>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.
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.