One of the things that seems intuitively repugnant is the idea of “lives barely worth living”. The word barely is doing a lot of work in driving my intuition of repugnancy, since a life “barely” worth living seems to imply some level of fragility—“if something goes even slightly wrong, then that life is no longer worth living”.
I think this may simply be a marketing problem though. Could we use some variation of “middle class”? This is essentially the standard of living that developed-world politics accepts as both sustainable and achievable, and sounds a lot nicer than “lives barely worth living”. In reality, even lives “barely worth living” will build in a margin of individual slack to avoid the problem of individual fragility which has huge negative societal consequences, so it will probably seem much closer to middle-class than our current impression of poverty anyway.
What if you consider a population of beings with much narrower (expected) welfare ranges or much shorter lives? How many nematodes eating their preferred foods are better than a population of a billion flourishing humans?
A lot of people (including I) lean towards empty individualism.
From an empty individualistic perspective, there is no difference between creating 1 billion people who experience 100 years of bliss and creating 100 billion people who experience 1 year of bliss.
So that version of the RC is easy to bite the bullet on.
I am a negative utilitarian so both would be neutral, in my opinion.
Not sure what you’re getting at here—the whole point of the repugnant conclusion is that the people in the large branch have lives barely worth living. If you replace those people with people whose lives are a generous margin above the threshold, it’s not the same question anymore.
My guess is that, even then, there’ll be a lot of people for whom it remains counterintuitive. (People may no longer use the strong word “repugnant” to describe it, but I think many will still find it counterintuitive.)
Which would support my point that many people find the repugnant conclusion counterintuitive not (just) because of aggregation concerns, but also because they have the intuition that adding new people doesn’t make things better.
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.
One of the things that seems intuitively repugnant is the idea of “lives barely worth living”. The word barely is doing a lot of work in driving my intuition of repugnancy, since a life “barely” worth living seems to imply some level of fragility—“if something goes even slightly wrong, then that life is no longer worth living”.
I think this may simply be a marketing problem though. Could we use some variation of “middle class”? This is essentially the standard of living that developed-world politics accepts as both sustainable and achievable, and sounds a lot nicer than “lives barely worth living”. In reality, even lives “barely worth living” will build in a margin of individual slack to avoid the problem of individual fragility which has huge negative societal consequences, so it will probably seem much closer to middle-class than our current impression of poverty anyway.
What if you consider a population of beings with much narrower (expected) welfare ranges or much shorter lives? How many nematodes eating their preferred foods are better than a population of a billion flourishing humans?
See also Sebo, 2023 https://doi.org/10.1080/21550085.2023.2200724
Or, you could imagine if humans had extremely short lives, but joyful nonetheless, and in huge numbers.
A lot of people (including I) lean towards empty individualism.
From an empty individualistic perspective, there is no difference between creating 1 billion people who experience 100 years of bliss and creating 100 billion people who experience 1 year of bliss.
So that version of the RC is easy to bite the bullet on.
I am a negative utilitarian so both would be neutral, in my opinion.
Not sure what you’re getting at here—the whole point of the repugnant conclusion is that the people in the large branch have lives barely worth living. If you replace those people with people whose lives are a generous margin above the threshold, it’s not the same question anymore.
My guess is that, even then, there’ll be a lot of people for whom it remains counterintuitive. (People may no longer use the strong word “repugnant” to describe it, but I think many will still find it counterintuitive.)
Which would support my point that many people find the repugnant conclusion counterintuitive not (just) because of aggregation concerns, but also because they have the intuition that adding new people doesn’t make things better.
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.