A nit picking (and late) point of order I can’t resist making because it’s a pet peeve of mine, re this part:
“the public perception seems to be that you can’t be an effective altruist unless you’re capable of staring the repugnant conclusion in the face and sticking to your guns, like Will MacAskill does in his tremendously widely-publicised and thoughtfully-reviewed book.”
You don’t say explicitly here that staring at the repugnant conclusion and sticking to your guns is specifically the result of being a bullet biting utilitarian, but it seems heavily implied by your framing. To be clear, this is roughly the argument in this part of the book:
-population ethics provably leads every theory to one or more of a set of highly repulsive conclusions most people don’t want to endorse
-out of these the least repulsive one (my impression is that this is the most common view among philosophers, though don’t quote me on that) is the repugnant conclusion
-nevertheless the wisest approach is to apply a moral uncertainty framework that balances all of these theories, which roughly adds up to a version of the critical level view, which bites a sandpapered down version of the repugnant conclusion as well as (editorializing a bit here, I don’t recall MacAskill noting this) a version of the sadistic conclusion more palatable and principled than the averagist one
Note that his argument doesn’t invoke utilitarianism anywhere, it just invokes the relevant impossibility theorems and some vague principled gesturing around semi-related dilemmas for person-affecting ethics. Indeed many non-utilitarians bite the repugnant conclusion bullet as well, what is arguably the most famous paper in defense of it was written by a deontologist.
I can virtually guarantee you that whatever clever alternative theory you come up with, it will take me all of five minutes to point out the flaws. Either it is in some crucial way insufficiently specific (this is not a virtue of the theory, actual actions are specific so all this does is hide which bullets the theory will wind up biting and when), or winds up biting one or more bullets, possibly different ones at different times (as for instance theories that deny the independence of irrelevant alternatives do). There are other moves in this game, in particular making principled arguments for why different theories lead to these conclusions in more or less acceptable ways, but just pointing to the counterintuitive implication of the repugnant conclusion is not a move in that game, but rather a move that is not obviously worse than any other in the already solved game of “which bullets exist to be bitten”.
Maybe the right approach to this is to just throw up our hands in frustration and say “I don’t know”, but then it’s hard to fault MacAskill, who again, does a more formalized version of essentially this rather than just biting the repugnant conclusion bullet.
Part of my pet peeve here is with discourse around population ethics, but also it feels like discourse around WWOTF is gradually drifting further away from anything I recognize from its contents. There’s plenty to criticize in the book, but to do a secondary reading skim from a few months after its release, you would think it was basically arguing “classical utilitarianism, therefore future”, which is not remotely what the book is actually like.
A nit picking (and late) point of order I can’t resist making because it’s a pet peeve of mine, re this part:
You don’t say explicitly here that staring at the repugnant conclusion and sticking to your guns is specifically the result of being a bullet biting utilitarian, but it seems heavily implied by your framing. To be clear, this is roughly the argument in this part of the book:
-population ethics provably leads every theory to one or more of a set of highly repulsive conclusions most people don’t want to endorse
-out of these the least repulsive one (my impression is that this is the most common view among philosophers, though don’t quote me on that) is the repugnant conclusion
-nevertheless the wisest approach is to apply a moral uncertainty framework that balances all of these theories, which roughly adds up to a version of the critical level view, which bites a sandpapered down version of the repugnant conclusion as well as (editorializing a bit here, I don’t recall MacAskill noting this) a version of the sadistic conclusion more palatable and principled than the averagist one
Note that his argument doesn’t invoke utilitarianism anywhere, it just invokes the relevant impossibility theorems and some vague principled gesturing around semi-related dilemmas for person-affecting ethics. Indeed many non-utilitarians bite the repugnant conclusion bullet as well, what is arguably the most famous paper in defense of it was written by a deontologist.
I can virtually guarantee you that whatever clever alternative theory you come up with, it will take me all of five minutes to point out the flaws. Either it is in some crucial way insufficiently specific (this is not a virtue of the theory, actual actions are specific so all this does is hide which bullets the theory will wind up biting and when), or winds up biting one or more bullets, possibly different ones at different times (as for instance theories that deny the independence of irrelevant alternatives do). There are other moves in this game, in particular making principled arguments for why different theories lead to these conclusions in more or less acceptable ways, but just pointing to the counterintuitive implication of the repugnant conclusion is not a move in that game, but rather a move that is not obviously worse than any other in the already solved game of “which bullets exist to be bitten”.
Maybe the right approach to this is to just throw up our hands in frustration and say “I don’t know”, but then it’s hard to fault MacAskill, who again, does a more formalized version of essentially this rather than just biting the repugnant conclusion bullet.
Part of my pet peeve here is with discourse around population ethics, but also it feels like discourse around WWOTF is gradually drifting further away from anything I recognize from its contents. There’s plenty to criticize in the book, but to do a secondary reading skim from a few months after its release, you would think it was basically arguing “classical utilitarianism, therefore future”, which is not remotely what the book is actually like.