> I’m curious about what you mean by not addressing the actual question.
I just meant that my impression was that person-affecting views seem fairly orthogonal to the Repugnant Conclusion specifically. I imagine that many person-affecting believers would agree with this. Or, I assume that it’s very possible to do any combination of [strongly care about the repugnant conclusion] | [not care about it], and [have person-affecting views] and [not have them].
The (very briefly explained) example I mentioned is meant as something like, Say there’s a trolly problem. You could either accept scenario (A): 100 people with happy lives are saved, or (B) 10000 people with sort of decent lives are saved.
My guess was that this would still be an issue in many person-affecting views (I might well be wrong here though, feel free to correct me!). To me, this question is functionally equivalent to the Repugnant Conclusion.
Your examples with aggregation also seem very similar.
Just a guess, but I think many people who reject the repugnant conclusion in its original form would be happy to save far more people with less good but positive lives, over less people with better lives. Recall the recent piece on bioethicists where lots of them don’t even think you have more reason to save the life of a 20-year old than a 70-year old. Or consider how offensive it is to say “let’s save the lives of people in rich countries, all things being equal, because their lives will likely contain less suffering”. In general, people seem to reject the idea that the size of the benefit conveyed on someone by saving their life affects how strong the reason to save their life is, so long as their remaining life will be net positive and something like a “normal” human life, and isn’t ludicrously short. (Note: I’m not defending this position, I think you should obviously save a 20-year old over a 70-year old because the benefit to them is so much larger.)
On the other hand, most of these people would probably save a few humans over many more animals, which is kind of like rejecting the repugnant conclusion in a life-saving rather than life-creating context.
I just meant that my impression was that person-affecting views seem fairly orthogonal to the Repugnant Conclusion specifically. I imagine that many person-affecting believers would agree with this. Or, I assume that it’s very possible to do any combination of [strongly care about the repugnant conclusion] | [not care about it], and [have person-affecting views] and [not have them].
The (very briefly explained) example I mentioned is meant as something like, Say there’s a trolly problem. You could either accept scenario (A): 100 people with happy lives are saved, or (B) 10000 people with sort of decent lives are saved.
My guess was that this would still be an issue in many person-affecting views (I might well be wrong here though, feel free to correct me!). To me, this question is functionally equivalent to the Repugnant Conclusion.
I’m pretty confident you’re wrong about this. (Edit: I mean, you’re right if you call it “repugnant conclusion” whenever we talk about choosing between a small very happy population and a sufficiently larger less happy one; however, my point is that it’s no coincidence that people most often object to favoring the larger population over the smaller one in contexts of population ethics, i.e., when the populations are not already both in existence.) I’ve talked to a lot of suffering-focused EAs. Of the people who feel strongly about rejecting the repugnant conclusion in population ethics, at best only half feel that aggregation is altogether questionable. More importantly, even in those that feel that aggregation is altogether questionable, I’m pretty sure that’s a separate intuition for them (and it’s only triggered when we compare something as mild as dust specks to extremes like torture). Meaning, they might feel weird about “torture vs dustspecks,” but they’ll be perfectly okay with “there comes a point where letting a trolley run over a small paradise is better than letting it run over a sufficiently larger population of less happy (but still overall happy) people on the other track.” By contrast, the impetus of their reaction to the original repugnant conclusion comes from the following. When they hear a description of “small-ish population with very high happiness,” their intuition goes “hmm, that sounds pretty optimal,” so they’re not interested in addingcosts just to add more happiness moments (or net happy lives) to the total.
To pass the Ideological Turing test for most people who don’t want to accept the repugnant conclusion, you IMO have to engage with the intuition that it isn’t morally important to create new happy people. (This is also what person-affecting views try to build on.)
I haven’t done explicit surveys of this, but I’m still really confident that I’m right about this being what non-totalists in population ethics base their views on, and I find it strange that pretty much* every time totalists discuss the repugnant conclusion, they don’t seem to see this.
(For instance, I’ve pointed this out here on the EA forum at least once to Gregory Lewis and Richard Yetter-Chappell (so you’re in good company, but what is going on?))
*For an exception,this post by Joe Carlsmisth doesn’t mention the repugnant conclusion directly, but it engages with what I consider to be more crux-y arguments and viewpoints in relation to it.
>I’ve talked to a lot of suffering-focused EAs. Of the people who feel strongly about rejecting the repugnant conclusion in population ethics, at best only half feel that aggregation is altogether questionable.
I think this is basically agreeing with my point on “person-affecting views seem fairly orthogonal to the Repugnant Conclusion specifically”, in that it’s possible to have any combination.
That said, you do make it sound like suffering-focused people have a lot of thoughtful and specific views on this topic.
My naive guess would have been that many suffering-focused total utilitarians would simply have a far higher bar for what the utility baseline is than, say, classical total utilitarians. So in some cases, perhaps they would consider most groups of “a few people living ‘positive’ lives” to still be net-suffering, and would therefore just straightforwardly prefer many options with fewer people. But I’d also assume that in this theory, the repugnant conclusion would basically not be an issue anyway.
