At the risk of belaboring the obvious to anyone who has considered this point before: The RC glosses over the exact content of happiness and suffering that are summed up to the quantities of “welfare” defining world A and world Z. In world A, each life with welfare 1,000,000 could, on one extreme, consist purely of (a) good experiences that sum in intensity to a level 1,000,000, or on the other, (b) good experiences summing to 1,000,000,000 minus bad experiences summing (in absolute value) to 999,000,000. Similarly, each of the lives of welfare 1 in world Z could be (a) purely level 1 good experiences, or (b) level 1,000,001 good experiences minus level 1,000,000 bad experiences.
To my intuitions, it’s pretty easy to accept the RC if our conception of worlds A and Z is the pair (a, a) from the (of course non-exhaustive) possibilities above, even more so for (b, a). However, the RC is extremely unpalatable if we consider the pair (a, b). This conclusion, which is entailed by any plausible non-negative[1] total utilitarian view, is that a world of tremendous happiness with absolutely no suffering is worse than a world of many beings each experiencing just slightly more happiness than those in the first, but along with tremendous agony.
To drive home how counterintuitive that is, we can apply the same reasoning often applied against NU views: Suppose the level 1,000,001 happiness in each being in world Z is compressed into one millisecond of some super-bliss, contained within a life of otherwise unremitting misery. There doesn’t appear to be any temporal ordering of the experiences of each life in world Z such that this conclusion isn’t morally absurd to me. (Going out with a bang sounds nice, but not nice enough to make the preceding pure misery worth it; remember this is a millisecond!) This is even accounting for the possible scope neglect involved in considering the massive number of lives in world Z. Indeed, multiplying these lives seems to make the picture more horrifying, not less.
Again, at the risk of sounding obvious: The repugnance of the RC here is that on total non-NU axiologies, we’d be forced to consider the kind of life I just sketched a “net-positive” life morally speaking.[2] Worse, we’re forced to consider an astronomical number of such lives better than a (comparatively small) pure utopia.
[1] “Negative” here includes lexical and lexical threshold views.
[2] I’m setting aside possible defenses based on the axiological importance of duration. This is because (1) I’m quite uncertain about that point, though I share the intuition, and (2) it seems any such defense rescues NU just as well. I.e. one can, under this principle, maintain that 1 hour of torture-level suffering is impossible to morally outweigh, but 1 millisecond isn’t.
This conclusion, which is entailed by any plausible non-negative[1] total utilitarian view, is that a world of tremendous happiness with absolutely no suffering is worse than a world of many beings each experiencing just slightly more happiness than those in the first, but along with tremendous agony.
It seems to me that you’re kind of rigging this thought experiment when you define an amount of happiness that’s greater than an amount of suffering, but you describe the happiness as “slight” and the suffering as “tremendous”, even though the former is larger than the latter.
I don’t call the happiness itself “slight,” I call it “slightly more” than the suffering (edit: and also just slightly more than the happiness per person in world A). I acknowledge the happiness is tremendous. But it comes along with just barely less tremendous suffering. If that’s not morally compelling to you, fine, but really the point is that there appears (to me at least) to be quite a strong moral distinction between 1,000,001 happiness minus 1,000,000 suffering, and 1 happiness.
The Repugnant Conclusion is worse than I thought
At the risk of belaboring the obvious to anyone who has considered this point before: The RC glosses over the exact content of happiness and suffering that are summed up to the quantities of “welfare” defining world A and world Z. In world A, each life with welfare 1,000,000 could, on one extreme, consist purely of (a) good experiences that sum in intensity to a level 1,000,000, or on the other, (b) good experiences summing to 1,000,000,000 minus bad experiences summing (in absolute value) to 999,000,000. Similarly, each of the lives of welfare 1 in world Z could be (a) purely level 1 good experiences, or (b) level 1,000,001 good experiences minus level 1,000,000 bad experiences.
To my intuitions, it’s pretty easy to accept the RC if our conception of worlds A and Z is the pair (a, a) from the (of course non-exhaustive) possibilities above, even more so for (b, a). However, the RC is extremely unpalatable if we consider the pair (a, b). This conclusion, which is entailed by any plausible non-negative[1] total utilitarian view, is that a world of tremendous happiness with absolutely no suffering is worse than a world of many beings each experiencing just slightly more happiness than those in the first, but along with tremendous agony.
To drive home how counterintuitive that is, we can apply the same reasoning often applied against NU views: Suppose the level 1,000,001 happiness in each being in world Z is compressed into one millisecond of some super-bliss, contained within a life of otherwise unremitting misery. There doesn’t appear to be any temporal ordering of the experiences of each life in world Z such that this conclusion isn’t morally absurd to me. (Going out with a bang sounds nice, but not nice enough to make the preceding pure misery worth it; remember this is a millisecond!) This is even accounting for the possible scope neglect involved in considering the massive number of lives in world Z. Indeed, multiplying these lives seems to make the picture more horrifying, not less.
Again, at the risk of sounding obvious: The repugnance of the RC here is that on total non-NU axiologies, we’d be forced to consider the kind of life I just sketched a “net-positive” life morally speaking.[2] Worse, we’re forced to consider an astronomical number of such lives better than a (comparatively small) pure utopia.
[1] “Negative” here includes lexical and lexical threshold views.
[2] I’m setting aside possible defenses based on the axiological importance of duration. This is because (1) I’m quite uncertain about that point, though I share the intuition, and (2) it seems any such defense rescues NU just as well. I.e. one can, under this principle, maintain that 1 hour of torture-level suffering is impossible to morally outweigh, but 1 millisecond isn’t.
It seems to me that you’re kind of rigging this thought experiment when you define an amount of happiness that’s greater than an amount of suffering, but you describe the happiness as “slight” and the suffering as “tremendous”, even though the former is larger than the latter.
I don’t call the happiness itself “slight,” I call it “slightly more” than the suffering (edit: and also just slightly more than the happiness per person in world A). I acknowledge the happiness is tremendous. But it comes along with just barely less tremendous suffering. If that’s not morally compelling to you, fine, but really the point is that there appears (to me at least) to be quite a strong moral distinction between 1,000,001 happiness minus 1,000,000 suffering, and 1 happiness.