I am also interested by the claim in this paper that the repugnant conclusion afflicts all population axiologies, including person-affecting views, although I haven’t actually read through the paper yet to understand it completely
I’d just check the definition of the Extended very repugnant conclusion (XVRC) on p. 19. Roughly, tiny changes in welfare (e.g. pin pricks, dust specks) to an appropriate base population can make up for the addition of any number of arbitrarily bad lives and the foregoing of any number of arbitrarily good lives. The base population depends on the magnitude of the change in welfare, and the bad and good lives.
The claim of the paper is that basically all theories so far have led to the XVRC.
It’s possible to come up with theories that don’t. Take Meacham’s approach, and instead of using the sum of harms, use the maximum individual harm (and the counterpart relations should be defined to minimize the max harm in the world).
Or do something like this for pairwise comparisons only, and then extend using some kind of voting method, like beatpath, as discussed in Thomas’s paper on the asymmetry.
This is similar to the view the animal rights ethicist Tom Regan described here:
Given that these conditions are fulfilled, the choice concerning who should be saved must be decided by what I term the harm principle. Space prevents me from explaining that principle fully here (see The Case, chapters 3 and 8, for my considered views). Suffice it to say that no one has a right to have his lesser harm count for more than the greater harm of another. Thus, if death would be a lesser harm for the dog than it would be for any of the human survivors—(and this is an assumption Singer does not dispute)—then the dog’s right not to be harmed would not be violated if he were cast overboard. In these perilous circumstances, assuming that no one’s right to be treated with respect has been part of their creation, the dog’s individual right not to be harmed must be weighed equitably against the same right of each of the individual human survivors.
To weigh these rights in this fashion is not to violate anyone’s right to be treated with respect; just the opposite is true, which is why numbers make no difference in such a case. Given, that is, that what we must do is weigh the harm faced by any one individual against the harm faced by each other individual, on an individual, not a group or collective basis, it then makes no difference how many individuals will each suffer a lesser, or who will each suffer a greater, harm. It would not be wrong to cast a million dogs overboard to save the four human survivors, assuming the lifeboat case were otherwise the same. But neither would it be wrong to cast a million humans overboard to save a canine survivor, if the harm death would be for the humans was, in each case, less than the harm death would be for the dog.
These approaches all sacrifice the independence of irrelevant alternatives or transitivity.
Another way to “avoid” it is to recognize gaps in welfare, so that the smallest change in welfare (in one direction from a given level) allowed is intuitively large. For example, maybe there’s a lexical threshold for sufficiently intense suffering, and a gap in welfare just before it. Suffering may be bearable to different degrees, but some kinds may just be completely unbearable, and the threshold could be where it becomes completely unbearable; see some discussion of thresholds here. Then people people past the threshold is extremely bad, no matter where they start, whether that’s right next to the threshold, or from non-existence.
Or, maybe there’s no gap, but just barely pushing people past that threshold is extremely bad anyway, and roughly as bad as bringing people into existence already past that threshold. I think a gap in welfare is functionally the same, but explains this better.
I’d just check the definition of the Extended very repugnant conclusion (XVRC) on p. 19. Roughly, tiny changes in welfare (e.g. pin pricks, dust specks) to an appropriate base population can make up for the addition of any number of arbitrarily bad lives and the foregoing of any number of arbitrarily good lives. The base population depends on the magnitude of the change in welfare, and the bad and good lives.
The claim of the paper is that basically all theories so far have led to the XVRC.
It’s possible to come up with theories that don’t. Take Meacham’s approach, and instead of using the sum of harms, use the maximum individual harm (and the counterpart relations should be defined to minimize the max harm in the world).
Or do something like this for pairwise comparisons only, and then extend using some kind of voting method, like beatpath, as discussed in Thomas’s paper on the asymmetry.
This is similar to the view the animal rights ethicist Tom Regan described here:
These approaches all sacrifice the independence of irrelevant alternatives or transitivity.
Another way to “avoid” it is to recognize gaps in welfare, so that the smallest change in welfare (in one direction from a given level) allowed is intuitively large. For example, maybe there’s a lexical threshold for sufficiently intense suffering, and a gap in welfare just before it. Suffering may be bearable to different degrees, but some kinds may just be completely unbearable, and the threshold could be where it becomes completely unbearable; see some discussion of thresholds here. Then people people past the threshold is extremely bad, no matter where they start, whether that’s right next to the threshold, or from non-existence.
Or, maybe there’s no gap, but just barely pushing people past that threshold is extremely bad anyway, and roughly as bad as bringing people into existence already past that threshold. I think a gap in welfare is functionally the same, but explains this better.