According to the asymmetry, creating a miserable person is morally impermissible but failing to create a happy person is morally permissible, other things being equal. Some attempt to underwrite the asymmetry by appealing to a choice-dependent moral theory according to which the deontic status of an act depends on whether the agent performs it. We show that all choice-dependent moral theories in the literature are vulnerable to what we call ‘The Parent Trap’. These theories imply that the presence of morally impermissible options can generate a moral requirement to create happy people, even at the cost of the procreator’s well-being. We consider two new choice-dependent theories that avoid this result but show that they generate an implausible moral permission to create miserable people. Choice-dependent theories therefore fail to do justice to the intuitions that motivate the asymmetry.

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.