In Defence of Repugnance

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. In Defence of Repugnance 1. The Repugnant Conclusion and the Benign Addition Proof 1.1 The ‘Repugnant’ Conclusion The following ethical theorem was proved a number of years ago by Derek Parfit, who, however, recoiled from his own progeny, cruelly naming it ‘the Repugnant Conclusion’: RC: For any world full of happy people, a world full of people whose lives were just barely worth living would be better, provided that the latter world contained enough people. Upon proving this proposition, Parfit introduced the name ‘the Mere Addition Paradox’ to denote the intellectual problem occasioned by the existence of the proof and its conflict with our intuitions. Since Parfit’s unwelcome discovery, several moral philosophers have taken RC under their wing, and several discoveries have been made that further strengthen RC. Despite all this, most philosophers continue to despise RC, citing (what else?) their intuitive sense of repugnance. At times, it seems that RC will never earn acceptance, no matter how strong the arguments in its favour. Because of this ongoing injustice, I have undertaken in this piece to offer a comprehensive defence of RC and response to its critics, in the hopes that RC will at last come to be accepted for what it is: one of the few genuine, nontrivial theorems of ethics discovered thus far. 1.2 The assumptions of population axiology The Repugnant Conclusion, like other theses in population ethics, asks us to compare possible worlds in terms of their overall value. I assume that such comparisons are possible, and that we may rely on our ethical intuitions in making such comparisons—whether directly or through reasoning based on abstract principles. These assumptions are nontrivial. In addition to those who doubt the validity of intuition as a source of ethical knowledge (Mackie 1977; Sinnott-Armstrong 2006), some philosophers reject the notion of the overall goodness of an event or state of affairs, or of improving or worsening the world as a whole. Geach (1956) holds that a thing can be a good F, for some particular sortal term ‘F’, but not good simply. Nor is there such a thing as a good event in his view, since ‘event’ is Parfit 1984, Ch. 17. I have slightly altered the principle from Parfit’s formulation. See Anglin 1977; Sikora 1978; 1981; Ng 1990, pp. 191–3; Attfield 1991, pp. 127–30; Ryberg 1996; Fotion 1997; Tännsjö 2002; and Broome 2004, pp. 210–14. See Parfit 1984; Temkin 1987; Locke 1987; Boonin-Vail 1996; Arrhenius 2000; Rachels 2001; Hurka 2003; Cowen 2004; and Blackorby, Bossert, and Donaldson 2004. too broad of a category for there to be standards for good events in the way that there are standards, for example, for good pens. Thomson holds that all goodness is goodness in a way—where being good in a way includes being a good F, being good for a given person, and being good for a given purpose, among other things. Like Geach, she denies that a thing can be good simply, that there are unqualifiedly good and bad events, or that there is such a thing as improving the world as a whole (for this reason, she sees consequentialism as incoherent). She characterises the contrary assumption as reflecting a confusion about the use of language (Thomson 2001, pp. 17–19). I do not attempt to disprove their views here; however, I shall assume that these philosophers are mistaken. When I ask myself whether it would be better for there to be one billion barely-worth-living lives or one million wonderful lives, it seems to me that I clearly understand the question, and thus that it is not incoherent or meaningless. I am not asking which would be better for some particular person or group, nor which would be better for some particular purpose, nor, in general, which would be better in some particular way. I am asking which would be better in the generic, agent-neutral sense—‘from the point of view of the universe’, in Sidgwick’s phrase. In asking this, I am not falling prey to a simple oversight about the proper use of language: I have explicitly considered whether the words ‘good’ and ‘better’ function only as Geach and Thomson describe, and it seems to me that they do not. Likewise, I do not attempt to refute skeptics about ethical intuition here. I assume that we have some prima facie justification for believing what our intuitions tell us regarding generic, agent-neutral value. These intuitions, however, are fallible, and a process of reasoning may often be needed to correct wayward intuitions. These assumptions are commonly taken for granted in population axiology, whether one accepts the Repugnant Conclusion or not. I believe, for example, that a world containing a billion people with slightly valuable lives is better than a world containing a million people each with lives 100 times better than in the first world. I base this conclusion on reasoning from certain intuitive axioms described below. My arguments are addressed to those who think, on the basis of intuition, that the first world would be overall worse than the second. 1.3 The Benign Addition Argument I begin with a variant of Parfit’s proof. Assume that there are levels of wellSidgwick 1907, p. 382. See Moore (1903), whom Thomson mistakenly accuses of linguistic confusion, for more on the concept of generic, agent-neutral goodness. I defend the epistemic value of ethical intuition elsewhere (2005, Ch. 5; 2008). The argument following in the text is inspired by Parfit (1984, Ch. 19; see also his 1986, pp. 14– 17), but I have taken considerable liberties. I have simplified the argument so that only two worldcomparisons are required, and I have substituted for Parfit’s (1984, p. 420) ‘mere addition’ a case of ‘benign addition’ (my term). Mere addition occurs when a group of people with positive welfare is added to the world without changing the welfare of any of the original people; benign addition occurs when a group of people with positive welfare is added while increasing the welfare of all of the original people (as in Parfit 1986, pp. 15–16; Tännsjö 2002, pp. 358–9). The purpose of the being, which may be represented by numbers. Positive numbers represent desirable levels of well-being, levels of well-being that render life worth living. Negative numbers represent states in which life is worth not living. ‘0’ represents a neutral state, in which it is a matter of indifference whether one continues in that state or ceases to exist. A possible world’s total utility is the sum of all its inhabitants’ levels of well-being. A world’s average utility is its total utility divided by the population size. We start with the following ethical axioms: The Benign Addition Principle: If worlds x and y are so related that x would be the result of increasing the well-being of everyone in y by some amount and adding some new people with worthwhile lives, then x is better than y with respect to utility. Non-anti-egalitarianism: If x and y have the same population, but x has a higher average utility, a higher total utility, and a more equal distribution of utility than y, then x is better than y with respect to utility. Transitivity: If x is better than y with respect to utility and y is better than z with respect to utility, then x is better than z with respect to utility. The qualifier ‘with respect to utility’ indicates that we are only considering the value that a world has in virtue of the levels of well-being enjoyed by its inhabitants; we are bracketing questions about such values as justice, freedom, knowledge, virtue, and so on. We are to assume, then, that all the worlds discussed are comparable in all those other dimensions. There remains an interesting question as to how we should evaluate worlds on the basis solely of their distributions of utility. Hereafter, I shall take these qualifications as read. To see how these principles necessitate the Repugnant Conclusion, consider three possible worlds (figure 1): World A: One million very happy people (welfare level 100). World A: The same one million people, slightly happier (welfare level 101), plus 99 million new people with lives barely worth living (welfare level 1). World Z: The same 100 million people as in A, but all with lives slightly better than the worse-off group in A (welfare level 3). latter change is to avoid objections stemming from the Person-Affecting Principle (see Sect. 3 below) and from Parfit’s (1984, pp. 430–32) view that A might fail to be worse than A without being either as good as or better than A. The notion of ‘adding’ people to a world need not be taken to denote a temporal process; rather, when we have imagined a possible world, we ‘add’ people to it by imagining another world just like the first but with additional people. A similar interpretation may be applied to the notion of ‘increasing’ people’s utility in a world. The name ‘Non-anti-egalitarianism’ derives from Ng (1989, p. 238), who uses the principle in an argument much like the Benign Addition Argument (Ng 1989, p. 240).