What an interesting and fun post! Your analysis goes many directions and I appreciate your investigation of normative, descriptive, and prescriptive ethics.
The repugnant conclusion worries me. As a thought experiment, it seems to contain an uncharitable interpretation of principles of utilitarianism.
You increase total and average utility to measure increases in individual utility across an existing and constant population. However, those measures, total and average, are not adequate to handle the intuition people associate with them. Therefore, they should not be used for deciding changes in utility across a population of changing size or one containing drastic differences in individual utility. For example, there’s no value in increasing total utility by adding additional people, but it will drive total utility up, even if individual utility is low.
You pursue egalitarianism to raise everyone’s utility up to the same level. Egalitarian is not an aspiration to lower some people’s well-being while raising other’s well-being. Likewise, egalitarianism is not pursuit of equality of utility at any utility level. Therefore, egalitarianism does not imply an overriding interest in equalizing everyone’s utility. For example, there’s no value in lowering other’s utility to match those with less.
You measure utility accumulated by existent people in the present or the future to know utility for all individuals in a population and that utility is only relevant to the time period during when those people exist. Those individuals have to exist in order for the measures to apply. Therefore, utilitarianism can be practiced in contexts of arbitrary changes in population, with a caveat: consequences for others of specific changes to population, someone’s birth or death, are relevant to utilitarian calculations. TIP: the repugnant conclusion thought experiment only allows one kind of population change: increase. You could ask yourself whether the thought experiment says anything about the real world or requirements of living in it.
Utility is defined with respect to purposes (needs, reasons, wants) that establish a reference point of accumulation of utility suitable for some purpose. That reference point is always at a finite level of accumulation. Therefore, to assume that utility should be maximized to an unbounded extent is an error, and speaks to a problem with some arguments for transitivity. NOTE: by definition, if there is no finite amount of accumulated utility past which you have an unnecessary amount for your purposes, then it is not utility for you.
The repugnant conclusion does not condemn utilitarianism to disuse, but points 1-4 seem to me to be the principles to treat charitably in showing that utilitarianism leads to inconsistency. I don’t believe that current formulations of the repugnant conclusion are charitable to those principles and the intuitions behind them.
What an interesting and fun post! Your analysis goes many directions and I appreciate your investigation of normative, descriptive, and prescriptive ethics.
The repugnant conclusion worries me. As a thought experiment, it seems to contain an uncharitable interpretation of principles of utilitarianism.
You increase total and average utility to measure increases in individual utility across an existing and constant population. However, those measures, total and average, are not adequate to handle the intuition people associate with them. Therefore, they should not be used for deciding changes in utility across a population of changing size or one containing drastic differences in individual utility. For example, there’s no value in increasing total utility by adding additional people, but it will drive total utility up, even if individual utility is low.
You pursue egalitarianism to raise everyone’s utility up to the same level. Egalitarian is not an aspiration to lower some people’s well-being while raising other’s well-being. Likewise, egalitarianism is not pursuit of equality of utility at any utility level. Therefore, egalitarianism does not imply an overriding interest in equalizing everyone’s utility. For example, there’s no value in lowering other’s utility to match those with less.
You measure utility accumulated by existent people in the present or the future to know utility for all individuals in a population and that utility is only relevant to the time period during when those people exist. Those individuals have to exist in order for the measures to apply. Therefore, utilitarianism can be practiced in contexts of arbitrary changes in population, with a caveat: consequences for others of specific changes to population, someone’s birth or death, are relevant to utilitarian calculations. TIP: the repugnant conclusion thought experiment only allows one kind of population change: increase. You could ask yourself whether the thought experiment says anything about the real world or requirements of living in it.
Utility is defined with respect to purposes (needs, reasons, wants) that establish a reference point of accumulation of utility suitable for some purpose. That reference point is always at a finite level of accumulation. Therefore, to assume that utility should be maximized to an unbounded extent is an error, and speaks to a problem with some arguments for transitivity. NOTE: by definition, if there is no finite amount of accumulated utility past which you have an unnecessary amount for your purposes, then it is not utility for you.
The repugnant conclusion does not condemn utilitarianism to disuse, but points 1-4 seem to me to be the principles to treat charitably in showing that utilitarianism leads to inconsistency. I don’t believe that current formulations of the repugnant conclusion are charitable to those principles and the intuitions behind them.