The fact that the Repugnant Conclusion is implied by many plausible principles of axiology and social welfare is not a reason to doubt the existence or coherence of ethics and value theory (although we do not rule out that there may be other reasons for moral skepticism).
If your moral intuitions are not logically compatible, thatās a problem for the coherence of your views, right? Is the point that your views are just not the āright onesā? But still, if ethics fundamentally relies on moral intuitions, then I think the more intuitions we need to drop, the more doubt we should have about the reliability of moral intuitions generally and the coherence of ethics altogether.
Of course, some people do not find the RC repugnant at all and never did.
(i) The Repugnant Conclusion depends crucially on intuitions about cases with very large numbers of people. The size of such very large numbers is hard to grasp on an intuitive level (Broome 2004; Huemer 2008; Gustafsson, forthcoming).
My intuitions against the repugnant conclusion donāt have anything to do with the large numbers involved. I think itās wrong to add extra people if it means those who would exist otherwise (in a wide non-identity sense, or in a personal sense) will be worse off. This already holds for 1 extra person.
Personally, I lean towards a hard procreation asymmetry and something like negative utilitarianism. If I wanted āmore moderateā views, Iād also rather reject the independence of irrelevant alternatives than accept that adding people with sufficiently good lives to the world makes things better, all else equal.
The impossibility theorems in population ethics can be read as strong arguments for the Repugnant Conclusion.
I agree, but they could also be read as strong arguments against any of the other conditions, like the independence of irrelevant alternatives, which seems usually taken for granted in these theorems.
From the paper itself:
If your moral intuitions are not logically compatible, thatās a problem for the coherence of your views, right? Is the point that your views are just not the āright onesā? But still, if ethics fundamentally relies on moral intuitions, then I think the more intuitions we need to drop, the more doubt we should have about the reliability of moral intuitions generally and the coherence of ethics altogether.
Of course, some people do not find the RC repugnant at all and never did.
My intuitions against the repugnant conclusion donāt have anything to do with the large numbers involved. I think itās wrong to add extra people if it means those who would exist otherwise (in a wide non-identity sense, or in a personal sense) will be worse off. This already holds for 1 extra person.
Personally, I lean towards a hard procreation asymmetry and something like negative utilitarianism. If I wanted āmore moderateā views, Iād also rather reject the independence of irrelevant alternatives than accept that adding people with sufficiently good lives to the world makes things better, all else equal.
I agree, but they could also be read as strong arguments against any of the other conditions, like the independence of irrelevant alternatives, which seems usually taken for granted in these theorems.