Actualism and Frick's views imply the procreation asymmetry, but I wouldn't consider them absolute views or standard Existence Anticomparativism. Rather, I'd still consider them merely comparative views (although we could argue about definitions). They allow certain kinds of comparisons, but for principled reasons and without directly as…
Actualism and Frick's views imply the procreation asymmetry, but I wouldn't consider them absolute views or standard Existence Anticomparativism. Rather, I'd still consider them merely comparative views (although we could argue about definitions). They allow certain kinds of comparisons, but for principled reasons and without directly assuming asymmetry between apparent goods and apparent bads or asserting the existence of absolute harms while denying absolute benefits:
1. Actualism allows actual beings to compare their lives to nonexistence (or us to do so on their behalf), but not non-actual beings to compare their lives with anything (or us to do so on their behalf). That seems intuitive to me, because the actual and only the actual can have objects that exist in the universe we can point to in order to ground their interests (e.g. brains with interest-generating and identity-establishing structures*).
2. Frick's conditional reasons are of the form "I have reason to (if I do p, do q)" (or Bykvist and Campbell, 2021's contrastive version "I have reason to (if I do p, do q) rather than not (if I do p, do q)").
If all person-regarding reasons are actualist or conditional (as I think is assumed in actualism and Frick's views, respectively), then we get the procreation asymmetry. You also concede (or at least don't strongly object to) actualist reasons and so at least weak asymmetry in Rethinking the Asymmetry, as "partiality towards the actual". The existence of absolute reasons seems to require more than the existence of actualist reasons or Frick's conditional reasons, at least with respect to apparently good and bad lives, because actualist and conditional reasons (at least with respect to individual welfare) each have absolute counterparts that make stronger claims, and there are more absolute reasons. So, it seems that there's an extra burden of proof to establish absolute reasons.
I think we can also use Frick's conditional reasons (and only conditional reasons), along with transitivity and the independence of irrelevant alternatives, to establish absolute harms while denying absolute goods, basically antifrustrationism (e.g. Fehige, 1998).
*This is a bit subtle, because we want to consider the whole of the future, including future actual beings, not just presently actual beings. This depends on specific views of the nature of time, although I wouldn't be surprised if the differences turned out to be merely normative, anyway. It also seems like you're sympathetic to something similar, with "timeless difference" and 4-dimensionalism, as you discuss in https://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/08/must-harms-be-temporally-located.html. Another possibility is Bader's account.
(1) I take it that 'actualist reasons' = what I call 'person-directed' reasons in the OP. The quick argument for absolute (or undirected) reasons is that we need them to explain our reasons *not* to create Misery (a merely possibly person, who *would* be miserable were she to exist).
One could instead appeal to some kind of structural reasons of ratifiability: if we created Misery, we'd then have (actualist) reasons to regret it. But this just pushes the asymmetry back a step, for what is the justification for adding structural reasons of regret-avoidance but not structural reasons of gladness-enticement (we would have actualist reasons to be glad of Joy's existence, were we to create her)?
(2) I worry that Frick's conditional approach presupposes rather than justifies the asymmetry. After all, it seems a general feature of "conditional obligations" (like promises) that violating them is bad, whereas satisfying them is merely neutral rather than good. [Cf. https://www.philosophyetc.net/2021/10/puzzling-conditional-obligations.html ] But that's an abhorrent view to take of people: that our existence is possibly bad, and neutral at best!
This brings me to my central argument for absolute value/reasons, which is just that its denial seems to express an abhorrent/disrespectful attitude towards human life, as I explain in the OP. We should view each other more positively than that.
(You suggest that "there's an extra burden of proof to establish absolute reasons." I reject that picture of moral methodology. Occam's razor is no reason at all to ascribe less value to people, or to smaller numbers of people. Moral parsimony is not a virtue. We should simply endorse the moral views that are best-warranted on their first-order merits.)
