The Oxford Handbook Of Population Ethics

Description

The Oxford Handbook of Population Ethics presents up-to-date theoretical analyses of various problems associated with the moral standing of future people and animals in current decision-making. Future people pose an especially hard problem for our current decision-making, since their number and their identities are not fixed but depend on the choices the present generation makes. Do we make the world better by creating more people with good lives? What do we owe future generations in terms of justice? How should burdens and benefits be shared across generations so that justice prevails? These questions are philosophically difficult and important, but also directly relevant to many practical decisions and policies. Climate change policy provides an example, as the increasing global temperature will kill some people and prevent many others from ever existing. Many other policies also influence the size and make-up of future populations both directly and indirectly, for example those concerning family planning, child support, and prioritization in health-care. If we are to adequately assess these policies, we must be able to determine the value of differently sized populations. The essays in this handbook shed light on the value of population change and the nature of our obligations to future generations. It brings together world-leading philosophers to introduce readers to some of the paradoxes of population ethics, challenge some fundamental assumptions that may be taken for granted in the debate about the value of population change, and apply these problems and assumptions to real-world decisions. Cover The Oxford Handbook of Population Ethics Copyright Acknowledgments Contents About the Contributors Introduction Part I Ways Out of the Paradoxes 1. How Not to Avoid the Repugnant Conclusion 2. Prioritarianism and Population Ethics 3. Anonymous Welfarism, Critical-​Level Principles, and the Repugnant and Sadistic Conclusions 4. Rank-​Discounting as a Resolution to a Dilemma in Population Ethics 5. Getting Personal: The Intuition of Neutrality Reinterpreted 6. Loosening the Betterness Ordering of Lives: A Response to Rabinowicz Part II Philosophical and Methodological Assumptions 7. Lessons to be Learned from the Mere Addition Paradox 8. Population Paradoxes without Transitivity 9. On Some Impossibility Theorems in Population Ethics 10. The Person-​Based Intuition and the Better Chance Puzzle 11. Person-​Affecting Utilitarianism 12. Separability and Population Ethics 13. Evaluative Uncertainty and Population Ethics 14. Claims Across Outcomes and Population Ethics 15. Does the Repugnant Conclusion Have Important Implications for Axiology or for Public Policy? 16. Our Intuitive Grasp of the Repugnant Conclusion Part III Applications 17. Climate Change and Population Ethics 18. Egalitarian Justice, Population Size, and Parents’ Responsibility for the Costs of Children 19. Overpopulation and Individual Responsibility 20. Optimum Population Size 21. Demographic Theory and Population Ethics 22. Population Overshoot 23. Creating People and Saving People 24. Animal Population Ethics 25. Gamete Donation as a Laudable Moral Mistake 26. Disability and Population Ethics Index