Asymmetries in Benefiting, Harming and Creating

Paper by Ben Bradley, published on September 15, 2012 in The Journal of Ethics

It is often said that while we have a strong reason not to create someone who will be badly off, we have no strong reason for creating someone who will be well off. In this paper I argue that this asymmetry is incompatible with a plausible principle of independence of irrelevant alternatives, and that a more general asymmetry between harming and benefiting is difficult to defend. I then argue that, contrary to what many have claimed, it is possible to harm or benefit someone by bringing her into existence.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-012-9134-6
The Journal of Ethics 17/1–2 (2013), 37–49