"(2) I worry that Frick's conditional approach presupposes rather than justifies the asymmetry. After all, it seems a general feature of "conditional obligations" (like promises) that violating them is bad, whereas satisfying them is merely neutral rather than good. [Cf. https://www.philosophyetc.net/2021/10/puzzling-conditional-obligations.html ]"
I'm not sure either way if I would say it presupposes ethical asymmetry, but that falls out basically immediately, so I guess it's at least "close" to presupposing it. Like with actualism in my other reply, if you tried to reverse Frick's conditional reasons, what you get wouldn't capture any kind of view of existence being prior to welfare, so it's hard to interpret it in person-affecting or non-absolute terms: "I have reason to do p and do q". p and q can be switched in that statement without affecting its truth value, but you can't do that for Frick's original "I have reason to (if I do p, do q)".
So, among person-affecting views and other views that reject absolute value, the asymmetry seems significantly more plausible than the reverse asymmetry, because reverse asymmetric views are harder to interpret as person-affecting or as rejecting absolute value than standard asymmetric views. Of course, this doesn't mean much if you're pretty sure of absolute value, as you seem to be.
I think the objection of regret-avoidance vs gladness-enticement may be missing how actualism is typically formulated. Here's "weak actualism" (not to be confused with only making weak asymmetry claims; the difference between weak and strong is who counts at all; strong actualism is much less plausible to me):
“They could say that what matters is whether the outcome of the action would have been better for those people who would have existed had it been performed. Thus:
Weak Actualism.—The moral status of any aj, actual or not, is determined by whether its outcome is better or worse for people in Saj than the outcomes of the other available actions", where aj is an action, and Saj is "the set of people who would exist (in the past, present, and future) if action aj were to be taken." (Hare, 2007)
"Self-Conditional Maximization. The permissible options are all and only the options that maximize self-conditional value." (Spencer, 2021)
So, under weak actualism, betterness/worseness is basically outcome-relative, because it's relative to who is actual. We're interested in whether the people in some outcome A are worse off than those same people (or nonexistence) in another outcome B, i.e. whether A is worse than B from the point of view of those in A. The unconditionally permissible options are exactly those that aren't worse than any other in this way, i.e. those that "maximize self-conditional value".
If B is just A with an additional miserable person and no other moral differences, and if B is actual, then B is worse than A for the people in B, because it's worse for the extra person, so it's not permitted under weak actualism. Still, A and B are equivalent for the people in A (or from the point of view of A).
If we try to reverse the actualist principles and get something like gladness-enticement and pronatalism, it's not totally clear how you should technically do this, and I think the result will seem spooky and lose its actualist/comparativist appeal.
On spookiness and actualist/comparativist appeal, suppose the outcome A is actual. If B is just A with an additional happy person and no other moral differences, then for A to be worse than B "from the point of view of A", which is actual, you need to refer to the interests of the non-actual extra person. That seems spooky and not at all in the spirit of actualism. If B is actual, then it would be better than A for the actual people (the people of B). However, that's already compatible with standard actualism, and doesn't rule out A unconditionally, because B isn't better for the people in A, and if you end up in A, there's no actual person for whom B is preferable.
On the technical difficulty of coming up with "actualist" principles to give gladness-enticement and pronatalism, I think you have to do one of the following:
1. An additional happy person in the actual outcome has to make that outcome unconditionally obligatory (rather than unconditional (im)permissibility as in standard actualism), which will mean multiple options are sometimes unconditionally obligatory, contrary to my understanding of unconditional obligation. For example, consider A and B, which differ just in the identity of one person who is very happy. We'd claim both A and B are unconditionally obligatory, but that can't be. That being said, I think there's a similar problem for standard actualism and miserable lives: if A and B differ only in the identity of a miserable person, then neither maximizes self-conditional value, and neither is permissible. One way to fix both views would be with something like saturating counterpart relations, or additional principles to break ties when there are multiple obligatory options or no permissible options. If I recall correctly, this is a common issue brought up and discussed around actualism, and Spencer (2021) in particular discusses Misery vs Moremisery and Misery vs Equalmisery. Also, multiple unconditionally obligatory options seems worse than no unconditionally permissible options.
2. From the actual world without an additional happy person, you need to decide which non-actual people to count and how to weigh them and their interests in non-actual worlds from the point of view of the actual world. There are usually multiple non-actual worlds to consider, so either you're left starting from pairwise comparisons and no counterpart to "maximize self-conditional value", or you sometimes need to weigh interests across 3 worlds simultaneously.
