According to procreative asymmetry, there is a reason not to create a miserable life not worth living, whereas there is no reason to create a life worth living for its own sake. Although this idea is plausible, it is difficult to account for within a standard consequentialist framework based on population axiology. This paper proposes a new formal framework that extends consequentialism and argues that this intuition can be given a welfarist explanation in terms of dynamic consistency. More specifically, the framework evaluates actions not only in terms of the outcomes they bring about, but also in terms of the outcomes before those actions are performed. As a result, it becomes possible to distinguish between improving the well-being of existing individuals and creating new happy individuals. Within this framework, the axiom of dynamic consistency yields a result corresponding to the asymmetry. Creating a miserable life not worth living is impermissible because it is inconsistent with the ex post perspective, whereas refraining from creating a life worth living is permissible. Moreover, from the same mechanism of consistency, the intuitive judgments in the non-identity problem can also be explained in a unified way.
