You might be right that the world doesnât have to be twice as good just because it has twice as many people. But if you agree that a world with more people is better than one with fewer people, then what happens when I increase the population to 20B? At some point, you donât get a better worldâyou get a world where everyone is suffering and starving due to lack of resources. The paradox remains: if âmore lives = better worldâ leads to unbearable conditions, can we really say itâs better?
If you care about maximizing total welfare, then you will think adding extra people to the population is better until the point where the harm they do to others (via using up scarce resources) outweighs the good from creating the extra person. I donât know where that point is, but itâs not obvious that it is a point where âeveryone is suffering and starvingâ.
If you care about total welfare, then it is true that for any concievable state of the world, there is always a hypothetical better state of the world in which everyoneâs lives are only barely worth living, but the population is so large that the total amount of welfare is still higher. This is the repugnant conclusion.
The repugnant conclusion is a problem for people who claim to care about total welfare. But you can reject the repugnant conclusion without being forced to conclude that saving people makes the world worse. For example, person affecting views hold that an act can only be good or bad if it is good or bad for someone. Stopping someone from being born is not bad for anyone, because the hypothetical child does not exist. On the other hand, saving someone who already exists might still be seen as very good. The two things do not have to be treated as equivalent.
Or perhaps Iâm missing the point of your question completely, and it is more practical than theoretical. Are you just getting at the practical concern that saving lives will increase the current population, and that at its current level this is a bad thing? Like Ian Turner said, this then becomes a complicated empirical question about what the actual effect of saving lives on the population is. I donât know if the answer to that is clear.
Also, even if you think adding an extra person by creating a new life does more harm than good on the margin in todayâs world, and you believe that saving a life increases the population, it does not necessarily follow that saving a life also does more harm than good, because saving lives also has other big effects (e.g. if someone who already exists dies then the family and friends who are left behind suffer greatly).
I didnât fully understand your opinion, but I noticed youâre not against the principle of stopping births. My concern is that this line of thinking can open the gates to very dangerous ideas.
If you accept that saving people isnât always good, or that preventing certain births can be morally justified, then it becomes possible to argue that we should stop genetically defected people from having childrenâalso for the âgreater good.â Just like one might argue we should prevent births to avoid suffering, one could now argue that we should prevent certain types of people from being born in order to âimprove humanity.â
This is a very slippery slope. It might start with the idea of doing good, but it risks justifying things like eugenics. Once you accept that some lives shouldnât be saved or born, you risk treating some people as worth less than others.
I think a non-paradoxical answer is: âa world with 10 billion people is better, but probably not twice as goodâ.
The reason it might not be quite twice as good is because of the resource issues you mention, that might decrease average welfare.
You might be right that the world doesnât have to be twice as good just because it has twice as many people. But if you agree that a world with more people is better than one with fewer people, then what happens when I increase the population to 20B? At some point, you donât get a better worldâyou get a world where everyone is suffering and starving due to lack of resources. The paradox remains: if âmore lives = better worldâ leads to unbearable conditions, can we really say itâs better?
If you care about maximizing total welfare, then you will think adding extra people to the population is better until the point where the harm they do to others (via using up scarce resources) outweighs the good from creating the extra person. I donât know where that point is, but itâs not obvious that it is a point where âeveryone is suffering and starvingâ.
If you care about total welfare, then it is true that for any concievable state of the world, there is always a hypothetical better state of the world in which everyoneâs lives are only barely worth living, but the population is so large that the total amount of welfare is still higher. This is the repugnant conclusion.
The repugnant conclusion is a problem for people who claim to care about total welfare. But you can reject the repugnant conclusion without being forced to conclude that saving people makes the world worse. For example, person affecting views hold that an act can only be good or bad if it is good or bad for someone. Stopping someone from being born is not bad for anyone, because the hypothetical child does not exist. On the other hand, saving someone who already exists might still be seen as very good. The two things do not have to be treated as equivalent.
Person-affecting views have different problems (the non-identity problem, and giving non-transitive ranking of outcomes). But they avoid the repugnant conclusion without implying that saving people is bad.
Or perhaps Iâm missing the point of your question completely, and it is more practical than theoretical. Are you just getting at the practical concern that saving lives will increase the current population, and that at its current level this is a bad thing? Like Ian Turner said, this then becomes a complicated empirical question about what the actual effect of saving lives on the population is. I donât know if the answer to that is clear.
Also, even if you think adding an extra person by creating a new life does more harm than good on the margin in todayâs world, and you believe that saving a life increases the population, it does not necessarily follow that saving a life also does more harm than good, because saving lives also has other big effects (e.g. if someone who already exists dies then the family and friends who are left behind suffer greatly).
I didnât fully understand your opinion, but I noticed youâre not against the principle of stopping births. My concern is that this line of thinking can open the gates to very dangerous ideas.
If you accept that saving people isnât always good, or that preventing certain births can be morally justified, then it becomes possible to argue that we should stop genetically defected people from having childrenâalso for the âgreater good.â Just like one might argue we should prevent births to avoid suffering, one could now argue that we should prevent certain types of people from being born in order to âimprove humanity.â
This is a very slippery slope. It might start with the idea of doing good, but it risks justifying things like eugenics. Once you accept that some lives shouldnât be saved or born, you risk treating some people as worth less than others.