“Or perhaps even: that preventing humans from being born is as bad as killing living humans.”
I’m not sure if this is what you were looking for, but here are some thoughts on the “all else equal” version of the above statement. Suppose that Alice is the only person in the universe. Suppose that Alice would, conditional on you not intervening, live a really great life of 100 years. Now on the 50th birthday of Alice, you (a god-being) have the option to painlessly end Alice’s life, and in place of her to create a totally new person, let’s call this person Bob, who comes into existence as a 50-year old with a full set of equally happy (but totally different) memories, and who (you know) has an equally great life ahead of them as Alice would have if you choose not to intervene. (All this assumes that interpersonal comparisons of what a “great” life is make sense. I personally highly doubt one can do anything interesting in ethics without such a notion; this is just to let people know about a possible point of rejecting this argument.)
Do you think it is bad to intervene in this way? (My position is that intervening is morally neutral.) If you think it is bad to intervene, then consider intervening twice in short succession, once painlessly replacing Alice with Bob, and then painlessly replacing Bob with Alice again. Would this be even worse? Since this double-swapping process gives an essentially identical (block) universe as just doing nothing, I have a hard time seeing how anything significantly bad could have happened.
Or consider a situation in which this universe had laws of nature such that Alice was to “naturally” turn into Bob on her 50th birthday without any intervention by you. Would you then be justified in immediately swapping Alice and Bob again to prevent Alice from being “killed”?
(Of course, the usual conditions of killing someone vs creating a new person are very much non-equivalent in practice in the various ways in which the above situation was constructed to be equivalent. Approximately no one thinks that never having a baby is as bad as having a baby and then killing them.)
“Or perhaps even: that preventing humans from being born is as bad as killing living humans.”
I’m not sure if this is what you were looking for, but here are some thoughts on the “all else equal” version of the above statement. Suppose that Alice is the only person in the universe. Suppose that Alice would, conditional on you not intervening, live a really great life of 100 years. Now on the 50th birthday of Alice, you (a god-being) have the option to painlessly end Alice’s life, and in place of her to create a totally new person, let’s call this person Bob, who comes into existence as a 50-year old with a full set of equally happy (but totally different) memories, and who (you know) has an equally great life ahead of them as Alice would have if you choose not to intervene. (All this assumes that interpersonal comparisons of what a “great” life is make sense. I personally highly doubt one can do anything interesting in ethics without such a notion; this is just to let people know about a possible point of rejecting this argument.)
Do you think it is bad to intervene in this way? (My position is that intervening is morally neutral.) If you think it is bad to intervene, then consider intervening twice in short succession, once painlessly replacing Alice with Bob, and then painlessly replacing Bob with Alice again. Would this be even worse? Since this double-swapping process gives an essentially identical (block) universe as just doing nothing, I have a hard time seeing how anything significantly bad could have happened.
Or consider a situation in which this universe had laws of nature such that Alice was to “naturally” turn into Bob on her 50th birthday without any intervention by you. Would you then be justified in immediately swapping Alice and Bob again to prevent Alice from being “killed”?
(Of course, the usual conditions of killing someone vs creating a new person are very much non-equivalent in practice in the various ways in which the above situation was constructed to be equivalent. Approximately no one thinks that never having a baby is as bad as having a baby and then killing them.)