This confuses me. In the original context in which the Repugnant Conclusion was dreamed up (neo-Malthusian debates over population control), seeking a larger population was a kind of laissez-faire approach opposed to “population policy”, while advocates for smaller populations such as Garett Hardin explicitly embraced ‘coercion’. When Parfit originally formulated the Repugnant Conclusion, I don’t think he imagined ‘forced reproductive camps’!
So how about being more specific. Suppose you are living in 1968, and as a matter of fact you know that the claims made in Ehrlich and Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb are true. (This is a hypothetical, as those claims turned out to be false in the actual world.) And you have control over population policies—say, you are president of the United States. If you exercise coercive power over reproduction, you can ensure that the world will have a relatively small population of relatively happy people. If you don’t, and you simply let things be, then the world will have an enormous population of people whose lives are barely worth living.
This case has exactly the same structure as the Repugnant Conclusion, and not by accident: this is exactly the kind of question that Parfit and other population ethicists were thinking about in the 1960s and 1970s. But in this case, the larger population is not produced by the exercise of power; it is the smaller population that would be produced by coercion, and the larger population would be produced through laissez-faire. Thus, your argument about ‘the use of power’ does not support the claim that there do not exist choices with the logical structure of the Repugnant Conclusion.
In general, I think you have confused the Repugnant Conclusion itself with a weirdly specific variant of it, perhaps inspired by versions of the astronomical waste argument.
Thanks! This is a great set of context and a great way to ask for specifics. :-)
I think the situation is like this: I’m hypothetically in a position to exercise a lot of power over reproductive choices—perhaps by backing tax plans which either reward or punish having children. I think what you’re asking is “suppose you know that your plan to offer a child tax credit will result in a miserable population, should you stay with the plan because there’ll be so many miserable people that it’ll be better on utilitarian grounds”? The answer is no, I should not do that. I shouldn’t exercise power I have to make a world which I believe will contain a lot of miserable people.
I think a better power-inversion question is: “suppose you are given dictatorial control of one million miserable and hungry people. Should you slaughter 999,000 of them so the other 1000 can be well fed and happy.” My answer is, again, unsurprisingly, No. No, I shouldn’t use dictatorial power to genocide this unhappy group. Instead I should use it to implement policies I think will lead over time to a sustainable 1000-member happy population, perhaps by the same kind of anti-natalist policies that would in other happier circumstances be abhorrent.
My suspicion I think I share with you: that consequentialism’s advice is imperfect. My sense is it is imperfect mostly not because of unfamiliar galactic-scale reasons or other failures in reacting to odd situations involving unbelievably powerful political forces. If that’s where it broke down it’d be mostly immaterial to considering alternatives to consequentialism in everyday situations (IMO).
This confuses me. In the original context in which the Repugnant Conclusion was dreamed up (neo-Malthusian debates over population control), seeking a larger population was a kind of laissez-faire approach opposed to “population policy”, while advocates for smaller populations such as Garett Hardin explicitly embraced ‘coercion’. When Parfit originally formulated the Repugnant Conclusion, I don’t think he imagined ‘forced reproductive camps’!
So how about being more specific. Suppose you are living in 1968, and as a matter of fact you know that the claims made in Ehrlich and Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb are true. (This is a hypothetical, as those claims turned out to be false in the actual world.) And you have control over population policies—say, you are president of the United States. If you exercise coercive power over reproduction, you can ensure that the world will have a relatively small population of relatively happy people. If you don’t, and you simply let things be, then the world will have an enormous population of people whose lives are barely worth living.
This case has exactly the same structure as the Repugnant Conclusion, and not by accident: this is exactly the kind of question that Parfit and other population ethicists were thinking about in the 1960s and 1970s. But in this case, the larger population is not produced by the exercise of power; it is the smaller population that would be produced by coercion, and the larger population would be produced through laissez-faire. Thus, your argument about ‘the use of power’ does not support the claim that there do not exist choices with the logical structure of the Repugnant Conclusion.
In general, I think you have confused the Repugnant Conclusion itself with a weirdly specific variant of it, perhaps inspired by versions of the astronomical waste argument.
Thanks! This is a great set of context and a great way to ask for specifics. :-)
I think the situation is like this: I’m hypothetically in a position to exercise a lot of power over reproductive choices—perhaps by backing tax plans which either reward or punish having children. I think what you’re asking is “suppose you know that your plan to offer a child tax credit will result in a miserable population, should you stay with the plan because there’ll be so many miserable people that it’ll be better on utilitarian grounds”? The answer is no, I should not do that. I shouldn’t exercise power I have to make a world which I believe will contain a lot of miserable people.
I think a better power-inversion question is: “suppose you are given dictatorial control of one million miserable and hungry people. Should you slaughter 999,000 of them so the other 1000 can be well fed and happy.” My answer is, again, unsurprisingly, No. No, I shouldn’t use dictatorial power to genocide this unhappy group. Instead I should use it to implement policies I think will lead over time to a sustainable 1000-member happy population, perhaps by the same kind of anti-natalist policies that would in other happier circumstances be abhorrent.
My suspicion I think I share with you: that consequentialism’s advice is imperfect. My sense is it is imperfect mostly not because of unfamiliar galactic-scale reasons or other failures in reacting to odd situations involving unbelievably powerful political forces. If that’s where it broke down it’d be mostly immaterial to considering alternatives to consequentialism in everyday situations (IMO).