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M. A. Roberts, The Existence Puzzles, Oxford University Press, 2024, 280pp., $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780197544143
Reviewed by Krister Bykvist, Stockholm University
‘We are in favour of making people happy, but neutral about making happy people’, Narveson famously quipped (Narveson 1976, 73). In her book, M.A. Roberts transforms this snappy slogan into a thorough and innovative theory of population ethics. She defends two ideas that initially seem to be in tension, namely, the basic maximizing intuition, according to which we ought to produce the best consequences, and the basic existential intuition, according to which we should be neutral about creating happy people. These ideas seem to be in tension, since it seems that we can produce good consequences either by making people happy or by creating happy people (Here and elsewhere I follow Roberts in using ‘being happy’ and ‘being unhappy’ as synonymous with ‘having positive wellbeing’…
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