Confused about "making people happy" vs. "making happy people"

I'm also in favour of making-people-happy over making-happy-people.

I said this below in a reply, but I just want to flag that: some people assume that if you're in the making-people-happy/person-affecting camp, you must not care about future people. This isn't true for me - I do care about future people and hope they have good lives. Because there almost-certainly will be people in the future, for me, improving the future counts as making-people-happy! But I'm indifferent about how many happy people there are. 

I think this is actually a central question that is relatively unresolved among philosophers, but it is my impression that philosophers in general, and EAs in particular, lean in the "making happy people" direction. I think of there as being roughly three types of reason for this. One is that views of the "making people happy" variety basically always wind up facing structural weirdness when you formalize them. It was my impression until recently that all of these views imply intransitive preferences (i.e something like A>B>C>A), until I had a discussion with Michael St Jules in which he pointed out more recent work that instead denies the independence of irrelevant alternatives. This avoids some problems, but leaves you with something very structurally weird or even absurd to some. I think Larry Temkin has a good quote about it something like "I will have the chocolate ice-cream, unless you have vanilla, in which case I will have strawberry".

The second reason is the non-identity problem, formalized by Derek Parfit. Basically the issue this raises is that almost all of our decisions that impact the longer term future in some way also change who gets born, so a standard person affecting view seems to allow us to do almost anything to future generations. Use up all their resources, bury radioactive waste, you name it.

The third maybe connects more directly to why EAs in particular often reject these views. Most EAs subscribe to a sort of universalist, beneficent ethics, that seems to imply that if something is genuinely good for someone, then that something is good in a more impersonal sense that tugs on ethics for all. For those of us who live lives worth living, are glad we were born, and don't want to die, it seems clear that existence is good for us. If this is the case, it seems like this presents a reason for action to anyone who can impact it if we accept this sort of universal form of ethics. Therefore, it seems like we are left with three choices. We can say that our existence actually is good for us, and so it is also good for others to bring it about, we can say that it is not good for others to bring it about, and therefore it is not actually good for us after all, or we can deny that ethics has this omnibenevolent quality. To many EAs, the first choice is clearly best.

I think here is where a standard person-affecting view might counter that it cares about all reasons that actually exist, and if you aren't born, you don't actually exist, and so a universal ethics on this timeline cannot care about you either. The issue is that without some better narrowing, this argument seems to prove too much. All ethics is about choosing between possible worlds, so just saying that a good only exists in one possible world doesn't seem like it will help us in making decisions between these worlds. Arguably the most complete spelling out of a view like this looks sort of like "we should achieve a world in which no reasons for this world not to exist are present, and nothing beyond this equilibrium matters in the same way". I actually think some variation of this argument is sometimes used by negative utilitarians and people with similar views. A frustrated interest exists in the timeline it is frustrated in, and so any ethics needs to care about it. A positive interest (i.e. having something even better than an already good or neutral state) does not exist in a world in which it isn't brought about, so it doesn't provide reasons to that world in the same way. Equilabrium is already adequetely reached when no one is badly off.

This is coherent, but again it proves much more than most people want to about what ethics should actually look like, so going down that route seems to require some extra work.

My impression is that there is somewhat of a split on this issue. Note also that “person affecting” could involve caring about helping future people as well, to the extent they are likely to exist … just not caring about making more of them.

I have not seen any surveys specifically on this issue. In the 2019 EAS about 70% of ppl said they were utilitarian, but this doesn’t necessarily imply the total population view.

I think the fact that most EA donations go to present global health speaks somewhat against the majority being strictly total populationist. The limited advocacy for pronatalist policies may also be evidence against it.

But I’d really like to see this surveyed directly. Particularly with both abstract and concrete questions about (e.g.) whether EAs would be willing to make current/certain-to-exist ppl less happy in order to create more happy ppl. (And vice versa).

This intuition can be money pumped. (Many commenters have said this already tbc.)

If you want to understand how someone might not be indifferent about creating happy people, I recommend Joe Carlsmith’s post, “Against neutrality about creating happy lives”. Here’s the passage that resonated most with me (referring to a thought experiment about having the choice to create a new person called Michael):

I feel like I have a chance to invite Michael to the greatest party, the only party, the most vast and terrifying and beautiful party, in the history of everything: the only party where there is music, and wet grass, and a woman he’ll fall in… love with — a party he would want to come to, a party he’ll be profoundly grateful to have been to, even if only briefly, even if it was sometimes hard.

I don’t have kids. But if I did, I imagine that showing them this party would be one of the joys. Saying to them: “Here, look, this is the world. These are trees, these are stars, this is what we have learned so far, this is what we don’t know, this is where it all might be going. You’re a part of this now. Welcome.”

