Can Parfit’s Appeal to Incommensurabilities Block the Continuum Argument for the Repugnant Conclusion?

Blocking the Continuum Argument for the Repugnant Conclusion by an appeal to incommensurabilities in value, as suggested in Parfit (2016), is an attractive option. But incommensurabilities (‘imprecise equalities’ in Parfit’s terminology) that need to be posited to achieve this result have to be very thoroughgoing – ‘persistent’ in the sense to be explained. While this persistency is highly atypical, it can be explained if incommensurability is interpreted on the lines of the fitting-attitudes analysis of value, as permissibility of divergent attitudes towards the items that are being compared. More precisely, it can be interpreted as parity – as the permissibility of opposing preferences with respect to the compared items. This account makes room for the persistency phenomena. Nevertheless, some of Parfit’s substantive value assumptions must be given up, to avoid implausible implications. In particular, his Simple View regarding the marginal value of added lives cannot be retained.

Getting Personal — The Intuition of Neutrality Re-interpreted

According to the Intuition of Neutrality, there is a range of wellbeing levels such that adding people with lives at these levels doesn’t make the world either better or worse. As lives in the neutral range can be good for those who live them, this intuition is in conflict with one of the main tenets of welfarism; it creates a disparity between what is good for a person and what is impersonally good. Adding a person with a good life needn’t make the world better. In “Broome and the Intuition of Neutrality” (2009) I suggested, but did not elaborate, a re-interpretation of the neutral range that would remove the problematic disparity. On this re-interpretation, a life at a level within the neutral range is not merely impersonally neutral; it is also neutral in its personal value: neither better nor worse for its owner than non-existence. Nevertheless, among such personally neutral lives, some might still be personally better or worse than others, provided that they are incommensurable in their personal value with non-existence. In this paper, I explore some of the implications of this ‘personalization’ of the Intuition of neutrality. In particular, I discuss its worrisome implications for neutral-range utilitarianism (NRU). While NRU was originally proposed as a way to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, it turns out this conclusion is re-instated on the new interpretation and, contrary to what was suggested in my 2009-paper, it remains repugnant. A related point is that it no longer holds that all personally good lives must be better for a person than personally neutral lives. Nor that all personally bad lives must be worse than personally neutral lives. While this might seem strange, it should be accepted. As for the worrisome implications of NRU, these implications do not undermine the personalized Neutrality Intuition itself. The latter might well be retained even if NRU is given up.

Calibrating Variable-Value Population Ethics

Variable-Value axiologies propose solutions to the challenges of population ethics. These views avoid Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion, while satisfying some weak instances of the Mere Addition principle (for example, at small population sizes). We apply calibration methods to Variable-Value views while assuming: first, some very weak instances of Mere Addition, and, second, some plausible empirical assumptions about the size and welfare of the intertemporal world population. We find that Variable-Value views imply conclusions that should seem repugnant to anyone who opposes Total Utilitarianism due to the Repugnant Conclusion. So, any wish to avoid repugnant conclusions is not a good reason to choose a Variable-Value view. More broadly, these calibrations teach us something about the effort to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion. Our results join a recent literature arguing that prior efforts to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion hinge on inessential features of the formalization of repugnance. Some of this effort may therefore be misplaced.

Nondeterminacy and Population Ethics

This paper synthesizes a general view out of Derek Parfit’s last views on how to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion and presents the general features of a plausible theory of population ethics based on Parfit’s suggestions. The paper argues that a plausible population axiology provides only partial orderings and implies that some outcomes are nondeterminate in their ranking. The paper shows, first, how the combination of what Parfit calls “imprecise equality” and the “Wide Dual Person-Affecting Principle” allows one to avoid both the Continuum Argument and the Improved Mere Addition Paradox. Second, the paper shows how this is enough to in principle also refute Gustaf Arrhenius’s impossibility theorems. Third, the paper suggests that a plausible population axiology must allow for nondeterminacy, that whatever the substance of the axiology is, it can only provide partial orderings of outcomes, and that if we revise Arrhenius’s adequacy conditions these can condition what a satisfactory population axiology looks like. Finally, the paper illustrates how one can apply normative theories that allow for nondeterminacy and also infer formal constraints on the theories in light of the consequences of their application.

A dilemma for lexical and Archimedean views in population axiology

Lexical views in population axiology can avoid the Repugnant Conclusion without violating Transitivity or Separability. However, they imply a dilemma: either some good life is better than any number of slightly worse lives, or else the ‘at least as good as’ relation on populations is radically incomplete. In this paper, I argue that Archimedean views face an analogous dilemma. I thus conclude that the lexical dilemma gives us little reason to prefer Archimedean views. Even if we give up on lexicality, problems of the same kind remain.

Who Cares? ―The COVID-19 Pandemic, Global Heating and the Future of Humanity1

The COVID-19 pandemic has engendered unprecedented drastic and costly measures to obviate the threat. Will something similar happen in relation to global heating? No, this is not likely. Mainly this has to do with a difference in the nature of collective action. Nation states protect their respective populations against the virus. With regard to global heating, we are facing the tragedy of the commons. No global government assumes responsibility for our common future. However, there may be another and further explanation lurking behind political inaction: many people, including our politicians, think that it does not matter if humanity goes extinct. It does matter, however. Strangely enough, the view that it matters is questioned by many important philosophers in the past and in the present, and it is hence controversial. Yet, it should be our common-sense stance to the problem. It is of the utmost importance that there will be sentient happy life on the globe for an indefinite time. Theoretically speaking, in order to recognize this, we need to accept some “total” view, implying what has been called the repugnant conclusion. Practically speaking, we should go to great length to rescue our human civilisation, even if this means that, for a while, we must endure all sorts of hardships such as a global enlightened despotism, or worse—a situation of life boat ethics.

What Should We Agree on about the Repugnant Conclusion?

The Repugnant Conclusion is an implication of some approaches to population ethics. It states, in Derek Parfit's original formulation, 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: 388)

Why Derek Parfit had reasons to accept the Repugnant Conclusion

Total views imply what Derek Parfit has called ‘the repugnant conclusion’. There are several strategies aimed at debunking the intuition that this implication is repugnant. In particular, it goes away when we consider the principle of unrestricted instantiation, according to which any instantiation of the repugnant conclusion must appear repugnant if we should be warranted in relying on it as evidence against total theories. However, there are instantiations of the conclusion where it doesn't seem to be at all repugnant. Hence there is nothing repugnant about the repugnant conclusion as such. The faults with total views have nothing to do with large numbers or with the conclusion as such. It is possible, if you like, to correct these putative faults even if you adopt some total view (different from utilitarianism).