Thanks a lot for taking the time to do this Arden, I found it useful. I have a couple of comments
Firstly, on the repugnant conclusion. I have long found the dominant dialectic in population ethics a bit strange. We (1) have this debate about whether merely possible future people are worthy of our ethical consideration and then (2) people start talking about a conclusion that they find repugnant because of aggregation of low quality lives. The repugnance of the repugnant conclusion in no way stems from the fact that the people involved are in the future; it is rather from the way totalism aggregates low quality lives. This repugnance is irrelevant to questions of population ethics. It’s a bit like if we were talking about the totalist view of population ethics, and then people started talking about the experience machine or other criticisms of hedonism: this may be a valid criticism of totalism but it is beside the point—which is whether merely possible future people matter.
Related to this:
(1) There are current generation perfect analogues of the repugnant conclusion. Imagine you could provide a medicine that provides a low quality life to billions of currently existing people or provide a different medicine to a much smaller number of people giving them brilliant lives. The literature on aggregation also discusses the ‘headaches vs death’ case which seems exactly analogous.
(2) For this reason, we shouldn’t expect person-affecting views to avoid the repugnant conclusion. For one thing, some impartialist views like critical level utilitarianism, avoid the repugnant conclusion. For another thing, the A population and the Z population are merely possible future people so most person-affecting theories will say that they are incomparable.
Meacham’s view avoids this with its saturating relation in which possible future people are assigned counterparts. But (1) there are current generation analogues to the RC as discussed above, so this doesn’t actually solve the (debatable) puzzle of the RC.
(2) Meacham’s view would imply that if the people in the much larger population had on average lives only slightly worse than people in the small population (A), then the smaller population would still be better. Thus, Meacham’s view solves the repugnant conclusion but only by discounting aggregation of high quality lives, in some circumstances. This is not the solution to the repugnant conclusion that people wanted.
I think you’re right to point out that we should be clear about exactly what’s repugnant about the repugnant conclusion. However, Ralph Bader’s answer (not sure I have a citation, I think it’s in his book manuscript) is that what’s objectionable about moving from world A (take as the current world) to world Z is that creating all those extra lives isn’t good for the new people, but it is bad for the current population, whose lives are made worse off. I share this intuition. So I think you can cast the repugnant conclusion as being about population ethics.
FWIW, I share your intuition that, in a fixed population, one should just maximise the average.
However, Ralph Bader’s answer (not sure I have a citation, I think it’s in his book manuscript) is that what’s objectionable about moving from world A (take as the current world) to world Z is that creating all those extra lives isn’t good for the new people, but it is bad for the current population, whose lives are made worse off.
I strongly agree with this comment. This is and has always been the rationale of basically everyone I ever talked to who endorses the asymmetry. It seems problematic how badly some totalists fail at the Ideological Turing test here. (And some people have continued to spread the questionable and overconfident account of what others find repugnant about the repugnant conclusion even after they had gotten pushback from individuals who found it repugnant for a different reason. At the very least, at that point intellectual honesty demands pointing out that people may find the repugnant conclusion repugnant for several/different reasons.)
I changed my mind a bit after reading the paper summary by Arden. Interestingly enough, it seems like one of Meacham’s motivations was precisely to avoid saying that we’re indifferent between newlycreating a small paradise vs. the large barely-worth-living population in the repugnant conclusion. Instead, he wants to say that creating the small paradise is better.
So, for Meacham specifically, avoiding the aggregation aspect of the repugnant conclusion seems a core motivation. However, I maintain that for many other people, the worst aspect of the repugnant conclusion is taking away from presently existing people for the dubious benefit of bringing more people into existence.
If we’re talking about creating new people, I think indifference between creating a small paradise vs. the large population in the repugnant conclusion seems like an intuitive stance to me.
Here, Meacham could say: But for some of the people in the larger population, there are counterparts who could have been created as extremely happy. You had the option to make them really happy, but you didn’t. Why did you do that?
