I defend the 'Repugnant' Conclusion that for any possible population of happy people, a population containing a sufficient number of people with lives barely worth living would be better. Four lines of argument converge on this conclusion, and the conclusion has a simple, natural theoretical explanation. The opposition to the Repugnant Conclusion rests on a bare appeal to intuition. This intuition is open to charges of being influenced by multiple distorting factors. Several theories of population ethics have been devised to (...) avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, but each generates even more counterintuitive consequences. The intuition opposing the Repugnant Conclusion is thus among the best candidates for an intuition that should be revised. (shrink)

In Derek Parfit's original formulation the Repugnant Conclusion is characterized 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” (Parfit 1984). The Repugnant Conclusion highlights a problem in an area of ethics which has become known as population ethics . The (...) last three decades have witnessed an increasing philosophical interest in questions such as “Is it possible to make the world a better place by creating additional happy creatures?” and “Is there a moral obligation to have children?” The main problem has been to find an adequate theory about the moral value of states of affairs where the number of people, the quality of their lives, and their identities may vary. Since, arguably, any reasonable moral theory has to take these aspects of possible states of affairs into account when determining the normative status of actions, the study of population ethics is of general import for moral theory. As the name indicates, Parfit finds the Repugnant Conclusion unacceptable and many philosophers agree. However, it has been surprisingly difficult to find a theory that avoids the Repugnant Conclusion without implying other equally counterintuitive conclusions. Thus, the question as to how the Repugnant Conclusion should be dealt with and, more generally, what it shows about the nature of ethics has turned the conclusion into one of the cardinal challenges of modern ethics. (shrink)

In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit cannot find a theory of well-being that solves the Non-Identity Problem, the Repugnant Conclusion, the Absurd Conclusion, and all forms of the Mere Addition Paradox. I describe a “Quasi-Maximizing” theory that solves them. This theory includes (i) the denial that being better than is transitive and (ii) the “Conflation Principle,” according to which alternative B is hedonically better than alternative C if it would be better for someone to have all the B-experiences. (i) entails (...) that Quasi-Maximization is not a maximizing theory, but (ii) ensures that its evaluations will often coincide with such theories. (shrink)

This article articulates and defends a dissolution of the so-called repugnant conclusion, which focuses on the notion of life worth living figuring both in Parfit's formulation of the repugnant conclusion and in most responses to such a conclusion. The proposed dissolution demonstrates that the notion of life worth living is plagued by multiple ambiguities and that these ambiguities, in turn, hamper meaningful debate about both the issue of whether the repugnant conclusion can be avoided and the issue of whether the (...) repugnant conclusion is actually repugnant. This result does not exclude that some modified versions of the repugnant conclusion may yield valuable insights about the value of populations and the tenability of different axiological/ethical theories. Still, if the proposed dissolution is correct, then the repugnant conclusion rests on an ill-defined notion and we lack the information required to assess the merits of the repugnant conclusion. (shrink)

The Repugnant Conclusion served an important purpose in catalyzing and inspiring the pioneering stage of population ethics research. We believe, however, that the Repugnant Conclusion now receives too much focus. Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion should no longer be the central goal driving population ethics research, despite its importance to the fundamental accomplishments of the existing literature.

This paper introduces a novel approach to evaluating theories of the good. It proposes evaluating these theories on the basis of their compatibility with the most plausible ways of calculating overall intrinsic value of a world. The paper evaluates the plausibility of egalitarianism using this approach, arguing that egalitarianism runs afoul of the more plausible ways of calculating the overall intrinsic value of a world. Egalitarianism conflicts with the general motivation for totalism and critical-level totalism, which is that independent contributions (...) of each individual’s life should be counted separately. It conflicts with the most plausible version of averagism because only the highly implausible simultaneous life-segment version of egalitarianism can make sense of inequality being disvaluable at a time. Egalitarianism combined with a diminishing marginal value theory also fails because it holds that, other things equal, the world is a better place when we reduce inequality by adding many people whose lives go very badly but whose sheer numbers lessen inequality. The discussion moves the debate about egalitarianism forward by circumventing the oft-discussed, but intractable, debate concerning the leveling down objection. It also reveals a promising new approach to critiquing theories of the good. (shrink)

-/- I start from three premises, roughly as follows: (1) that if possible world x is better than world y for every individual who exists in either world, then x is better than y; (2) that if x has a higher average utility, a higher total utility, and no more inequality than y, then x is better than y; (3) that better than is transitive. From these premises, it follows that benefits given to the worse off contribute no more to (...) the world’s value than equal-sized benefits given to the better off. (shrink)

Formal arguments have proven that avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion is impossible without rejecting one or more highly plausible population principles. To many, such proofs establish not only a deep challenge for axiology, but also pose an important practical problem of how policymaking can confidently proceed without resolving any of the central questions of population ethics. Here we offer deflationary responses: first to the practical challenge, and then to the more fundamental challenge for axiology. Regarding the practical challenge, we provide an (...) overview of recent literature that explores the implications for public policy of the Repugnant Conclusion and related puzzles within population ethics, and shows that there is more commonality in the implications of different population axiologies than is generally recognized. The upshot is that uncertainty about population ethics presents no important problem for policymaking, and the importance of population ethics to policymaking has been overstated. We then turn to more fundamental issues about axiology, and describe a new series of formal proofs that undermine the idea that any plausible axiology could avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, including those that are assumed to avoid it in the literature. The philosophical upshot is that the Repugnant Conclusion cannot plausibly be avoided, and so it is a mistake to assume as a constraint on a plausible axiology that it must be avoided, as is assumed by most of the literature in population ethics, including by all of the fundamental impossibility theorems. (shrink)

The spectre of the repugnant conclusion and the search for a population axiology that avoids it has endured as a focus of population ethics. This is in part because the repugnant conclusion is often interpreted as a defining problem for totalism, while the implications of averagism and related views are taken to illustrate the theoretical cost of avoiding the repugnant conclusion. However, we show that this interpretation cannot be sustained unless one focuses only on a special case of the repugnant (...) conclusion: namely, the subset of instances of the repugnant conclusion where there is no portion of the population unaffected by the choice between population outcomes (as in Derek Parfit’s original illustration). To avoid an inappropriate focus on only this proper subset of instances of the repugnant conclusion, we formulate a general characterization of the repugnant conclusion. We then prove formally that all leading welfarist axiologies imply this conclusion, including averagism and Ng’s Theory X0 , including probabilistic and ‘very repugnant’ variants that involve the addition of negative lives. We then prove that the full range of axiologies considered by population ethics each imply an extended version of the repugnant conclusion, including axiologies that are incomplete, intransitive, rank-dependent, person-affecting, and/or pluralist. The upshot is that the repugnant conclusion does not ultimately tell against any approach to axiology, and the methodological requirement to avoid the repugnant conclusion should be dropped from population axiology. (shrink)

This article introduces a non-human version of the non-identity problem and suggests that such a variation exposes weaknesses in several proposed person-focused solutions to the classic version of the problem. It suggests first that person-affecting solutions fail when applied to non-human animals and, second, that many common moral arguments against climate change should be called into question. We argue that a more inclusive version of the person-affecting principle, which we call the ‘patient-affecting principle’, captures more accurately the moral challenge posed (...) by the non-identity problem. We argue further that the failure of person-affecting solutions to solve non-human versions of the problem lend support to impersonal solutions to the problem which avoid issues of personhood or species identity. Finally, we conclude that some environmental arguments against climate change that rely on the notion of personal harm should be recast in impersonal terms. (shrink)