I’m neither a philosopher nor familiar with the formal methods Spears & Budolfson use, but here is my understanding of the paper, which understanding may well be wrong.
Normally, the repugnant conclusion says that a very large population with only barely positive lives is better than a small population of really great lives. I don’t think Spears & Budolfson deny the fact that, in this particular situation, average utilitarianism (to take one example) does say that the small population of really great lives is in fact better than the alternative. Instead, they rephrase the problem to say something like that, for any one population, you can always make those people really unhappy if you only add enough additional lives to counterbalance it. Even average utilitarianism aggregates, so a large number of slightly happy members will outweigh a small group of very unhappy members. In any case, so long as you can add an arbitrary number to a population, & so long as you aggregate utility, a very large number of small differences can outweigh a small number of large differences.
I take them to say that Parfit & others were looking not for forms of utilitarianism that avoided any repugnant conclusion, but for ones that avoided some specific repugnant conclusion for some specific hypothetical populations (such as those originally described by Parfit). But there are still, for all forms of utilitarianism – including those that solve Parfit’s original problem – other repugnant conclusions for other hypothetical populations. And because the particular hypothetical populations that produce repugnant conclusions are different in different variants of utilitarianism, they cannot easily be compared & repugnant conclusions are therefore not a good measure.
They also argue that there are repugnant conclusions for non-aggregative forms of utilitarianism. As I interpret it, they argue that, for any suffering population, you can always distribute some fixed amount of utility by giving a tiny amount to each existing member & distributing the rest over a very large number of additional members, such that all original members are still suffering & all new members are, too. But at every step we only added utility & therefore made everyone better off, so even if we don’t aggregate utility, the final population should still be preferable to the original population. (To be clear, as I understand it, they are still discussing only utilitarian systems & their discussion doesn’t apply to for example Kantian or virtue ethics.)
So I think the suggestion is that one shouldn’t look at repugnancy as a binary category, but instead some sort of continuum, though the precise measuring of it is yet to be worked out.
Hi! Thanks for your careful read of our paper and thougthful summary. I think this paragraph is especially good: “I take them to say that Parfit & others were looking not for forms of utilitarianism that avoided any repugnant conclusion, but for ones that avoided some specific repugnant conclusion for some specific hypothetical populations (such as those originally described by Parfit). But there are still, for all forms of utilitarianism – including those that solve Parfit’s original problem – other repugnant conclusions for other hypothetical populations. And because the particular hypothetical populations that produce repugnant conclusions are different in different variants of utilitarianism, they cannot easily be compared & repugnant conclusions are therefore not a good measure.”
I’m neither a philosopher nor familiar with the formal methods Spears & Budolfson use, but here is my understanding of the paper, which understanding may well be wrong.
Normally, the repugnant conclusion says that a very large population with only barely positive lives is better than a small population of really great lives. I don’t think Spears & Budolfson deny the fact that, in this particular situation, average utilitarianism (to take one example) does say that the small population of really great lives is in fact better than the alternative. Instead, they rephrase the problem to say something like that, for any one population, you can always make those people really unhappy if you only add enough additional lives to counterbalance it. Even average utilitarianism aggregates, so a large number of slightly happy members will outweigh a small group of very unhappy members. In any case, so long as you can add an arbitrary number to a population, & so long as you aggregate utility, a very large number of small differences can outweigh a small number of large differences.
I take them to say that Parfit & others were looking not for forms of utilitarianism that avoided any repugnant conclusion, but for ones that avoided some specific repugnant conclusion for some specific hypothetical populations (such as those originally described by Parfit). But there are still, for all forms of utilitarianism – including those that solve Parfit’s original problem – other repugnant conclusions for other hypothetical populations. And because the particular hypothetical populations that produce repugnant conclusions are different in different variants of utilitarianism, they cannot easily be compared & repugnant conclusions are therefore not a good measure.
They also argue that there are repugnant conclusions for non-aggregative forms of utilitarianism. As I interpret it, they argue that, for any suffering population, you can always distribute some fixed amount of utility by giving a tiny amount to each existing member & distributing the rest over a very large number of additional members, such that all original members are still suffering & all new members are, too. But at every step we only added utility & therefore made everyone better off, so even if we don’t aggregate utility, the final population should still be preferable to the original population. (To be clear, as I understand it, they are still discussing only utilitarian systems & their discussion doesn’t apply to for example Kantian or virtue ethics.)
So I think the suggestion is that one shouldn’t look at repugnancy as a binary category, but instead some sort of continuum, though the precise measuring of it is yet to be worked out.
Hi! Thanks for your careful read of our paper and thougthful summary. I think this paragraph is especially good: “I take them to say that Parfit & others were looking not for forms of utilitarianism that avoided any repugnant conclusion, but for ones that avoided some specific repugnant conclusion for some specific hypothetical populations (such as those originally described by Parfit). But there are still, for all forms of utilitarianism – including those that solve Parfit’s original problem – other repugnant conclusions for other hypothetical populations. And because the particular hypothetical populations that produce repugnant conclusions are different in different variants of utilitarianism, they cannot easily be compared & repugnant conclusions are therefore not a good measure.”