I think it’s useful to have a thought experiment to refer to other than Omelas to capture the intuition of “a perfect, arbitrarily large utopia is better than a world with arbitrarily many miserable lives supposedly counterbalanced by sufficiently many good lives.” Because:
The “arbitrarily many” quantifiers show just how extreme this can get, and indeed the sort of axiology that endorses the VRC is committed to judging the VRC as better the more you multiply the scale, which seems backwards to my intuitions.
The first option is a utopia, whereas the Omelas story doesn’t say that there’s some other civilization that is smaller yet still awesome and has no suffering.
Omelas as such is confounded by deontological intuitions, and the alternative postulated in the story is “walking away,” not preventing the existence of such a world in the first place. I’ve frequently found that people get hung up on the counterproductiveness of walking away, which is true, but irrelevant to the axiological point I want to make. The VRC is purely axiological, so more effective at conveying this.
So while I agree that aggregation is an important part of the VRC, I also disagree that the “nickel and diming” is at the heart of this. To my intuitions, the VRC is still horrible and borderline unacceptable if we replace the just-barely-worth-living lives with lives that have sufficiently intense happiness, intense enough to cross any positive lexical threshold you want to stipulate. In fact, muzak and potatoes lives as Parfit originally formulated them (i.e., with no suffering) seem much better than lots of lives with both lexically negative and lexically “positive” experiences. I’ll eagerly accept Parfit’s version of the RC. (If you want to say this is contrary to common sense intuitions, that’s fine, since I don’t put much stock in common sense when it comes to ethics; there seem to be myriad forces pushing our default intuitions in directions that make evolutionary sense but are disturbing to me upon reflection.)
I think it’s useful to have a thought experiment to refer to other than Omelas to capture the intuition of “a perfect, arbitrarily large utopia is better than a world with arbitrarily many miserable lives supposedly counterbalanced by sufficiently many good lives.” Because:
The “arbitrarily many” quantifiers show just how extreme this can get, and indeed the sort of axiology that endorses the VRC is committed to judging the VRC as better the more you multiply the scale, which seems backwards to my intuitions.
The first option is a utopia, whereas the Omelas story doesn’t say that there’s some other civilization that is smaller yet still awesome and has no suffering.
Omelas as such is confounded by deontological intuitions, and the alternative postulated in the story is “walking away,” not preventing the existence of such a world in the first place. I’ve frequently found that people get hung up on the counterproductiveness of walking away, which is true, but irrelevant to the axiological point I want to make. The VRC is purely axiological, so more effective at conveying this.
So while I agree that aggregation is an important part of the VRC, I also disagree that the “nickel and diming” is at the heart of this. To my intuitions, the VRC is still horrible and borderline unacceptable if we replace the just-barely-worth-living lives with lives that have sufficiently intense happiness, intense enough to cross any positive lexical threshold you want to stipulate. In fact, muzak and potatoes lives as Parfit originally formulated them (i.e., with no suffering) seem much better than lots of lives with both lexically negative and lexically “positive” experiences. I’ll eagerly accept Parfit’s version of the RC. (If you want to say this is contrary to common sense intuitions, that’s fine, since I don’t put much stock in common sense when it comes to ethics; there seem to be myriad forces pushing our default intuitions in directions that make evolutionary sense but are disturbing to me upon reflection.)
[edited for some clarifications]