Should We Value Population?*

Abstract

WHAT good does it do you to continue living? Or—an equivalentquestion—what harm would it do you to die now? These questions have exercised philosophers since antiquity,1 and they are not mere philosophers’ questions. An answer to them is important in practice. An answer might help you when you are wondering whether to take the risk of hang-gliding, and it would help a government that is wondering whether to increase its investment in health. Here is an answer. The benefit to you of continuing to live—and equivalently the harm to you of dying now—is the difference between the overall goodness your life will have if you continue to live and the overall goodness it will have if you die now. This answer is hard to fault. Given one way of using ‘benefit’ and ‘harm’, this difference is simply what we mean by the benefit of continuing to live and the harm of dying now. The answer leaves a lot open, because it does not specify what the overall goodness of your life will be, either if you continue to live or if you die now. One might take many views about that. For example, one might think a good life has to contain some worthwhile accomplishments, or one might think the goodness of a life is the total of the good things it contains. For my purposes here it does not matter. I only need to assume there is such a thing as the goodness of a life. Various events may affect it, and death is one. Often when a person dies, her life is less good than it would have been had she continued to li…