I realize that this wasn’t clear in my post, but when I wrote it, it wasn’t with suffering-focused people in mind. My impression is that the vast majority of people worried about the Repugnant Conclusion are not suffering focused, and would have different thoughts on this topic and counterarguments. I think I’m fine not arguing against the suffering-focused people on this topic, like the ones you’ve mentioned, because it seems like they’re presenting different arguments than the main ones I disagree with.
> I’m curious about what you mean by not addressing the actual question.
I just meant that my impression was that person-affecting views seem fairly orthogonal to the Repugnant Conclusion specifically. I imagine that many person-affecting believers would agree with this. Or, I assume that it’s very possible to do any combination of [strongly care about the repugnant conclusion] | [not care about it], and [have person-affecting views] and [not have them].
The (very briefly explained) example I mentioned is meant as something like,
Say there’s a trolly problem. You could either accept scenario (A): 100 people with happy lives are saved, or (B) 10000 people with sort of decent lives are saved.
My guess was that this would still be an issue in many person-affecting views (I might well be wrong here though, feel free to correct me!). To me, this question is functionally equivalent to the Repugnant Conclusion.
Your examples with aggregation also seem very similar.
The repugnant trolley! Love it.
Just a guess, but I think many people who reject the repugnant conclusion in its original form would be happy to save far more people with less good but positive lives, over less people with better lives. Recall the recent piece on bioethicists where lots of them don’t even think you have more reason to save the life of a 20-year old than a 70-year old. Or consider how offensive it is to say “let’s save the lives of people in rich countries, all things being equal, because their lives will likely contain less suffering”. In general, people seem to reject the idea that the size of the benefit conveyed on someone by saving their life affects how strong the reason to save their life is, so long as their remaining life will be net positive and something like a “normal” human life, and isn’t ludicrously short. (Note: I’m not defending this position, I think you should obviously save a 20-year old over a 70-year old because the benefit to them is so much larger.)
On the other hand, most of these people would probably save a few humans over many more animals, which is kind of like rejecting the repugnant conclusion in a life-saving rather than life-creating context.
I’m pretty confident you’re wrong about this. (Edit: I mean, you’re right if you call it “repugnant conclusion” whenever we talk about choosing between a small very happy population and a sufficiently larger less happy one; however, my point is that it’s no coincidence that people most often object to favoring the larger population over the smaller one in contexts of population ethics, i.e., when the populations are not already both in existence.)
I’ve talked to a lot of suffering-focused EAs. Of the people who feel strongly about rejecting the repugnant conclusion in population ethics, at best only half feel that aggregation is altogether questionable. More importantly, even in those that feel that aggregation is altogether questionable, I’m pretty sure that’s a separate intuition for them (and it’s only triggered when we compare something as mild as dust specks to extremes like torture). Meaning, they might feel weird about “torture vs dustspecks,” but they’ll be perfectly okay with “there comes a point where letting a trolley run over a small paradise is better than letting it run over a sufficiently larger population of less happy (but still overall happy) people on the other track.” By contrast, the impetus of their reaction to the original repugnant conclusion comes from the following. When they hear a description of “small-ish population with very high happiness,” their intuition goes “hmm, that sounds pretty optimal,” so they’re not interested in adding costs just to add more happiness moments (or net happy lives) to the total.
To pass the Ideological Turing test for most people who don’t want to accept the repugnant conclusion, you IMO have to engage with the intuition that it isn’t morally important to create new happy people. (This is also what person-affecting views try to build on.)
I haven’t done explicit surveys of this, but I’m still really confident that I’m right about this being what non-totalists in population ethics base their views on, and I find it strange that pretty much* every time totalists discuss the repugnant conclusion, they don’t seem to see this.
(For instance, I’ve pointed this out here on the EA forum at least once to Gregory Lewis and Richard Yetter-Chappell (so you’re in good company, but what is going on?))
*For an exception,this post by Joe Carlsmisth doesn’t mention the repugnant conclusion directly, but it engages with what I consider to be more crux-y arguments and viewpoints in relation to it.
Thanks for that explanation.
>I’ve talked to a lot of suffering-focused EAs. Of the people who feel strongly about rejecting the repugnant conclusion in population ethics, at best only half feel that aggregation is altogether questionable.
I think this is basically agreeing with my point on “person-affecting views seem fairly orthogonal to the Repugnant Conclusion specifically”, in that it’s possible to have any combination.
That said, you do make it sound like suffering-focused people have a lot of thoughtful and specific views on this topic.
My naive guess would have been that many suffering-focused total utilitarians would simply have a far higher bar for what the utility baseline is than, say, classical total utilitarians. So in some cases, perhaps they would consider most groups of “a few people living ‘positive’ lives” to still be net-suffering, and would therefore just straightforwardly prefer many options with fewer people. But I’d also assume that in this theory, the repugnant conclusion would basically not be an issue anyway.
I realize that this wasn’t clear in my post, but when I wrote it, it wasn’t with suffering-focused people in mind. My impression is that the vast majority of people worried about the Repugnant Conclusion are not suffering focused, and would have different thoughts on this topic and counterarguments. I think I’m fine not arguing against the suffering-focused people on this topic, like the ones you’ve mentioned, because it seems like they’re presenting different arguments than the main ones I disagree with.