I think some of what makes the repugnant conclusion counter-intuitive to some people might simply be that when they hear “life barely worth living” they think of a life that is quite unpleasant, and feel sad about lots of people living that life. This might either be:
People actually thinking of a net-negative life, e.g. because people with net-negative lives often still want to live because of survival instincts and/or hope for improvement, so people are thinking of “a life barely worth suffering through in the hope that it gets better”, which is not worth living for its own sake,
People thinking of lives that are net positive, but are easily instinctively compared to lives that are better, causing them to seem sad / tragic as an outcome for what they fail to be, even though they are good for what they are.
If I’m right, then you may already see surprising results when people compare things like “a small population of people with lives barely worth living” and “a large population of people with lives barely worth living”, which I expect people to be much more ambivalent about than “a small population of people with good lives” vs “a large population of people with good lives”.
(Obviously it makes sense to feel less strongly about the former comparison, but I also think people will feel more negatively rather than just more indifferent towards it.)
(To be clear, I’m conjecturing reasons why someone might be biased / irrational in rejecting the repugnant conclusion, but I don’t mean to imply that all rejections are of this kind. People may have other, more principled reasons as well / instead.)
People actually thinking of a net-negative life, e.g. because people with net-negative lives often still want to live because of survival instincts and/or hope for improvement, so people are thinking of “a life barely worth suffering through in the hope that it gets better”, which is not worth living for its own sake,
Ya, this would be denying the hypothetical. There may be ways to prevent this, though, by making descriptions of lives more explicit and suffering-free, like extremely short joyful lives, or happy animal lives, for animals with much narrower welfare ranges each.
People thinking of lives that are net positive, but are easily instinctively compared to lives that are better, causing them to seem sad / tragic as an outcome for what they fail to be, even though they are good for what they are.
This could depend on what you (or they) mean by “net positive” here. Or, they may just have intuitions about “net positive” and other things that are incompatible with these instinctive comparisons to better lives, but that doesn’t mean they should abandon the instinctive comparisons to better lives instead of abandoning their interpretation of net positive. It could be that their intuitions about “net positive” are the biased ones, or, more plausibly, in my view, there’s no objective fact of the matter (denying moral realism).
Instinctively comparing to better lives doesn’t seem necessarily biased or irrational (or no more so than any other intuitions). This could just be how people can compare outcomes. People with explicit person-affecting intuitions do something like this fairly explicitly. People who do so instinctively/implicitly may have (partially) person-affecting intuitions they haven’t made explicit.
If we describe this as biased, I’d say all preferences and moral intuitions are biased. I think proving otherwise requires establishing a stance-independent moral fact, i.e. moral realism, relative to which we can assess bias. Every other view looks biased relative to a view that disagrees with it in some case. Those who accept the Repugnant Conclusion are biased relative to views rejecting it.
Ya, this would be denying the hypothetical. There may be ways to prevent this, though, by making descriptions of lives more explicit and suffering-free, like extremely short joyful lives, or happy animal lives, for animals with much narrower welfare ranges each.
Yeah these are good ideas, although they come with their own complications. (A related thought experiment is how you feel about two short lives vs. one long life, with the same total lifetime and the same moment-to-moment quality of experience. I think they’re equally valuable, but I sympathise with people finding this counterintuitive, especially as you subdivide further.)
It could be that their intuitions about “net positive” are the biased ones, or, more plausibly, in my view, there’s no objective fact of the matter (denying moral realism).
The sense in which I’d want to call the view I described “objectively” biased / irrational, is that it says “this state of affairs is undesirable because a better state is possible”, but in fact the better state of affairs is not possible. Again, it’s denying the hypothetical, but may be doing so implicitly or subconsciously. The error is not a moral error but an epistemic one, so I don’t think you need moral realism.
I think some of what makes the repugnant conclusion counter-intuitive to some people might simply be that when they hear “life barely worth living” they think of a life that is quite unpleasant, and feel sad about lots of people living that life. This might either be:
People actually thinking of a net-negative life, e.g. because people with net-negative lives often still want to live because of survival instincts and/or hope for improvement, so people are thinking of “a life barely worth suffering through in the hope that it gets better”, which is not worth living for its own sake,
People thinking of lives that are net positive, but are easily instinctively compared to lives that are better, causing them to seem sad / tragic as an outcome for what they fail to be, even though they are good for what they are.
If I’m right, then you may already see surprising results when people compare things like “a small population of people with lives barely worth living” and “a large population of people with lives barely worth living”, which I expect people to be much more ambivalent about than “a small population of people with good lives” vs “a large population of people with good lives”.
(Obviously it makes sense to feel less strongly about the former comparison, but I also think people will feel more negatively rather than just more indifferent towards it.)
(To be clear, I’m conjecturing reasons why someone might be biased / irrational in rejecting the repugnant conclusion, but I don’t mean to imply that all rejections are of this kind. People may have other, more principled reasons as well / instead.)
Ya, this would be denying the hypothetical. There may be ways to prevent this, though, by making descriptions of lives more explicit and suffering-free, like extremely short joyful lives, or happy animal lives, for animals with much narrower welfare ranges each.
This could depend on what you (or they) mean by “net positive” here. Or, they may just have intuitions about “net positive” and other things that are incompatible with these instinctive comparisons to better lives, but that doesn’t mean they should abandon the instinctive comparisons to better lives instead of abandoning their interpretation of net positive. It could be that their intuitions about “net positive” are the biased ones, or, more plausibly, in my view, there’s no objective fact of the matter (denying moral realism).
Instinctively comparing to better lives doesn’t seem necessarily biased or irrational (or no more so than any other intuitions). This could just be how people can compare outcomes. People with explicit person-affecting intuitions do something like this fairly explicitly. People who do so instinctively/implicitly may have (partially) person-affecting intuitions they haven’t made explicit.
If we describe this as biased, I’d say all preferences and moral intuitions are biased. I think proving otherwise requires establishing a stance-independent moral fact, i.e. moral realism, relative to which we can assess bias. Every other view looks biased relative to a view that disagrees with it in some case. Those who accept the Repugnant Conclusion are biased relative to views rejecting it.
Yeah these are good ideas, although they come with their own complications. (A related thought experiment is how you feel about two short lives vs. one long life, with the same total lifetime and the same moment-to-moment quality of experience. I think they’re equally valuable, but I sympathise with people finding this counterintuitive, especially as you subdivide further.)
The sense in which I’d want to call the view I described “objectively” biased / irrational, is that it says “this state of affairs is undesirable because a better state is possible”, but in fact the better state of affairs is not possible. Again, it’s denying the hypothetical, but may be doing so implicitly or subconsciously. The error is not a moral error but an epistemic one, so I don’t think you need moral realism.