So, (something like) regret-avoidance falls out naturally from actualist intuitions, while (something like) gladness-enticement doesn't and faces more technical problems.
Hare, C. (2007). Voices from another world: Must we respect the interests of people who do not, and will never, exist?. Ethics, 117(3), 498-523.
Why the switch to "obligation"-talk? I take the pronatalist claim to just be that you have some *reason* to create each happy person (presumably in proportion to their welfare value). There's nothing paradoxical about that.
Working through the putative asymmetry in outcome-relative weak actualism, let's take world B as a base and compare both world A, which adds Joy, and world C, which adds Misery.
From B's perspective, the worlds are all value-equivalent. A says A is better. C says C is worse. Suppose B is actual. Asymmetrists want to say (i) we had good reason not to realize C, but (ii) no extra reason to realize A. How do they secure this? Appeal to self-conditional value gives us reasons against C, in that if we'd chosen C, it would've then been worse. But it's equally true that, if we'd chosen A, it would've then been better, suggesting that we should have self-conditional reasons for A. (B doesn't regard itself as any better or worse than either A or C, and so doesn't generate any competing self-conditional reasons when making these comparisons.) Where's the asymmetry between A and C?
I think an asymmetry may have been smuggled in to the account of permissibility as "exactly those [options] that aren't [self-conditionally] worse than any other". If we instead start from the more foundational normative question of what *reasons* there are in the situation (and insofar as we go for deontic concepts like 'permissibility' at all, take it to be determined in suitable fashion by the balance of those normative reasons), there doesn't appear to be any grounds for an asymmetry here after all.
(Though again, I do think the deeper issue here is that we should reject "the spirit of actualism". Even if B is actual, we should regard the extra suffering life in alternative C as a bad-making feature, resulting in world C being properly evaluated as *worse*. There's nothing "spooky" about this; it's entirely commonsensical that we should evaluate miserable lives as intrinsically bad.)
I think an asymmetry may have been smuggled in to the account of permissibility as "exactly those [options] that aren't [self-conditionally] worse than any other". If we instead start from the more foundational normative question of what *reasons* there are in the situation (and insofar as we go for deontic concepts like 'permissibility' at all, take it to be determined in suitable fashion by the balance of those normative reasons), there doesn't appear to be any grounds for an asymmetry here after all."
How else would you weigh reasons so that you get symmetry (reasons to create good lives, and equally strong reasons against creating bad lives) in a way that's person-affecting and without requiring absolute value?
I think the asymmetry and maximizing self-conditional value can be justified on the basis of a stability/dominance/money pump argument. If C would happen, on Misery's account, A and B would have been better, and neither A nor B directs you back to C following self-conditional value. If you could, you'd pay to switch to A or B. Or, you would pay to shorten Misery's life to nothing and have the result look like B, but with an extra cost. However, if you would pay to go from C to A or B (or worlds close enough to them), choosing C first means getting money pumped in principle, and you should have just chosen A or B in the first place without the extra cost.
On the other hand, from A or B, self-conditional value doesn't direct you away, and there's no issue of dominance or money pumps on the basis of self-conditional value if you were to choose A or B. The value of A over B in A is other-conditional value from the perspective of B. Joy doesn't exist in B, so Joy has no account in B to consider or compel you from B towards A (or C). Self-conditional reasons in A only compel you to stick to A if you're already there.
Maybe we have other reasons to switch from B to A, but those don't come from B, so they don't seem like they could be actualist, person-affecting or merely comparative reasons.
There may also be stability/dominance/money pump arguments against actualism generally, so maybe that undermines this kind of argument, but I don't think it would completely defeat it.
In general, options that don't maximize self-conditional value seem unstable, in that they'll direct you away from them if you follow self-conditional value and they'll make you vulnerable to dominance or money pumps. On the other hand, any option that does maximize self-conditional value is stable, at least with respect to self-conditional value.
Actualism and Frick's views imply the procreation asymmetry, but I wouldn't consider them absolute views or standard Existence Anticomparativism. Rather, I'd still consider them merely comparative views (although we could argue about definitions). They allow certain kinds of comparisons, but for principled reasons and without directly assuming asymmetry between apparent goods and apparent bads or asserting the existence of absolute harms while denying absolute benefits:
1. Actualism allows actual beings to compare their lives to nonexistence (or us to do so on their behalf), but not non-actual beings to compare their lives with anything (or us to do so on their behalf). That seems intuitive to me, because the actual and only the actual can have objects that exist in the universe we can point to in order to ground their interests (e.g. brains with interest-generating and identity-establishing structures*).
