Two Dogmas of Population Ethics: MacAskill’s Existentially Unrestricted Form of Longtermism and the Value of Existence

Abstract

This paper focuses on two arguments William MacAskill discusses with approval in What We Owe the Future. Both arguments support the existentially unrestricted form of longtermism that MacAskill favors, and both rely on moral principles that reflect a particular way of resolving the decades-old, Narveson-inspired, value of existence controversy. But it is questionable whether that way of resolving the controversy — i.e., against Narveson — has ever in fact been entirely grounded. Instead, many in the population ethics mainstream have simply assumed that the controversy was happily put to bed soon after it first gained attention. Once we identify that assumption as mere assumption, we can see that the principles in question work, not as the solid underpinnings of an insightful resolution of the value of existence controvery, a resolution we ourselves are compelled to accept, but rather as dogma – thus the two dogmas of population ethics . That insight opens the door to an existentially restricted form of longtermism, a form that is arguably more attractive than MacAskill’s own.