Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!noc.near.net!paperboy.wellfleet.com!news-feed-1.peachnet.edu!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!uunet!hearst.acc.Virginia.EDU!murdoch!darwin.clas.Virginia.EDU!dcs2e
From: dcs2e@darwin.clas.Virginia.EDU (David Christopher Swanson)
Subject: happiness and population
Message-ID: <Cxw75F.5s@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
Sender: usenet@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU
Organization: uva
Date: Tue, 18 Oct 1994 23:41:39 GMT
Lines: 27

Quoting Robert Nozick:
	"Maximizing the total happiness requires continuing to
add persons so long as their net utility is positive and is
sufficient to counterbalance the loss in utility their presence
in the world causes others."

And again:
	"Is it all right to kill someone provided you
immediately substitute another (by having a child or, in
science fiction fashion, by creating a full-grown person) who
will be as happy as the rest of the life of the person you
killed?  After all, there would be no net diminuition in total
utility, or even any change in its profile of distribution.  Do
we forbid murder only to prevent feelings of worry on the part
of potential victims?"

My response:
Is it necessarily incoherent to try to maximize the good
(happiness or whatever) for those who currently exist, and to
see a birth not as an increase in potential happiness, but as a
complete alteration of the playing field from without?
By the same token, is it not reasonable to maintain that the
happiness of one yet to exist even as embryo or fetus cannot
alter any equation (except as an event effecting existing
humans)?

David
