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Hedonic_Treader comments on Humans are utility monsters - Less Wrong
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...sometimes I wonder about the people who find it unintuitive to consider that "Killing X, once X is alive and asking not to be killed" and "Preferring that X not be born, if we have that option in advance" could have widely different utility to me. The converse perspective implies that we should either (1) be spawning as many babies as possible, as fast as possible, or (2) anyone who disagrees with 1 should go on a murder spree, or at best consider such murder sprees ethically unimportant. After all, not spawning babies as fast as possible is as bad as murdering that many existent adults, apparently.
If the utility monster is so monstrously sad, why would it be asking not to be killed? Usually, a decent rule of thumb is that if someone doesn't want to die there's a good chance their lives are somewhat worth living.
This conclusion is technically incorrect. For new babies, you don't know in advance whether their lives will be worth living. Even if you go with positive expected value (and no negative externalities), you can still have better alternatives, e.g. do science now that makes many more and much better lives much later; "as fast as possible" is logically unnecessary.
Also, killing sprees have side-effects on society that omissions of reproduction don't have, e.g. already-born people will take costly measures not to be killed (etc...)