Ethical Theories and Population Ethics
Summary
Ethical theories provide systematic accounts of right and wrong, drawing on traditions such as consequentialism, which assesses the moral value of actions by their outcomes; deontology, which emphasises duties and rights; and virtue ethics, which focuses on character and flourishing. Population ethics is a specialised field that examines how to evaluate outcomes that involve varying numbers of individuals, often with differing levels of well-being. Central puzzles include the non-identity problem (whether actions can harm future people whose very existence depends on those actions), the repugnant conclusion (the implication that a very large population with lives barely worth living can be preferable to a smaller, healthier one), and asymmetries that arise when comparing benefits and harms across possible populations. Recent debates explore whether total or average measures of well-being better capture moral intuitions, how to accommodate cases of incomparable welfare, and how threshold views—such as sufficientarianism—address questions of how many lives need to meet a basic standard. These discussions have profound implications for global challenges including climate change, public health policy, bioethical regulation of reproductive technologies and long-term planning for humanity’s future. By integrating insights from theoretical ethics, social choice theory and population biology, scholars aim to craft principles that guide policy on resource allocation, intergenerational justice and the moral status of future generations.
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Ethical Theories and Population Ethics publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in ethical theories and population ethics across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Consequentialism: A normative view that judges actions solely by their outcomes or consequences.
Deontology: An ethical theory holding that certain actions are right or wrong in themselves, irrespective of consequences.
Population ethics: The branch of moral philosophy that studies how to assess outcomes involving different numbers of individuals with varying well-being.
Repugnant conclusion: A paradox in population ethics suggesting that a very large population with barely positive lives may be preferable to a smaller population of high quality.
Parity: A notion in welfare comparison that two outcomes may be neither better, worse nor exactly equal, but on a distinct footing that resists standard ordering.
Sufficientarianism: The view that justice requires ensuring individuals have at least a specified threshold of well-being, beyond which additional gains matter less.
References
- Parity, Imprecise Comparability and the Repugnant Conclusion. Theoria (2016).
- Sufficiency and the Threshold Question. The Journal of Ethics (2020).
- What Should We Agree on about the Repugnant Conclusion?. Utilitas (2021).
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