In reply, I might say: Well, creating them as extremely happy people in the small paradise was never “positively morally good,” anyway. So why all the fuss? Yes, there’s a kind of “soft harm” that was being committed here. But arguably, creating more people is a “soft benefit.” At least according to some people’s way of counting. These things cancel out because ultimately, the main point of person-affecting principles is that we don’t really care about creating new people, as long as we avoid obviously bad things like creating people who suffer, or creating people who are worse off than they need to be.
The repugnance of the repugnant conclusion in no way stems from the fact that the people involved are in the future.
It doesn’t? That’s not my impression. In particular:
There are current generation perfect analogues of the repugnant conclusion. Imagine you could provide a medicine that provides a low quality life to billions of currently existing people or provide a different medicine to a much smaller number of people giving them brilliant lives.
But people don’t find these cases intuitively identical, right? I imagine that in the current-generation case, most people who oppose the repugnant conclusion instead favor egalitarian solutions, granting small benefits to many (though I haven’t seen any data on this, so I’d be curious if you disagree!). Whereas when debating who to bring into existence, people who oppose the repugnant conclusion aren’t just indifferent about what happens to these merely-possible people; they actively think that the happy, tiny population is better.
So the tricky thing is that people intuitively support granting small benefits to many already existing people above large benefits to a few already existing people, but don’t want to extend this to creating many barely-good lives above creating a few really good ones.
Hi, The A population and the Z population are both composed of merely possible future people, so person-affecting intuitions can’t ground the repugnance. Some impartialist theories (critical level utilitaianism) are explicitly designed to avoid the repugnant conclusion.
The case is analogous to the debate in aggregation about whether one should cure a billion headaches or save someone’s life.
When considering whether to cure a billion headaches or save someone’s life, I’d guess that people’s prioritarian intuition would kick in, and say that it’s better to save the single life. However, when considering whether to cure a billion headaches or to increase one person’s life from ok to awesome, I imagine that most people prefer to cure a billion headaches. I think this latter situation is more analogous to the repugnant conclusion. Since people’s intuition differ in this case and in the repugnant conclusion, I claim that “The repugnance of the repugnant conclusion in no way stems from the fact that the people involved are in the future” is incorrect. The fact that the repugnant conclusion concerns is about merely possible people clearly matters for people’s intuition in some way.
I agree that the repugnace can’t be grounded by saying that merely possible people don’t matter at all. But there are other possible mechanics that treat merely possible people differently from existing people, that can ground the repugnance. For example, the paper that we’re discussing under!
Thanks a lot for taking the time to do this Arden, I found it useful. I have a couple of comments
Firstly, on the repugnant conclusion. I have long found the dominant dialectic in population ethics a bit strange. We (1) have this debate about whether merely possible future people are worthy of our ethical consideration and then (2) people start talking about a conclusion that they find repugnant because of aggregation of low quality lives. The repugnance of the repugnant conclusion in no way stems from the fact that the people involved are in the future; it is rather from the way totalism aggregates low quality lives. This repugnance is irrelevant to questions of population ethics. It’s a bit like if we were talking about the totalist view of population ethics, and then people started talking about the experience machine or other criticisms of hedonism: this may be a valid criticism of totalism but it is beside the point—which is whether merely possible future people matter.
Related to this:
(1) There are current generation perfect analogues of the repugnant conclusion. Imagine you could provide a medicine that provides a low quality life to billions of currently existing people or provide a different medicine to a much smaller number of people giving them brilliant lives. The literature on aggregation also discusses the ‘headaches vs death’ case which seems exactly analogous.
(2) For this reason, we shouldn’t expect person-affecting views to avoid the repugnant conclusion. For one thing, some impartialist views like critical level utilitarianism, avoid the repugnant conclusion. For another thing, the A population and the Z population are merely possible future people so most person-affecting theories will say that they are incomparable.
Meacham’s view avoids this with its saturating relation in which possible future people are assigned counterparts. But (1) there are current generation analogues to the RC as discussed above, so this doesn’t actually solve the (debatable) puzzle of the RC.
(2) Meacham’s view would imply that if the people in the much larger population had on average lives only slightly worse than people in the small population (A), then the smaller population would still be better. Thus, Meacham’s view solves the repugnant conclusion but only by discounting aggregation of high quality lives, in some circumstances. This is not the solution to the repugnant conclusion that people wanted.
