I thought the Mere Addition Paradox and the Repugnant Conclusion were the same thing?
Either way, I do think it's useful to distinguish two versions as you have, since the main reason I find the RC counterintuitive is already explained by my intuitions about the Mere Addition Paradox, and the RC brings in additional considerations about number vs average value, which are irrelevant to me.
Yeah, I guess some people use the names interchangeably. I agree that it can be useful to look at them separately, which was done in Fehige (1998). Their difference is also described in the following way (on Wikipedia):
[Parfit] claims that on the face of it, it may not be absurd to think that B is better than A. Suppose, then, that B is in fact better than A ... . It follows that this revised intuition must hold in subsequent iterations of the original steps. For example, the next iteration would add even more people to B+, and then take the average of the total happiness, resulting in C-. If these steps are repeated over and over, the eventual result will be Z, a massive population with the minimum level of average happiness; this would be a population in which every member is leading a life barely worth living. Parfit claims that it is Z that is the repugnant conclusion.
I'm curious about your takes on the value-inverted versions of the repugnant and very-repugnant conclusions. It's easy to "make sense" of a preference (e.g. for positive experiences) by deciding not to care about it after all, but doing that doesn't actually resolve the weirdness in our feelings about aggregation.
Once you let go of trying to reduce people to a 1-dimensional value first and then aggregate them second, as you seem to be advocating here in ss. 3/4, I don't see why we should try to hold onto simple rules like "minimize this one simple thing." If the possibilities we're allowed to have preferences about are not 1-dimensional aggregations, but are instead the entire self-interacting florescence of life's future, then our preferences can get correspondingly more interesting. It's like replacing preferences over the center of mass of a sculpture with preferences about its pose or theme or ornamentation.
Thanks!
I'm curious about your takes on the value-inverted versions of the repugnant and very-repugnant conclusions.
I’m not sure what exactly they are. If either of them means to “replace a few extremely miserable lives with many, almost perfectly untroubled ones”, then it does not sound repugnant to me. But maybe you meant something else.
(Perhaps see also these comments about adding slightly less miserable people to hell to reduce the most extreme suffering therein, which seems, to me at least, to result in an overall more preferable population when repeated multiple times.)
It's easy to "make sense" of a preference (e.g. for positive experiences) by deciding not to care about it after all, but doing that doesn't actually resolve the weirdness in our feelings about aggregation.
Did you mean
If 1, then I would note that e.g. the antifrustrationist and tranquilist accounts would care about that subjective preference, as they would see it as a kind of dissatisfaction with the preferrer’s current situation. Yet when we are looking at only causally isolated lives, these views, like all minimalist views, would say that there is no need to create dissatisfied (or even perfectly fulfilled) beings for their own sake in the first place. (In other words, creating and fulfilling a need is only a roundabout way to not having the need in the first place, unless we also consider the positive roles of this process for other needs, which we arguably should do in the practical world.)
If 2, then I’d be eager to understand what seems to be missing with the previous “need-based” account.
(I agree that the above points are unrelated to how to aggregate e.g. small needs vs. extreme needs. But in a world with extreme pains, I might e.g. deprioritize any amount of isolated small pains, i.e. small pains that do not increase the risk of extreme pains nor constitute a distraction or opportunity cost for alleviating extreme pains. Perhaps one could intuitively think of this as making “the expected amount of extreme pains” the common currency. Of course, that kind of aggregation may seem repugnant between a few extreme pains vs. a vast amount of slightly less extreme pains, but in practice we would also account for their wide ”error bars” and non-isolated nature.)
Once you let go of trying to reduce people to a 1-dimensional value first and then aggregate them second, as you seem to be advocating here in ss. 3/4, I don't see why we should try to hold onto simple rules like "minimize this one simple thing." If the possibilities we're allowed to have preferences about are not 1-dimensional aggregations, but are instead the entire self-interacting florescence of life's future, then our preferences can get correspondingly more interesting. It's like replacing preferences over the center of mass of a sculpture with preferences about its pose or theme or ornamentation.
