I think some of what makes the repugnant conclusion counter-intuitive to some people might simply be that when they hear âlife barely worth livingâ 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/âor hope for improvement, so people are thinking of âa life barely worth suffering through in the hope that it gets betterâ, 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 /â tragic as an outcome for what they fail to be, even though they are good for what they are.
If Iâm right, then you may already see surprising results when people compare things like âa small population of people with lives barely worth livingâ and âa large population of people with lives barely worth livingâ, which I expect people to be much more ambivalent about than âa small population of people with good livesâ vs âa large population of people with good livesâ.
(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, Iâm conjecturing reasons why someone might be biased /â irrational in rejecting the repugnant conclusion, but I donât mean to imply that all rejections are of this kind. People may have other, more principled reasons as well /â 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/âor hope for improvement, so people are thinking of âa life barely worth suffering through in the hope that it gets betterâ, 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 /â 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 ânet positiveâ here. Or, they may just have intuitions about ânet positiveâ and other things that are incompatible with these instinctive comparisons to better lives, but that doesnât 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 ânet positiveâ are the biased ones, or, more plausibly, in my view, thereâs no objective fact of the matter (denying moral realism).
Instinctively comparing to better lives doesnât 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/âimplicitly may have (partially) person-affecting intuitions they havenât made explicit.
If we describe this as biased, Iâd 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 theyâre equally valuable, but I sympathise with people finding this counterintuitive, especially as you subdivide further.)
It could be that their intuitions about ânet positiveâ are the biased ones, or, more plausibly, in my view, thereâs no objective fact of the matter (denying moral realism).
The sense in which Iâd want to call the view I described âobjectivelyâ biased /â irrational, is that it says âthis state of affairs is undesirable because a better state is possibleâ, but in fact the better state of affairs is not possible. Again, itâs denying the hypothetical, but may be doing so implicitly or subconsciously. The error is not a moral error but an epistemic one, so I donât 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 âlife barely worth livingâ 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/âor hope for improvement, so people are thinking of âa life barely worth suffering through in the hope that it gets betterâ, 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 /â tragic as an outcome for what they fail to be, even though they are good for what they are.
If Iâm right, then you may already see surprising results when people compare things like âa small population of people with lives barely worth livingâ and âa large population of people with lives barely worth livingâ, which I expect people to be much more ambivalent about than âa small population of people with good livesâ vs âa large population of people with good livesâ.
(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, Iâm conjecturing reasons why someone might be biased /â irrational in rejecting the repugnant conclusion, but I donât mean to imply that all rejections are of this kind. People may have other, more principled reasons as well /â 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 ânet positiveâ here. Or, they may just have intuitions about ânet positiveâ and other things that are incompatible with these instinctive comparisons to better lives, but that doesnât 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 ânet positiveâ are the biased ones, or, more plausibly, in my view, thereâs no objective fact of the matter (denying moral realism).
Instinctively comparing to better lives doesnât 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/âimplicitly may have (partially) person-affecting intuitions they havenât made explicit.
If we describe this as biased, Iâd 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 theyâre equally valuable, but I sympathise with people finding this counterintuitive, especially as you subdivide further.)
The sense in which Iâd want to call the view I described âobjectivelyâ biased /â irrational, is that it says âthis state of affairs is undesirable because a better state is possibleâ, but in fact the better state of affairs is not possible. Again, itâs denying the hypothetical, but may be doing so implicitly or subconsciously. The error is not a moral error but an epistemic one, so I donât think you need moral realism.