1 Introduction

The person-affecting view is the idea that we have no reason to create a person just because their life would go well. In slogan form “make people happy, not happy people.” It’s important to know if the person-affecting view is right because it has serious implications for what actions should be taken. If the person-affecting view is false, it’s extremely important that we don’t go extinct so that we can then create lots of happy people.

The far future could contain staggeringly large numbers of people—on the order of 10^52, and possibly much more. If creating a happy person is a good thing, then ensuring we have such a future is a key priority. MacAskill and Greaves, in their paper on strong Longtermism, do some back of the envelope calculations and conclude that each dollar spent reducing existential risks increases expected future populations by 10 billion. This sounds outlandish, but it turns out pretty conservative when you take into account that there’s a non-zero chance that the future could sustain very large populations for billions of years.

Unfortunately for person-affecting view proponents, the person-affecting view is very unlikely to be correct. I think the case against it is about as good as the case against any view in philosophy gets.

I was largely inspired to write this by ’s excellent summary of the arguments for the person-affecting view, which I highly recommend reading. My piece overlaps considerably with his. Separately, Thornley is great—his blog and EA forum account are both very worth reading.

2 The core intuitions and the weird structure of the view

The core intuition against the person-affecting view is that it’s good to have a good life. Love, happiness, friendship, reading blog articles—these are all good things. Bringing good stuff into the world is good, so it’s good to create happy people. I’m quite happy to exist because I get to experience all the joys of life.

The core intuition behind the person-affecting view is that in order to be better, a state of affairs has to be better for someone. It’s good to help an old lady cross the street because that’s better for them. But if you’re creating a person, they wouldn’t have otherwise existed, and so they cannot be better off. Thus, creating a happy person is neutral.

Here is the issue: the person-affecting view’s core intuition is ...