Thanks for posting! I agree this is far from obvious at first glance. Here are most of the main intuitions that together make me very skeptical of "care about making people happy, not happy people":

• The reasoning you use would also support conclusions that to me feel very unintuitive. You could just as easily argue, "creating more humans doesn’t really matter morally, even if they would be utterly miserable, because the unborn can’t care about being born."
• Indifference to the well-being of potential people would imply that many people don't matter (in certain decisions). My starting assumption is heavy skepticism toward any view that advocates indifference to the well-being of many people, since historically, such views have horrific track records.
• Arguably, personal identity does not persist over time. For example, I will not exist in a decade or even in a second; instead, I will grow into someone who is similar to me, but not quite the same person. So whenever we "make people happy," we are creating new happy people who are slightly different from whoever would have existed otherwise. If that's the case, then making people happy is a way of making happy people. So it's contradictory [edit: or requires additional, complex assumptions] to value making people happy if we never value making happy people.
• If we care about making people happy but are indifferent to making happy people, this implies intransitive preferences [edit: or non-independence of irrelevant alternatives], which I find very unintuitive.

So the view that making people happy matters but making happy people doesn't is asymmetric (or unintuitive), frequently indifferent, self-contradictory [edit: or additionally complex], and intransitive [edit: or not independent of irrelevant alternatives].

(As a side note, person-affecting views seem to be defined rather consistently as the views that an outcome can only be bad if it is bad for people. It seems to be better to replace this with for sentient beings)

Lots of great comments here already.  I just wanted to chime in to share the relevant section of the 'population ethics' chapter of utilitarianism.net:

https://www.utilitarianism.net/population-ethics#person-affecting-views-and-the-procreative-asymmetry

The deepest concern I have with person-affecting (no value to creation) views is the negative evaluation it entails regarding the existence of the universe in the first place. As we put it in the chapter: 

When thinking about what makes some possible universe good, the most obvious answer is that it contains a predominance of awesome, flourishing lives. How could that not be better than a barren rock? Any view that denies this verdict is arguably too nihilistic and divorced from humane values to be worth taking seriously.

I think what I ultimately care about is experiences had by a person. To me it seems unintuitive that it matters whether the person having that experience existed at the time of my decision or not.

So I want a world with as little negative experiences and as many positive experiences as possible. Having more people around is as legitimate a way of achieving that as making existing people happier.

(I think personal identity over time is a pretty confused concept, i.e. see the teleportation paradox, that's why I think the distinction between "existing" and "not-yet-existing" people is also pretty confused)

• Presumably you're not neutral about creating someone who you know will live a dreadful life? If so it seems there's no fundamental barrier to comparing existence and non-existence, and it would analogously seem you should not be neutral about creating someone you know will live a great life. You can get around this by introducing an asymmetry, but this seems ad hoc.
• I used to hold a person-affecting view but I found the transitivity argument against being neutral about making happy people quite compelling. Similar to the money pump argument I think. Worth noting that you can get around breaking transitivity by giving up the independence of irrelevant alternatives instead, but that may not be much of an improvement.
• If it's a person-affecting intuition that makes you neutral about creating happy lives you can run into some problems, most famously the non-identity problem. The non-identity problem implies for example that there's nothing wrong with climate change and making our planet a hellscape, because this won't make lives worse for anyone in particular as climate change itself will change the identities of who comes into existence. Most people agree the non-identity problem is just that...a problem, because not caring about climate change seems a bit silly.

When a range of different happiness levels of future people are available, it is hard to have a time consistent preferences that doesn't consist of "making happy people", or "stopping miserable people being made".

Suppose you are presented with these 3 options.

1. Alice is born and has happiness level A
2. Alice is born and has happiness level B
3. Alice is not born.

In order to be indifferent between all 3 options and have time consistent preferences, you must be indifferent towards

1.  Alice has happiness level A
2. Alice has happiness level B

Its possible to have some level of happiness L, and be indifferent to people with levels >L existing, but against people having levels lower than L.  This does mean a form of negative utilitarianism that would have killed the first primitive life given the chance. 

Its also allowed to say, my preferences aren't time consistent. I can be money pumped. Every time a baby is born, my preferences shift from not caring about that baby to caring about that baby. 

This means you should want to sign a binding oath saying you won't go out of your way to help anyone who hadn't been born at the time of signing the oath. (At the time of signing, you by hypothesis don't care about them. You want to stop your future self wasting resources on someone you currently don't care about.)

Or maybe you decide you are a human, not an AI. Any clear utility function you write down will be goodheartable. You will just wing it based on intuition and hope. 

just simply, shouldn't we measure impact by averages, rather than in an additive way? i.e. what is the mean wellbeing of people, instead of adding up everyone's wellbeing scores out of 10.

The former encourages making people happy, the latter making happy people.

The thing you're looking to maximise is the happiness of people, rather than the abstract of "happiness". The latter treats humans as just vessels to carry this "happiness" around in the world, rather than something which is worthwhile because of the effect that it has on people. 

If you're maximising making happy people then surely you would also be for having as many children as possible, against abortion etc. (talking about welfare of "the unborn" is also...uncomfortable.)