2. Frick's conditional reasons are of the form "I have reason to (if I do p, do q)" (or Bykvist and Campbell, 2021's contrastive version "I have reason to (if I do p, do q) rather than not (if I do p, do q)").
If all person-regarding reasons are actualist or conditional (as I think is assumed in actualism and Frick's views, respectively), then we get the procreation asymmetry. You also concede (or at least don't strongly object to) actualist reasons and so at least weak asymmetry in Rethinking the Asymmetry, as "partiality towards the actual". The existence of absolute reasons seems to require more than the existence of actualist reasons or Frick's conditional reasons, at least with respect to apparently good and bad lives, because actualist and conditional reasons (at least with respect to individual welfare) each have absolute counterparts that make stronger claims, and there are more absolute reasons. So, it seems that there's an extra burden of proof to establish absolute reasons.
I think we can also use Frick's conditional reasons (and only conditional reasons), along with transitivity and the independence of irrelevant alternatives, to establish absolute harms while denying absolute goods, basically antifrustrationism (e.g. Fehige, 1998).
*This is a bit subtle, because we want to consider the whole of the future, including future actual beings, not just presently actual beings. This depends on specific views of the nature of time, although I wouldn't be surprised if the differences turned out to be merely normative, anyway. It also seems like you're sympathetic to something similar, with "timeless difference" and 4-dimensionalism, as you discuss in https://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/08/must-harms-be-temporally-located.html. Another possibility is Bader's account.
Frick, J. (2020). Conditional reasons and the procreation asymmetry. Philosophical Perspectives, 34(1), 53-87. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/phpe.12139
Bykvist, K., & Campbell, T. (2021). Frick’s Defence of the Procreation Asymmetry2. CLIMATE ETHICS, 263. https://www.iffs.se/media/23375/climate_ethics_vol4_webb.pdf#page=264
Fehige, C. (1998). A Pareto principle for possible people. Preferences, 508-43. https://www.fehige.info/pdf/A_Pareto_Principle_for_Possible_People.pdf
Bader, R. M. (2021). The Asymmetry. Ethics and Existence: The Legacy of Derek Parfit, 15. https://homeweb.unifr.ch/BaderR/Pub/Asymmetry%20%28R.%20Bader%29.pdf
Thanks for the references!
(1) I take it that 'actualist reasons' = what I call 'person-directed' reasons in the OP. The quick argument for absolute (or undirected) reasons is that we need them to explain our reasons *not* to create Misery (a merely possibly person, who *would* be miserable were she to exist).
One could instead appeal to some kind of structural reasons of ratifiability: if we created Misery, we'd then have (actualist) reasons to regret it. But this just pushes the asymmetry back a step, for what is the justification for adding structural reasons of regret-avoidance but not structural reasons of gladness-enticement (we would have actualist reasons to be glad of Joy's existence, were we to create her)?
(2) I worry that Frick's conditional approach presupposes rather than justifies the asymmetry. After all, it seems a general feature of "conditional obligations" (like promises) that violating them is bad, whereas satisfying them is merely neutral rather than good. [Cf. https://www.philosophyetc.net/2021/10/puzzling-conditional-obligations.html ] But that's an abhorrent view to take of people: that our existence is possibly bad, and neutral at best!
This brings me to my central argument for absolute value/reasons, which is just that its denial seems to express an abhorrent/disrespectful attitude towards human life, as I explain in the OP. We should view each other more positively than that.
(You suggest that "there's an extra burden of proof to establish absolute reasons." I reject that picture of moral methodology. Occam's razor is no reason at all to ascribe less value to people, or to smaller numbers of people. Moral parsimony is not a virtue. We should simply endorse the moral views that are best-warranted on their first-order merits.)
