Do you also find the Reverse Repugnant Conclusion to be straightforwardly and unobjectionably true? (This would help tailor an intuition pump that gets at the repugnance)
I think any scenario that involves hypothetical vast populations in a very simple abstract universe isn’t going to change my views here. I can’t actually imagine that scenario (a flaw with many thought experiments), so I’m forced to fall back on small-scale intuitions + intellectual beliefs. The latter say such a thing would be the right thing to do, given a sufficiently large blissful population and all the caveats and restrictions that always apply in these thought experiments.
I think trying to convince the former might be more tractable, but big abstract thought experiments like this don’t do that, because they are so unimaginable and unrealistic. That’s (one framing of) why I’m looking for something less abstract. This is what I was trying to get at in the OP, though I accept I wasn’t super clear about what exactly I was & wasn’t looking for.
I thought the OP was clear. Sorry that most of the answers, including mine, do not actually answer your question.
Given what you say, maybe the reason you don’t find the Repugnant Conclusion counterintuitive is that you have already internalized that you can’t adequately represent the thought experiment in imagination, so your brain doesn’t generate the relevant intuitions in the first place. Whereas I personally agree, on reflection, that my internal representation of the thought experiment is inadequate, but this doesn’t prevent me from feeling the intuitive appeal of the less populous world. This might also explain why you do feel the sting of trolley problems, which generally involve small numbers of people. (However, you also say that you find utility monsters counterintuitive, which would be inconsistent with this explanation. Interestingly, in Reasons and Persons Parfit dismisses the force of Nozick’s thought experiment on the grounds that it’s impossible to properly imagine a utility monster. But he doesn’t take this same approach for dealing with the Repugnant Conclusion.)
Yeah, I do think that “I can’t actually realistically represent this scenario in my imagination, and if I try I’ll just deceive myself, so I won’t” has become a pretty deep intuition for me over the years.
I think it’s more thoroughly internalised for scenarios that are unimaginably large (many people, very long stretches of time) than scenarios that are small but weird. Possibly because the intuition for size has been trained by a lot of real-world experiences – I don’t think a human can really imagine even a million people, so there are many real-world cases where the correct response is to back off from visual imagination and shut up and multiply.
Utility monsters (and the Fat Man trolley problem variant) are small but weird, so it’s more difficult for me to accept that my intuitive imagination of the scenario is likely to be misleading. I’ve seen fictional representations of utility monsters, and in general when I try to imagine a single sentient being it’s difficult not to imagine something like a human. So even though I believe that a real utility monster would in fact be a profoundly alien and hard-to-imagine being, when I think about the scenario my brain conjures up a human tyrant and it seems really bad.
Whereas for the RC my brain sees the words “unimaginably vast” and decides not to try and imagine.
Do you also find the Reverse Repugnant Conclusion to be straightforwardly and unobjectionably true? (This would help tailor an intuition pump that gets at the repugnance)
Yes.
Ditto for Creating Hell to Please the Blissful?
I think any scenario that involves hypothetical vast populations in a very simple abstract universe isn’t going to change my views here. I can’t actually imagine that scenario (a flaw with many thought experiments), so I’m forced to fall back on small-scale intuitions + intellectual beliefs. The latter say such a thing would be the right thing to do, given a sufficiently large blissful population and all the caveats and restrictions that always apply in these thought experiments.
I think trying to convince the former might be more tractable, but big abstract thought experiments like this don’t do that, because they are so unimaginable and unrealistic. That’s (one framing of) why I’m looking for something less abstract. This is what I was trying to get at in the OP, though I accept I wasn’t super clear about what exactly I was & wasn’t looking for.
I thought the OP was clear. Sorry that most of the answers, including mine, do not actually answer your question.
Given what you say, maybe the reason you don’t find the Repugnant Conclusion counterintuitive is that you have already internalized that you can’t adequately represent the thought experiment in imagination, so your brain doesn’t generate the relevant intuitions in the first place. Whereas I personally agree, on reflection, that my internal representation of the thought experiment is inadequate, but this doesn’t prevent me from feeling the intuitive appeal of the less populous world. This might also explain why you do feel the sting of trolley problems, which generally involve small numbers of people. (However, you also say that you find utility monsters counterintuitive, which would be inconsistent with this explanation. Interestingly, in Reasons and Persons Parfit dismisses the force of Nozick’s thought experiment on the grounds that it’s impossible to properly imagine a utility monster. But he doesn’t take this same approach for dealing with the Repugnant Conclusion.)
Yeah, I do think that “I can’t actually realistically represent this scenario in my imagination, and if I try I’ll just deceive myself, so I won’t” has become a pretty deep intuition for me over the years.
I think it’s more thoroughly internalised for scenarios that are unimaginably large (many people, very long stretches of time) than scenarios that are small but weird. Possibly because the intuition for size has been trained by a lot of real-world experiences – I don’t think a human can really imagine even a million people, so there are many real-world cases where the correct response is to back off from visual imagination and shut up and multiply.
Utility monsters (and the Fat Man trolley problem variant) are small but weird, so it’s more difficult for me to accept that my intuitive imagination of the scenario is likely to be misleading. I’ve seen fictional representations of utility monsters, and in general when I try to imagine a single sentient being it’s difficult not to imagine something like a human. So even though I believe that a real utility monster would in fact be a profoundly alien and hard-to-imagine being, when I think about the scenario my brain conjures up a human tyrant and it seems really bad.
Whereas for the RC my brain sees the words “unimaginably vast” and decides not to try and imagine.