I’m particularly interested in the third objection you present—that the value of “lives barely worth living” may be underrated.
I wonder to what extent the intuition that world Z is bad compared to A is influenced by framing effects. For instance, if I think of “lives net positive but not by much”, or something similar, this seems much more valueable than “lives barely worth living”, allthough it means the same in population ethics (as I understand it).
I’m also sympathetic to the claim that ones response to world Z may be affected by ones perception of the goodness of the ordinary (human) life. Perhaps, buddhists, who are convinced that ordinary life is pervaded with suffering, view any live that is net-positive as remarkably good.
Do you know if there exists any psychological literature on any of these two hypotheses? I’d be interested to research both.
However, even if we’d show that the repugnance of the repugnant conclusion is influenced in these ways or even rendered unreliable, I doubt the same would be true for the “very repugnant conclusion”:
for any world A with billions of happy people living wonderful lives, there is a world Z+ containing both a vast amount of mildly-satisfied lizards and billions of suffering people, such that Z+ is better than A.
(Credit to joe carlsmith who mentioned this on some podcast)
It seems plausible that the framing effect could be at play here, and that different people would draw the line between a life that’s worth living and one that’s not at different points. I don’t know about any literature about this, but maybe I’d give a look at the Happier Lives Institute’s work.
And I’ll need to think more seriously about the very repugnant conclusion. That’s a tough one!
Thanks for the post!
I’m particularly interested in the third objection you present—that the value of “lives barely worth living” may be underrated.
I wonder to what extent the intuition that world Z is bad compared to A is influenced by framing effects. For instance, if I think of “lives net positive but not by much”, or something similar, this seems much more valueable than “lives barely worth living”, allthough it means the same in population ethics (as I understand it).
I’m also sympathetic to the claim that ones response to world Z may be affected by ones perception of the goodness of the ordinary (human) life. Perhaps, buddhists, who are convinced that ordinary life is pervaded with suffering, view any live that is net-positive as remarkably good.
Do you know if there exists any psychological literature on any of these two hypotheses? I’d be interested to research both.
However, even if we’d show that the repugnance of the repugnant conclusion is influenced in these ways or even rendered unreliable, I doubt the same would be true for the “very repugnant conclusion”:
for any world A with billions of happy people living wonderful lives, there is a world Z+ containing both a vast amount of mildly-satisfied lizards and billions of suffering people, such that Z+ is better than A.
(Credit to joe carlsmith who mentioned this on some podcast)
You raised some interesting points!
It seems plausible that the framing effect could be at play here, and that different people would draw the line between a life that’s worth living and one that’s not at different points. I don’t know about any literature about this, but maybe I’d give a look at the Happier Lives Institute’s work.
And I’ll need to think more seriously about the very repugnant conclusion. That’s a tough one!