The Repugnant Conclusion is the implication, generated by a number of theories in population ethics, that an outcome with sufficiently many people with lives just barely worth living is better than an outcome with arbitrarily many people each arbitrarily well off. Derek Parfit, who first brought the Repugnant Conclusion to the attention of contemporary philosophers, stated it informally as follows: “For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living.”[1]
Further reading
Arrhenius, Gustaf, Jesper Ryberg & Torbjörn Tännsjö (2006) The repugnant conclusion, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, March (updated March 2017).
Blackorby, Charles, Walter Bossert & David Donaldson (2003) The axiomatic approach to population ethics, Politics, Philosophy & Economics, vol. 2, pp. 342–381.
Parfit, Derek (1984) Reasons and Persons, Oxford: Clarendon Press, ch. 17.
Spears, Dean & Mark Budolfson (2021) Repugnant conclusions, Social Choice and Welfare., vol. 57, pp. 567–588.
Zuber, Stéphane et al. (2021) What should we agree on about the repugnant conclusion?, Utilitas, pp. 1–5.
Related entries
population ethics | total view
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Parfit, Derek (1984) Reasons and Persons, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 388.