The claim of axiological monism is only that our different values ultimately reduce to one value. Without a common measure, it would seem that multiple independent values are incommensurable and cannot be measured against each other even in principle.
So no one claims that people would descriptively follow only a single guiding principle, nor that it would be simple to e.g. decide how to prioritize between our intertwined and often contradictory preferences. Our needs and preferences can be “about” anything, but if e.g. someone prefers the existence of additional beings, we should plausibly weigh the magnitude of this (unfulfilled) preference against the potential unfulfilled needs that those beings might suffer from. And it seems questionable that e.g. someone’s aesthetic preferences could in themselves override another’s need to avoid extreme suffering (cf. gladiator games).
First published in 2021. Revised in 2024. Chapter 3 in the book “Minimalist Axiologies: Alternatives to ‘Good Minus Bad’ Views of Value”.
Readable as a standalone post.
Minimalist views of value (axiologies) are evaluative views that define betterness solely in terms of the absence or reduction of independent bads, such as suffering. This chapter looks at minimalist axiologies that are impartial and welfarist (i.e. concerned with the welfare of all sentient beings), with a focus on their theoretical and practical implications. For example, these views reject the ‘Very Repugnant Conclusion’ implied by many offsetting (‘good minus bad’) views in population ethics.
Minimalist views are arguably neglected in population ethics due to their apparent implication that no life could be axiologically positive. After all, minimalist views reject the concept of independent goods. Yet these views are perfectly compatible with the notion of relational goods, and can thereby endorse relationally positive lives that make a positive difference for other beings.
This notion of relationally positive value is entirely excluded by the standard, restrictive assumption of treating lives as isolated value-containers. However, this assumption of ‘all else being equal’ is practically always false, enabling the possibility of highly positive lives according to minimalist views.
Minimalist views become more intuitive when we adopt a relational view of the overall value of individual lives, that is, when we don’t track only the causally isolated “contents” of these lives, but also their (often far more significant) causal roles.
Axiology is the philosophical study of value.[1] Here, I will focus on questions related to independent value, relational value, and resolving conflicts between values.
Axiology is centrally concerned with the question of what things, if any, have independent value, also known as intrinsic value.
‘Axiologies’ in the plural refer to specific views on this axiological question. Once we assume a specific axiology — that is, a view that ascribes independent value to certain entities or states — we may then understand the value of all other things as extrinsic, instrumental, or relational in terms of their effects on these entities or states.
This distinction between independent and relational value applies at the level of our axiological theory. The distinction can blur at the level of our everyday perception, and this blurring is often practically adaptive.
For instance, we may both formally deny that something has independent value, yet also correctly perceive that it does have value, without constantly unpacking what this value relationally depends on. Our decision-making tends to be more efficient when we perceive the various objects of our goals as simply having value, even when these goals are only indirectly related to what we ultimately value.
Thus, we may do well in practice by treating many widely-held values — such as autonomy, health, or friendship — as independently valuable things to safeguard and promote, at least until they run into conflicts with each other. When they conflict, we have reason to clarify what the underlying or ultimate source of their value might be.[2]
To figure out what things have independent value, we commonly devise thought experiments where only a single thing is meant to be changing, all else being equal. We then ask our supposedly value-tracking intuitions whether it seems true that this isolated change is accompanied by a change in value.
Based on such thought experiments of isolated value, one might come to endorse at least two, independent standards of value: “The more positive pleasure (or bliss), the better”, and “The less agony, the better”.
At first glance, these two standards of value may seem to be perfectly compatible with each other, given that the more blissful a mind-moment is, the less agonized it is. Yet dilemmas arise if we want to simultaneously follow both standards more widely, as they are not always perfectly anticorrelated. That is, we often cannot both “maximize bliss” and “minimize agony” at the same time, because even as these two guiding principles may seem to be polar opposites, they do not always constitute a coherent twin-principle like “Head North, Avoid South”.
The field of population ethics has highlighted ways in which these principles come apart, pulling our intuitions into mutually incompatible directions. And it has highlighted the lack of consensus about how to compare the intrinsic value of positive pleasure against the intrinsic disvalue of agony.[3]
To resolve conflicts between the seemingly intrinsic dual values of positive pleasure versus agony, one option is to establish acceptable tradeoff ratios (or “priority weights”) between them, so as to clarify how much a change in one weighs against a change in another.
