Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/207363 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2019
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 12537
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Population ethics is widely considered to be exceptionally important and exceptionally difficult. One key source of difficulty is the conflict between certain moral intuitions and analytical results identifying requirements for rational (in the sense of complete and transitive) social choice over possible populations. One prominent such intuition is the Asymmetry, which jointly proposes that the fact that a possible child's quality of life would be bad is a normative reason not to create the child, but the fact that a child's quality of life would be good is not a reason to create the child. This paper reports a set of questionnaire experiments about the Asymmetry in the spirit of economists' empirical social choice. Few survey respondents show support for the Asymmetry; instead respondents report that expectations of a good quality of life are relevant. Each experiment shows evidence (among at least some participants) of dual-process moral reasoning, in which cognitive reflection is statistically associated with reporting expected good quality of life to be normatively relevant. The paper discusses possible implications of these results for the economics of population-sensitive social welfare and for the conflict between moral mathematics and population intuition.
Subjects: 
population ethics
experimental social choice
the Asymmetry
dual-process moral reasoning
questionnaire-experimental method
JEL: 
J10
J13
J18
D63
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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