Not sure what youâre getting at hereâthe 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, itâs not the same question anymore.
My guess is that, even then, thereâll be a lot of people for whom it remains counterintuitive. (People may no longer use the strong word ârepugnantâ 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 doesnât make things better.
Hmm, Iâll 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 âquite positiveâ to âquite negativeâ between X and Z, because of what Zvi describes in the slack post I linkedâas you take up slack, this first results in lack of individual potential, and then in the extreme, great suffering due to lack of choice. Letâs 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 âfitâ 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 youâre 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 thereâs nothing wrong with this reasoning in itself, but it doesnât 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. Itâs purely a question of âsupposing 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?â Replying to this with âactually we should pick a medium-sized group of people with medium-good experiencesâ is like answering the trolley problem by saying âactually we should fit emergency brakes to trolleys so they donât hit anyoneâ. Itâs not wrong exactly, but it doesnât address the problems raised by the original argument.
Not sure what youâre getting at hereâthe 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, itâs not the same question anymore.
My guess is that, even then, thereâll be a lot of people for whom it remains counterintuitive. (People may no longer use the strong word ârepugnantâ 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 doesnât make things better.
Hmm, Iâll 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 âquite positiveâ to âquite negativeâ between X and Z, because of what Zvi describes in the slack post I linkedâas you take up slack, this first results in lack of individual potential, and then in the extreme, great suffering due to lack of choice. Letâs 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 âfitâ 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 youâre 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 thereâs nothing wrong with this reasoning in itself, but it doesnât 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. Itâs purely a question of âsupposing 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?â Replying to this with âactually we should pick a medium-sized group of people with medium-good experiencesâ is like answering the trolley problem by saying âactually we should fit emergency brakes to trolleys so they donât hit anyoneâ. Itâs not wrong exactly, but it doesnât address the problems raised by the original argument.