I think you’re right to point out that we should be clear about exactly what’s repugnant about the repugnant conclusion. However, Ralph Bader’s answer (not sure I have a citation, I think it’s in his book manuscript) is that what’s objectionable about moving from world A (take as the current world) to world Z is that creating all those extra lives isn’t good for the new people, but it is bad for the current population, whose lives are made worse off. I share this intuition. So I think you can cast the repugnant conclusion as being about population ethics.
FWIW, I share your intuition that, in a fixed population, one should just maximise the average.
I strongly agree with this comment. This is and has always been the rationale of basically everyone I ever talked to who endorses the asymmetry. It seems problematic how badly some totalists fail at the Ideological Turing test here. (And some people have continued to spread the questionable and overconfident account of what others find repugnant about the repugnant conclusion even after they had gotten pushback from individuals who found it repugnant for a different reason. At the very least, at that point intellectual honesty demands pointing out that people may find the repugnant conclusion repugnant for several/different reasons.)
I changed my mind a bit after reading the paper summary by Arden. Interestingly enough, it seems like one of Meacham’s motivations was precisely to avoid saying that we’re indifferent between newly creating a small paradise vs. the large barely-worth-living population in the repugnant conclusion. Instead, he wants to say that creating the small paradise is better.
So, for Meacham specifically, avoiding the aggregation aspect of the repugnant conclusion seems a core motivation. However, I maintain that for many other people, the worst aspect of the repugnant conclusion is taking away from presently existing people for the dubious benefit of bringing more people into existence.
If we’re talking about creating new people, I think indifference between creating a small paradise vs. the large population in the repugnant conclusion seems like an intuitive stance to me.
Here, Meacham could say: But for some of the people in the larger population, there are counterparts who could have been created as extremely happy. You had the option to make them really happy, but you didn’t. Why did you do that?
In reply, I might say: Well, creating them as extremely happy people in the small paradise was never “positively morally good,” anyway. So why all the fuss? Yes, there’s a kind of “soft harm” that was being committed here. But arguably, creating more people is a “soft benefit.” At least according to some people’s way of counting. These things cancel out because ultimately, the main point of person-affecting principles is that we don’t really care about creating new people, as long as we avoid obviously bad things like creating people who suffer, or creating people who are worse off than they need to be.
It doesn’t? That’s not my impression. In particular:
But people don’t find these cases intuitively identical, right? I imagine that in the current-generation case, most people who oppose the repugnant conclusion instead favor egalitarian solutions, granting small benefits to many (though I haven’t seen any data on this, so I’d be curious if you disagree!). Whereas when debating who to bring into existence, people who oppose the repugnant conclusion aren’t just indifferent about what happens to these merely-possible people; they actively think that the happy, tiny population is better.
So the tricky thing is that people intuitively support granting small benefits to many already existing people above large benefits to a few already existing people, but don’t want to extend this to creating many barely-good lives above creating a few really good ones.
Hi, The A population and the Z population are both composed of merely possible future people, so person-affecting intuitions can’t ground the repugnance. Some impartialist theories (critical level utilitaianism) are explicitly designed to avoid the repugnant conclusion.
The case is analogous to the debate in aggregation about whether one should cure a billion headaches or save someone’s life.
When considering whether to cure a billion headaches or save someone’s life, I’d guess that people’s prioritarian intuition would kick in, and say that it’s better to save the single life. However, when considering whether to cure a billion headaches or to increase one person’s life from ok to awesome, I imagine that most people prefer to cure a billion headaches. I think this latter situation is more analogous to the repugnant conclusion. Since people’s intuition differ in this case and in the repugnant conclusion, I claim that “The repugnance of the repugnant conclusion in no way stems from the fact that the people involved are in the future” is incorrect. The fact that the repugnant conclusion concerns is about merely possible people clearly matters for people’s intuition in some way.
I agree that the repugnace can’t be grounded by saying that merely possible people don’t matter at all. But there are other possible mechanics that treat merely possible people differently from existing people, that can ground the repugnance. For example, the paper that we’re discussing under!