Hmm, I’ll take another stab at this point, which has some mathematical basis but in the end is a fairly intuitive point:
Consider the per-person utility of society X which has a generous margin of slack for each person. Compare it to the per-person utility of society Z which has no margin of slack for each person.
My claim is something like, the per-person utility curves (of actual societies, that could exist, given reasonable assumptions about resources) most likely look like a steep drop from “quite positive” to “quite negative” between X and Z, because of what Zvi describes in the slack post I linked—as you take up slack, this first results in lack of individual potential, and then in the extreme, great suffering due to lack of choice. Let’s call society Y the point where per-person utility hits zero.
Society Y has a total utility of zero (and adding more people beyond that is negative!) so the utility-maximizing optimal population lands somewhere between X and Y. Where exactly depends on how many people you can “fit” into the per-person slack, before it binds too severely.
My claim is that the (total-utilitarian) optimal population is closer to X than Y, still leaving a fairly generous margin for each person.
It sounds like you’re discussing how we can maximise utility in the presence of resource constraints: given some fixed resource pool, we should perhaps aim to support less than the maximal number of people with those resources, so that each can have a larger share of them.
IMO there’s nothing wrong with this reasoning in itself, but it doesn’t apply to the repugnant conclusion, because the repugnant conclusion operates at an entirely different level of abstraction, with no notion of (or interest in) what resource consumption is necessary to achieve the hypothetical alternatives it presents. It’s purely a question of “supposing these are the situations you have to choose between: one where there are a few people with very good experiences, and one where there are very many people with barely-good experiences, how do you make that decision?” Replying to this with “actually we should pick a medium-sized group of people with medium-good experiences” is like answering the trolley problem by saying “actually we should fit emergency brakes to trolleys so they don’t hit anyone”. It’s not wrong exactly, but it doesn’t address the problems raised by the original argument.
Hmm, I’ll take another stab at this point, which has some mathematical basis but in the end is a fairly intuitive point:
Consider the per-person utility of society X which has a generous margin of slack for each person. Compare it to the per-person utility of society Z which has no margin of slack for each person.
My claim is something like, the per-person utility curves (of actual societies, that could exist, given reasonable assumptions about resources) most likely look like a steep drop from “quite positive” to “quite negative” between X and Z, because of what Zvi describes in the slack post I linked—as you take up slack, this first results in lack of individual potential, and then in the extreme, great suffering due to lack of choice. Let’s call society Y the point where per-person utility hits zero.
Society Y has a total utility of zero (and adding more people beyond that is negative!) so the utility-maximizing optimal population lands somewhere between X and Y. Where exactly depends on how many people you can “fit” into the per-person slack, before it binds too severely.
My claim is that the (total-utilitarian) optimal population is closer to X than Y, still leaving a fairly generous margin for each person.
It sounds like you’re discussing how we can maximise utility in the presence of resource constraints: given some fixed resource pool, we should perhaps aim to support less than the maximal number of people with those resources, so that each can have a larger share of them.
IMO there’s nothing wrong with this reasoning in itself, but it doesn’t apply to the repugnant conclusion, because the repugnant conclusion operates at an entirely different level of abstraction, with no notion of (or interest in) what resource consumption is necessary to achieve the hypothetical alternatives it presents. It’s purely a question of “supposing these are the situations you have to choose between: one where there are a few people with very good experiences, and one where there are very many people with barely-good experiences, how do you make that decision?” Replying to this with “actually we should pick a medium-sized group of people with medium-good experiences” is like answering the trolley problem by saying “actually we should fit emergency brakes to trolleys so they don’t hit anyone”. It’s not wrong exactly, but it doesn’t address the problems raised by the original argument.