"(2) I worry that Frick's conditional approach presupposes rather than justifies the asymmetry. After all, it seems a general feature of "conditional obligations" (like promises) that violating them is bad, whereas satisfying them is merely neutral rather than good. [Cf. https://www.philosophyetc.net/2021/10/puzzling-conditional-obligations.html ]"
I'm not sure either way if I would say it presupposes ethical asymmetry, but that falls out basically immediately, so I guess it's at least "close" to presupposing it. Like with actualism in my other reply, if you tried to reverse Frick's conditional reasons, what you get wouldn't capture any kind of view of existence being prior to welfare, so it's hard to interpret it in person-affecting or non-absolute terms: "I have reason to do p and do q". p and q can be switched in that statement without affecting its truth value, but you can't do that for Frick's original "I have reason to (if I do p, do q)".
So, among person-affecting views and other views that reject absolute value, the asymmetry seems significantly more plausible than the reverse asymmetry, because reverse asymmetric views are harder to interpret as person-affecting or as rejecting absolute value than standard asymmetric views. Of course, this doesn't mean much if you're pretty sure of absolute value, as you seem to be.
I think the objection of regret-avoidance vs gladness-enticement may be missing how actualism is typically formulated. Here's "weak actualism" (not to be confused with only making weak asymmetry claims; the difference between weak and strong is who counts at all; strong actualism is much less plausible to me):
“They could say that what matters is whether the outcome of the action would have been better for those people who would have existed had it been performed. Thus:
Weak Actualism.—The moral status of any aj, actual or not, is determined by whether its outcome is better or worse for people in Saj than the outcomes of the other available actions", where aj is an action, and Saj is "the set of people who would exist (in the past, present, and future) if action aj were to be taken." (Hare, 2007)
"Self-Conditional Maximization. The permissible options are all and only the options that maximize self-conditional value." (Spencer, 2021)
So, under weak actualism, betterness/worseness is basically outcome-relative, because it's relative to who is actual. We're interested in whether the people in some outcome A are worse off than those same people (or nonexistence) in another outcome B, i.e. whether A is worse than B from the point of view of those in A. The unconditionally permissible options are exactly those that aren't worse than any other in this way, i.e. those that "maximize self-conditional value".
If B is just A with an additional miserable person and no other moral differences, and if B is actual, then B is worse than A for the people in B, because it's worse for the extra person, so it's not permitted under weak actualism. Still, A and B are equivalent for the people in A (or from the point of view of A).
If we try to reverse the actualist principles and get something like gladness-enticement and pronatalism, it's not totally clear how you should technically do this, and I think the result will seem spooky and lose its actualist/comparativist appeal.
On spookiness and actualist/comparativist appeal, suppose the outcome A is actual. If B is just A with an additional happy person and no other moral differences, then for A to be worse than B "from the point of view of A", which is actual, you need to refer to the interests of the non-actual extra person. That seems spooky and not at all in the spirit of actualism. If B is actual, then it would be better than A for the actual people (the people of B). However, that's already compatible with standard actualism, and doesn't rule out A unconditionally, because B isn't better for the people in A, and if you end up in A, there's no actual person for whom B is preferable.
On the technical difficulty of coming up with "actualist" principles to give gladness-enticement and pronatalism, I think you have to do one of the following:
1. An additional happy person in the actual outcome has to make that outcome unconditionally obligatory (rather than unconditional (im)permissibility as in standard actualism), which will mean multiple options are sometimes unconditionally obligatory, contrary to my understanding of unconditional obligation. For example, consider A and B, which differ just in the identity of one person who is very happy. We'd claim both A and B are unconditionally obligatory, but that can't be. That being said, I think there's a similar problem for standard actualism and miserable lives: if A and B differ only in the identity of a miserable person, then neither maximizes self-conditional value, and neither is permissible. One way to fix both views would be with something like saturating counterpart relations, or additional principles to break ties when there are multiple obligatory options or no permissible options. If I recall correctly, this is a common issue brought up and discussed around actualism, and Spencer (2021) in particular discusses Misery vs Moremisery and Misery vs Equalmisery. Also, multiple unconditionally obligatory options seems worse than no unconditionally permissible options.
2. From the actual world without an additional happy person, you need to decide which non-actual people to count and how to weigh them and their interests in non-actual worlds from the point of view of the actual world. There are usually multiple non-actual worlds to consider, so either you're left starting from pairwise comparisons and no counterpart to "maximize self-conditional value", or you sometimes need to weigh interests across 3 worlds simultaneously.
