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.

中文翻译：

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人口伦理的不对称性：实验性社会选择与双重过程道德推理

人口伦理被广泛认为是非常重要和非常困难的。困难的一个关键来源是某些道德直觉和分析结果之间的冲突，这些结果确定了对可能人群进行理性（在完全和传递的意义上）社会选择的要求。一个突出的这种直觉是不对称性，它共同提出一个可能的孩子的生活质量会很差的事实是不创造孩子的规范性理由，但孩子的生活质量会很好的事实不是一个理由创造孩子。本文报告了一组关于经济学家经验社会选择精神中的不对称性的问卷实验。很少有受访者支持不对称；相反，受访者表示对良好生活质量的期望是相关的。每个实验都显示了双重过程道德推理的证据（至少在一些参与者中），其中认知反思与报告预期的良好生活质量在统计上相关联。本文讨论了这些结果对人口敏感的社会福利经济学以及道德数学和人口直觉之间的冲突的可能影响。