It's great to have a short description of the difficulties for person-affecting intuitions!

Any reasonable theory of population ethics must surely accept that C is better than B. C and B contain all of the same people, but one of them is significantly better off in C (with all the others equally well off in both cases). Invoking a person-affecting view implies that B and C are equally as good as each other, but this is clearly wrong.

That a good argument. Still, I find person-affecting views underrated because I suspect that many people have not given much thought to whether it even makes sense to treat population ethics in the same way as other ethical domains.

Why do we think we have to be able rate all possible world states according to how impartially good or bad they are? Population ethics seems underspecified on exactly the dimension where many moral philosophers derive "objective" principles from: others’ interests. It’s the one ethical discipline where others’ interests are not fixed. The principles that underlie preference utilitarianism aren’t sufficiently far-reaching to specify what to do with newly created people. And preference utilitarianism is itself incomplete, because of the further question: What are my preferences? (If everyone's preference was to be a preference utilitarian, we'd all be standing around waiting until someone has a problem or forms a preference that's different from selflessly adhering to preference utilitarianism.)

Preference utilitarianism seems like a good answer to some important question(s) that fall(s) under the "morality" heading. But it can't cover everything. Population ethics is separate from the rest of ethics.

And there's an interesting relation between how we choose to conceptualize population ethics and how we then come to think about "What are my life goals?"

If we think population ethics has a uniquely correct solution that ranks all world states without violations of transitivity or other, similar problems, we have to think that, in some way, there's a One Compelling Axiology telling us the goal criteria for every sentient mind. That axiology would specify how to answer "What are my life goals?"

By contrast, if axiology is underdetermined, then different people can rationally adopt different types of life goals.

I self-identify as a moral anti-realist because I'm convinced there's no One Compelling Axiology. Insofar as there's something fundamental and objective to ethics, it's this notion of "respecting others' interests." People's life goals (their "interests") won't converge.

Some people take personal hedonism as their life goals, some just want to Kill Bill, some want to have a meaningful family life and die from natural causes here on earth, some don't think about the future at all and live the party life, some discount any aspirations of personal happiness in favor of working toward positively affecting transformative AI, some want to live forever but also do things to help others realize their dreams along the way, some want to just become famous, etc.

If you think of humans as the biological algorithm we express, rather than the things we come to believe and identify with at some particular point in our biography (based on what we've lived), then you might be tempted to seek a One Compelling Axiology with the question "What's the human policy?" ("Policy" in analogy to machine learning.) For instance, you could plan to devote the future's large-scale simulation resources to figuring out the structure of what different humans come to value in different simulated environments, with different experienced histories. You could do science about this and identify general patterns. But suppose you've figured out the general patterns and tell the result to the Bride in Kill Bill. You tell her "the objective human policy is X." She might reply "Hold on with your philosophizing, I'm going to have to kill Bill first. Maybe I'll come back to you and consider doing X afterwards." Similarly, if you tell a European woman with husband and children about the arguments to move to San Francisco to work on reducing AI risks, because that's what she ended up caring about on many runs of simulations of her in environments where she had access to all the philosophical arguments, she might say "Maybe I'd be receptive to that in another life, but I love my husband in this world here, and I don't want to uproot my children, so I'm going to stay here and devote less of my caring capacity to longtermism. Maybe I'll consider wanting to donate 10% of my income, though." So, regardless of questions about their "human policy," in terms of what actual people care about at given points in time, life goals may differ tremendously between people, and even between copies of the same person in different simulated environments. That's because life goals also track things that relate to the identities we have adopted and the for-us meaningful social connections we have made.

If you say that population ethics is all-encompassing, you're implicitly saying that all the complexities in the above paragraphs count for nothing (or not much), and that people should just adopt the same types of life goals, no matter their level of novelty-seeking, achievement striving, proscociality, embeddedness in meaningful social connections, views on death, etc. You're implicitly saying that the way the future should ideally go has almost nothing to do with the goals of presently existing people. To me, that stance is more incomprehensible than some problem with transitivity.

