I am also interested by the claim in this paper that the repugnant conclusion afflicts all population axiologies, including person-affecting views
Not negative utilitarian axiology. The proof relies on the assumption that the utility variable u can be positive.
What if âutilityâ is meant to refer to the objective aspects of the beingsâ experience etc. that axiologies would judge as good or badârather than to moral goodness or badness themselves? Then I think there are two problems:
1) Supposing itâs a fair move to aggregate all these aspects into one scalar, the theorem assumes the function f must be strictly increasing. Under this interpretation the NU function would be f(u) = min(u, 0).
2) I deny that such aggregation even is a reasonable move. Restricting to hedonic welfare for simplicity, it would be more appropriate for f to be a function of two variables, happiness and suffering. Collapsing this into a scalar input, I think, obscures some massive moral differences between different formulations of the Repugnant Conclusion, for example. Interestingly, though, if we formulate the VRC as in that paper by treating all positive values of u as âonly happiness, no sufferingâ and all negative values as âonly suffering, no happinessâ (thereby making my objection on this point irrelevant) the theorem still goes through for all those axiologies. But not for NU.
Edit: The paper seems to acknowledge point #2, though not the implications for NU:
One way to see that a Δ increase could be very repugnant is to recall Portmoreâs (1999) suggestion that Δ lives in the restricted RC could be âroller coasterâ lives, in which there is much that is wonderful, but also much terribly suffering, such that the good ever-so-slightly outweighs the bad. Here, one admitted possibility is that an Δ-change could substantially increase the terrible suffering in a life, and also increase good components; such a Δ-change is not the only possible Δ-change, but it would have the consequence of increasing the total amount of suffering. ⊠Moreover, if Δ-changes are of the âroller coasterâ form, they could increase deep suffering considerably beyond even the arbitrarily many [u < 0] lives, and in fact could require everyone in the chosen population to experience terrible suffering.
Plenty of theories avoid the RC and VRC, but this paper extends the VRC on p. 19. Basically, you can make up for the addition of an arbitrary number of arbitrarily bad lives instead of an arbitrary number of arbitrarily good lives with arbitrarily small changes to welfare to a base population, which depends on the previous factors.
For NU (including lexical threshold NU), this can mean adding an arbitrarily huge number of new people to hell to barely reduce the suffering for each person in a sufficiently large population already in hell. (And also not getting the very positive lives, but NU treats them as 0 welfare anyway.)
Also, related to your edit, epsilon changes could flip a huge number of good or neutral lives in a base population to marginally bad lives.
For NU (including lexical threshold NU), this can mean adding an arbitrarily huge number of new people to hell to barely reduce the suffering for each person in a sufficiently large population already in hell. (And also not getting the very positive lives, but NU treats them as 0 welfare anyway.)
This may be counterintuitive to an extent, but to me it doesnât reach âvery repugnantâ territory. Misery is still reduced here; an epsilon change of the âreducing extreme sufferingâ sort, evenly if barely so, doesnât seem morally frivolous like the creation of an epsilon-happy life or, worse, creation of an epsilon roller coaster life. But Iâll have to think about this more. Itâs a good point, thanks for bringing it to my attention.
For NU (including lexical threshold NU), this can mean adding an arbitrarily huge number of new people to hell to barely reduce the suffering for each person in a sufficiently large population already in hell.
What would it mean to repeat this step (up to an infinite number of times)?
Intuitively, it sounds to me like the suffering gets divided more equally between those who already exist and those who do not, which ultimately leads to an infinite population where everyone has a subjectively perfect experience.
In the finite case, it leads to an extremely large population of almost perfectly untroubled lives.
If extrapolated in this way, it seems quite plausible that the population we eventually get by repeating this step is much better than the initial population.
Not negative utilitarian axiology. The proof relies on the assumption that the utility variable u can be positive.
What if âutilityâ is meant to refer to the objective aspects of the beingsâ experience etc. that axiologies would judge as good or badârather than to moral goodness or badness themselves? Then I think there are two problems:
1) Supposing itâs a fair move to aggregate all these aspects into one scalar, the theorem assumes the function f must be strictly increasing. Under this interpretation the NU function would be f(u) = min(u, 0).
2) I deny that such aggregation even is a reasonable move. Restricting to hedonic welfare for simplicity, it would be more appropriate for f to be a function of two variables, happiness and suffering. Collapsing this into a scalar input, I think, obscures some massive moral differences between different formulations of the Repugnant Conclusion, for example. Interestingly, though, if we formulate the VRC as in that paper by treating all positive values of u as âonly happiness, no sufferingâ and all negative values as âonly suffering, no happinessâ (thereby making my objection on this point irrelevant) the theorem still goes through for all those axiologies. But not for NU.
Edit: The paper seems to acknowledge point #2, though not the implications for NU:
Plenty of theories avoid the RC and VRC, but this paper extends the VRC on p. 19. Basically, you can make up for the addition of an arbitrary number of arbitrarily bad lives instead of an arbitrary number of arbitrarily good lives with arbitrarily small changes to welfare to a base population, which depends on the previous factors.
For NU (including lexical threshold NU), this can mean adding an arbitrarily huge number of new people to hell to barely reduce the suffering for each person in a sufficiently large population already in hell. (And also not getting the very positive lives, but NU treats them as 0 welfare anyway.)
Also, related to your edit, epsilon changes could flip a huge number of good or neutral lives in a base population to marginally bad lives.
This may be counterintuitive to an extent, but to me it doesnât reach âvery repugnantâ territory. Misery is still reduced here; an epsilon change of the âreducing extreme sufferingâ sort, evenly if barely so, doesnât seem morally frivolous like the creation of an epsilon-happy life or, worse, creation of an epsilon roller coaster life. But Iâll have to think about this more. Itâs a good point, thanks for bringing it to my attention.
What would it mean to repeat this step (up to an infinite number of times)?
Intuitively, it sounds to me like the suffering gets divided more equally between those who already exist and those who do not, which ultimately leads to an infinite population where everyone has a subjectively perfect experience.
In the finite case, it leads to an extremely large population of almost perfectly untroubled lives.
If extrapolated in this way, it seems quite plausible that the population we eventually get by repeating this step is much better than the initial population.
I wrote some more about this here in reply to Jack.