So, (something like) regret-avoidance falls out naturally from actualist intuitions, while (something like) gladness-enticement doesn't and faces more technical problems.
Hare, C. (2007). Voices from another world: Must we respect the interests of people who do not, and will never, exist?. Ethics, 117(3), 498-523.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/512172?journalCode=et
Spencer, J. (2021). The procreative asymmetry and the impossibility of elusive permission. Philosophical Studies, 178(11), 3819-3842.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-021-01627-y
Why the switch to "obligation"-talk? I take the pronatalist claim to just be that you have some *reason* to create each happy person (presumably in proportion to their welfare value). There's nothing paradoxical about that.
Working through the putative asymmetry in outcome-relative weak actualism, let's take world B as a base and compare both world A, which adds Joy, and world C, which adds Misery.
From B's perspective, the worlds are all value-equivalent. A says A is better. C says C is worse. Suppose B is actual. Asymmetrists want to say (i) we had good reason not to realize C, but (ii) no extra reason to realize A. How do they secure this? Appeal to self-conditional value gives us reasons against C, in that if we'd chosen C, it would've then been worse. But it's equally true that, if we'd chosen A, it would've then been better, suggesting that we should have self-conditional reasons for A. (B doesn't regard itself as any better or worse than either A or C, and so doesn't generate any competing self-conditional reasons when making these comparisons.) Where's the asymmetry between A and C?
I think an asymmetry may have been smuggled in to the account of permissibility as "exactly those [options] that aren't [self-conditionally] worse than any other". If we instead start from the more foundational normative question of what *reasons* there are in the situation (and insofar as we go for deontic concepts like 'permissibility' at all, take it to be determined in suitable fashion by the balance of those normative reasons), there doesn't appear to be any grounds for an asymmetry here after all.
(Though again, I do think the deeper issue here is that we should reject "the spirit of actualism". Even if B is actual, we should regard the extra suffering life in alternative C as a bad-making feature, resulting in world C being properly evaluated as *worse*. There's nothing "spooky" about this; it's entirely commonsensical that we should evaluate miserable lives as intrinsically bad.)
"Where's the asymmetry between A and C?
I think an asymmetry may have been smuggled in to the account of permissibility as "exactly those [options] that aren't [self-conditionally] worse than any other". If we instead start from the more foundational normative question of what *reasons* there are in the situation (and insofar as we go for deontic concepts like 'permissibility' at all, take it to be determined in suitable fashion by the balance of those normative reasons), there doesn't appear to be any grounds for an asymmetry here after all."
How else would you weigh reasons so that you get symmetry (reasons to create good lives, and equally strong reasons against creating bad lives) in a way that's person-affecting and without requiring absolute value?
I think the asymmetry and maximizing self-conditional value can be justified on the basis of a stability/dominance/money pump argument. If C would happen, on Misery's account, A and B would have been better, and neither A nor B directs you back to C following self-conditional value. If you could, you'd pay to switch to A or B. Or, you would pay to shorten Misery's life to nothing and have the result look like B, but with an extra cost. However, if you would pay to go from C to A or B (or worlds close enough to them), choosing C first means getting money pumped in principle, and you should have just chosen A or B in the first place without the extra cost.
On the other hand, from A or B, self-conditional value doesn't direct you away, and there's no issue of dominance or money pumps on the basis of self-conditional value if you were to choose A or B. The value of A over B in A is other-conditional value from the perspective of B. Joy doesn't exist in B, so Joy has no account in B to consider or compel you from B towards A (or C). Self-conditional reasons in A only compel you to stick to A if you're already there.
Maybe we have other reasons to switch from B to A, but those don't come from B, so they don't seem like they could be actualist, person-affecting or merely comparative reasons.
There may also be stability/dominance/money pump arguments against actualism generally, so maybe that undermines this kind of argument, but I don't think it would completely defeat it.
In general, options that don't maximize self-conditional value seem unstable, in that they'll direct you away from them if you follow self-conditional value and they'll make you vulnerable to dominance or money pumps. On the other hand, any option that does maximize self-conditional value is stable, at least with respect to self-conditional value.