Alternatively, you can say that maybe all of this can't be put under a single impartial utility function. If so, it seems that you're correct that you have to accept something similar to the violation of transitivity you describe. But is it really so bad if we look at it with my framing?

It's not "Even though there's a One Compelling Axiology, I'll go ahead and decide to do the grossly inelegant thing with it." Instead, it's "Ethics is about life goals and how to relate to other people with different life goals, as well as asking what types of life goals are good for people. Probably, different life goals are good for different people. Therefore, as long as we don't know which people exist, not everything can be determined. There also seems to be a further issue about how to treat cases where we create new people: that's population ethics, and it's a bit underdetermined, which gives more freedom for us to choose what to do with our future lightcone."

So, I propose to consider the possibility of drawing a more limited role for population ethics than it is typically conceptualized under. We could maybe think of it as: A set of appeals or principles by which beings can hold accountable the decision-makers that created them. This places some constraints on the already existing population, but it leaves room for personal life projects (as opposed to "dictatorship of the future," where all our choices about the future light cone are predetermined by the One Compelling Axiology, and so have no relation to which exact people are actually alive and care about it).

To give a few examples for population-ethical principles:

• All else equal, it seems objectionable on other-regarding grounds to create minds that lament their existence.
• It also seems objectionable, all else equal, to create minds and place them in situations where their interests are only somewhat fulfilled, if one could have provided them with better circumstances.
• Likewise, it seems objectionable, all else equal, to create minds destined to constant misery, yet with a strict preference for existence over non-existence.

(Note that the first principle is about objecting to the fact of being created, while the latter two principles are about objecting to how one was created.)

We can also ask: Is it ever objectionable to fail to create minds – for instance, in cases where they’d have a strong interest in their existence?

(From a preference-utilitarian perspective, it seems left open whether the creation of some types of minds can be intrinsically important. Satisfied preferences are good because satisfying preferences is just what it means to consider the interests of others. Also counting the interests of not-yet-existent beings is a possible extension of that, but a somewhat peculiar one. The choice looks underdetermined, again.)

Ironically, the perspective I have described becomes very similar to how non-philosophers commonly think about the ethics of having children:

• Parents are obligated to provide a very high standard of care for their children (universal principle)
• People are free to decide against becoming parents (personal principle)
• Parents are free to want to have as many children as possible (personal principle), as long as the children are happy in expectation (universal principle)
• People are free to try to influence other people’s stances and parenting choices (personal principle), as long as they remain within the boundaries of what is acceptable in a civil society (universal principle)

Universal principles fall out of considerations about respecting others' interests. Personal principles fall out of considerations about "What are my life goals?"

Personal principles can be inspired by considerations of morality, i.e., they can be about choosing to give stronger weight to universal principles and filling out underdetermined stuff with one's most deeply held moral intuitions. Many people find existence meaningless without dedication to something greater than oneself.

Because there are different types of considerations at play in all of this, there's probably no super-elegant way to pack everything into a single, impartially valuable utility function. There will have to be some messy choices about how to make tradeoffs, but there isn't really a satisfying alternative. Just like people have to choose some arbitrary-seeming percentage of how much caring capacity they dedicate toward self-oriented life goals versus other-regarding ones (insofar as the separation is clean; it often isn't so clean), we have to also somehow choose how much weight to give to different moral domains, including the considerations commonly discussed under the heading of population ethics, and how they relate to my life goals and those of other existing people.

I don't assign much credence to neutrality, because I think adding bad lives is in fact bad. I prefer the procreation asymmetry, which might be stated this way:

Additional lives never make things go better, all else equal, and additional bad lives make things go worse, all else equal.

Also, you can give up the independence of irrelevant alternatives instead of transitivity. This would mean that which of two options is better might depend on what alternatives there are available to you, i.e. the ranking of outcomes depends on available options. I actually find this a fairly intuitive way to avoid the repugnant conclusion.

