effects on any fetus present within 3 months of consumption, causing the resulting newborn to have a permanent cognitive impairment. Two mothers, both with the intent to harm their children, discover this pill.

The first mother is already 4 months into pregnancy; upon discovering the pill, she consumes said pill. In this case, the fetus was on track to become a perfectly healthy person; the taking of the pill during pregnancy will now cause the resulting person to become cognitively disabled for the rest of his life. The first mother is performing a morally abhorrent action.

The second mother found out about the pill before becoming pregnant. As the pill’s effects only subside 3 months after consumption, she can either:

1. Undergo pregnancy within 3 months, ensuring that the fetus is not going to be born with a cognitive impairment.

2. Wait 3 months, creating a new, unique fetus that will remain perfectly healthy.

Following her harmful intent, the second mother decides to undergo pregnancy while the pill’s effects are active. Under person-affecting views, her actions wouldn’t have been wrong, since the pill altered the identity of the child. The child that would’ve been healthy is a different child from the child conceived of when the pill’s effects were active; PAVs state that you couldn’t have wronged a person that wouldn’t have existed in the first place.

Since the cognitively impaired child still has a life worth living, it’s not wrong for the second mother to purposefully become pregnant while the purple pill’s effects were active.

Person-affecting views are logically capricious—even while they avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, most rational people would choose to bite the bullet rather than swallow multiple paradoxes and unintuitive conclusions whole. The second way defenders of the asymmetry try to reject premise 1 is by pointing out an inherent asymmetry between happiness and suffering. If they can prove that happiness and suffering aren’t fundamentally symmetrical, it’s easy to apply that to weighing the moral significance of creating happiness less.

Adherents of the procreation asymmetry often point out the “missing out on something good is bad” intuition and the neurological discrepancy when it comes to how alleviating pain and producing pleasure creates positive hedonic effects.

#1 You do actually suffer from missing out

But you benefit from missing out on painful experiences. Both potential painful experiences and potential pleasurable experiences are unbounded.

You wouldn’t want to be killed right now—why is that? Death is a state of neutrality, a state of moral non-existence just like potential personhood; we don’t want to die because it entails missing out on all the good experiences in life. If we truly felt disproportionate suffering as opposed to pain or had utilities below the threshold of a life worth living, we might be tempted to commit suicide, however high our commitment to preserving life is.

But you’re missing out on so many potential positive experiences within your reach every moment. If missing out on all of these experiences decreased your utility, you would be extremely miserable. But this isn’t the case, so why should we weigh pleasure that we missed out on as a moral negative equivalent to being saved from a pain-inducing agent?

Pointing out the potentially infinite positive experiences you can miss out on is one of the worst objections to the symmetry of pain and pleasure, as it affirms the symmetrical nature of pain alleviation and pleasure creation. You can simply flip the argument on its head:

You’re missing out on so many potential negative experiences within your reach every moment. If you’re sitting on a chair, your chair can tip over and break in numerous ways, giving you a plethora of potential bruises to work with. The same thing happens if the light above you shatters and falls, or if your outlet sporadically shocks you. If the pain induced from missing out on positive-utility experiences within your reach is so high, the happiness induced from missing out on negative-utility experiences without your reach is similarly high.

#2 Proving that pleasure-seeking is not as important

Even if we prove that alleviating pain is some sort of precursor to creating pleasure, or that it’s more effective to increase welfare a certain way, or that there are different states of utility associated with each one, it proves far too little to justify any version of the procreation asymmetry.

The only implication of pain alleviation/prevention being more important is that it’s weighted more heavily—not that we have a specific moral obligation that’s inherently stronger when it comes to preventing pain as opposed to creating happiness. Pain prevention may have what I call a “utility multiplier”, making it preferable to destroy 5,000 units of suffering as opposed to creating 5,000 units of pleasure.

An adherent to the procreation asymmetry now has to prove that a higher utility multiplier can scalarly increase our moral obligations, something that the asymmetry argument doesn’t do. If I could press a red button to create 1 million units of happiness, I have a strong moral obligation to do so. If I could press a blue button to create 1.1 million units of happiness, my moral obligation to do so is also strong—is it 10% higher because the latter button is weighted 1.1x relative to the former?

Such a link between higher utility and higher moral obligation is simply not justified; accepting that pain reduction is better for utility than happiness creation does nothing at all to disprove the existing symmetry between pain and pleasure. Even if we assign suffering a 1.5x multiplier, that only changes the utility comparison between pain and pleasure from 1:1 to 3:2; it doesn’t alter obligations.

I’ll leave you with a different way to think about procreation:

Suppose that in a hypothetical, utopian society, creating people was as easy as pressing a button. Creating a miserable person causes a negative hedonistic trade-off, and creating a happy person causes a positive hedonistic trade-off. You can either press a red button to not create a specific miserable/happy individual or press a blue button to create that specific individual.

In this case, residents of that society would be obligated to press the blue button and create as many happy individuals as possible! In our society, it’s stupid to require everybody to create happy people—but that’s not because we have no obligation to do so, but because it requires time and resources that most people can’t spare, whereas refusing to bring miserable people into existence requires no effort at all.

Pressing the blue button on a miserable potential life is morally wrong, but given there is almost zero cost of pressing the blue button to create a happy life, it’s just as abhorrent not to give that potential person a life of happiness.