Campbell, Tim | 2026
Working paper 2026:10
The Procreation Asymmetry holds that creating a miserable person is morally impermissible,
while not creating a happy person is morally permissible. Harm-avoidance
theories explain this asymmetry by claiming that, in certain contexts, only actions that
result in harm are impermissible. Two challenges for these theories are: (i) The Problem
of Improvable Life Avoidance—requiring agents to avoid creating improvable good
lives—and (ii) requiring dominated options, those that are worse for some and better
for none. Philosophers have developed sophisticated harm-avoidance theories that address
both challenges. However, we prove that any harm-avoidance theory entails either:
(1) a worse form of The Problem of Improvable Life Avoidance, (2) an absurd form
of sadism, (3) the permissibility of allowing unlimited harm, or (4) moral dilemmas. This
result challenges both harm-avoidance theories and the Procreation Asymmetry, since
it is doubtful that any alternative theory could support this asymmetry while avoiding
(1)–(4).