A few papers taking this approach to the procreation asymmetry and which avoid the repugnant conclusion:

• 'Making People Happy, Not Making Happy People': A Defense of the Asymmetry Intuition in Population Ethics by Johann Frick
• Person-affecting views and saturating counterpart relations by Christopher Meacham
• The Asymmetry, Uncertainty, and the Long Term by Teruji Thomas

I also have a few short arguments for asymmetry here and here in my shortform.

Also, in my view, a symmetric total view applied to preference consequentialism is the worst way to do preference consequentialism (well, other than obviously absurd approaches). I think a negative view/antifrustrationism or some mixture with a "preference-affecting view" is more plausible.

The reason I think this is because rather than satisfying your existing preferences, it can be better to create new preferences in you and satisfy them, against your wishes. This undermines the appeal of autonomy and subjectivity that preference consequentialism had in the first place. If, on the other hand, new preferences don't add positive value, then they can't compensate for the violation of preferences, including the violation of preferences to not have your preferences manipulated in certain ways.

I discuss these views a bit here.

Any reasonable theory of population ethics must surely accept that C is better than B.

I dispute this, at least if we interpret the positive-welfare lives as including only happiness (of varying levels) but no suffering. If a life contains no suffering, such that additional happiness doesn't play any palliative role or satisfy any frustrated preferences or cravings, I'm quite comfortable saying that this additional happiness doesn't add value to the life (hence B = C).

I suspect the strength of the intuition in favor of judging C > B comes from the fact that in reality, extra happiness almost always does play a palliative role and satisfies preferences. But a defender of the procreation asymmetry (not the neutrality principle, which I agree with Michael is unpalatable) doesn't need to dispute this.

The intransitivity problem that you address is very similar to the problem of simultaneity or synchronicity in special relativity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity Consider three space-time points (events) P1, P2 and P3. The point P1 has a future and a past light cone. Points in the future light cone are in the future of P1 (i.e. a later time according to all observers). Suppose P2 and P3 are outside of the future and past light cones of P1. Then it is possible to choose a reference frame (e.g. a non-accelerating rocket) such that P1 and P2 have the same time coordinate and hence are simultaneous space-time events: the person in the rocket sees the two events happening at the same time according to his personal clock. It is also possible to perform a Lorentz transformation towards another reference frame, e.g. a second rocket moving at constant speed relative to the first rocket, such that P1 and P3 are simultaneous (i.e. the person in the second rocket sees P1 and P3 at the same time according to her personal clock). But... it is possible that P3 is in the future light cone of P2, which means that all observers agree that event P3 happens after P2 (at a later time according to all clocks). So, special relativity involves a special kind of intransitivity: P2 is simultaneous to P1, P1 is simultaneous to P3, and P3 happens later than P2. This does not make space-time inconsistent or irrational, neither does it make the notion of time incomprehensible. The same goes for person-affecting views. In the analogy: the time coordinate corresponds to a person's utility level. A later time means a higher utility. You can formulate a person-affecting axiology that is 'Lorentz invariant' just like in special relativity.

My favorite population ethical theory is variable critical level utilitarianism

https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2020/04/26/a-game-theoretic-solution-to-population-ethics/

https://stijnbruers.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/variable-critical-level-utilitarianism-2.pdf

This theory is in many EA-relevant cases (e.g. dealing with X-risks) equal to total utilitarianism, except that it avoids the very repugnant conclusion: situation A involves N extremely happy people, situation B involves the same N people, now extremely miserable (very negative utility), plus a huge number M of extra people with lives barely worth living (small positive utility). According to total utilitarianism, situation B would be better if M is large enough. I'm willing to bite the bullet of the repugnant conclusion, but this very repugnant conclusion is for me one of the most counterintuitive conclusions in population ethics. VCLU can easily avoid this.