THE WELFARE ECONOMICS OF POPULATION

Intuition suggests there is no value in adding people to thepopulation if it brings no benefits to people already living:creating people is morally neutral in itself. This paper examinesthe difficulties of incorporating this intuition into a coherenttheory of the value of population. It takes three existing theorieswithin welfare economics—average utilitarianism, relativistutilitarianism, and critical-level utilitarianism—andconsiders whether they can satisfactorily accommodate the intuitionthat creating people is neutral.