Abstract
Advances in technology have made it possible for us to take actions that
affect the numbers and identities of humans and other animals that will
live in the future. Effective and inexpensive birth control, child
allowances, genetic screening, safe abortion, in vitro fertilization, the
education of young women, sterilization programs, environmental
degradation and war all have these effects.
Although it is true that a good deal of effort has been devoted to the
practical side of population policy, moral theory has not dealt adequately
with the new possibilities. The dilemma faced by moral theory is that
traditional theories cannot answer moral questions involving the
creation of people. Two related problems arise. The first concerns
numbers: how many people should there be? The second asks what sort
of people should live and what their levels of well-being should be. Conventional social-contract theories, including the work of Rawls
(1971), are restricted to situations with a fixed number of individuals.
Sumner (1978) attempts to extend a Rawlsian veil-of-ignorance approach
to possible people but is aware of the difficulties involved. The main
problem is that possible people must be thought to benefit when they
move from non-existence to existence, a view that we reject (see Section
1, Heyd, 1992, Chapter 1; McMahan, 1996a; Parfit, 1984, Appendix G).
Rights-based and duty-based theories suffer from a similar problem;
there must be a person who has the right or a person to whom the duty
is owed (see McMahan, 1981).