Another approach is to reject the assumption that there are any truly independent goods to begin with. This is the approach of minimalist axiologies, where the value of purported goods like bliss is weighed in terms of how well they reduce bads like agony. (Note that according to some views, such as views in the Epicurean tradition, bliss is understood as the complete absence of any pain or unpleasantness, and hence “maximizing bliss” and “minimizing unpleasantness” are indeed equivalent twin-principles on this conception of bliss.[4])
Minimalist axiologies essentially say: “The less this, the better”. In other words, their fundamental standard of value is about the avoidance of something, and not about the maximization of something else.
To list a few examples, minimalist axiologies may be formulated in terms of avoiding…
This chapter looks at minimalist axiologies that are impartial[13] and welfarist[14]: focused on the welfare of all sentient beings.[15]
In tradeoffs between multiple, seemingly independent values, minimalist axiologies avoid the issue of having to establish independent priority weights for different goods and bads so as to resolve their mutual conflict. (By contrast, offsetting axiologies face this issue in tradeoffs such as creating bliss for many at the cost of agony for others.)
Instead of using different standards of value for goods and bads, minimalist axiologies construe ‘positive value’ in a purely relational way, with regard to an overall avoidance goal for all beings. This transforms the apparent conflict between goods and bads into an empirical question about the degree to which the goods can reduce the bads, and thus still be genuinely valuable in that way.
When we look at only one kind of change in isolation, it may seem intuitive that bliss is independently good and agony independently bad. Yet we may also feel internally conflicted about tradeoffs where value and disvalue need to be compared with each other, so that we could say whether some tradeoff between them is “net positive” or not. Put differently, we may have both promotion intuitions and avoidance intuitions that seem to lack a common language.
To solve these dilemmas, minimalist axiologies would respect promotion intuitions to the degree that they are conducive to the overall avoidance goal, yet reject the creation of more (isolated) value for some at the cost of disvalue for others.[16]
For example, suffering-focused minimalism would respect the promotion of wellbeing in the place of suffering, but not of wellbeing at the cost of suffering, all else equal.[17]
Thus, minimalist axiologies sidestep the problem of having to find acceptable “tradeoff ratios” between independent goods versus bads, replacing it with the relational question of how the objects of our promotion intuitions could help with the overall avoidance goal.
Minimalist axiologies may appear to imply that “No life could be positive or worth living”. And such a conclusion might seem implausible to our intuitions, which might say that “Surely lives can be positive or worth living”.
Yet minimalist axiologies merely imply that individual lives cannot have positive value when understood as “isolated value-containers”, which they never are in the real world.[18] And given that the “no life could be worth living” conclusion only follows when we adopt this highly unrealistic isolated view of individual lives, our intuitive objection to this conclusion need not stem from the sentiment that “Surely lives can have at least some isolated positive value”. Instead, we might reject the conclusion because we reject, or fail to accurately imagine, its unrealistic premise of treating lives as isolated value-containers.
According to minimalist views, positive value is not something that we “have”, “contain”, or “accumulate” in isolation, but rather something that we “do” for a wider benefit. This relational view of positive value may conflict with the Western cultural tendency[19] to see individuals as “independent, self-contained, autonomous entities”[20] and to ascribe positive value to the collection of particular experiences for their own sake. Thus, minimalist views may be neglected by the heavily Western-influenced field of population ethics, where we often draw unrealistically tight boxes around individual lives in our quest to isolate that which makes a life valuable or worth living.
To better explore our intuitions about supposedly isolated positive value without the confounding influence of our positive roles-tracking intuitions, it may be helpful to explicitly imagine that we are offered the chance to create a causally isolated black box whose existence has no effects beyond itself. How positive could the box be? Minimalist views say that it cannot be positive at all, regardless of what it contains.
With all that said, the next section will consider the implications of minimalist versus offsetting views when we do play by the rules of population ethics and draw boxes around the contents of individual lives. Overall, many counterintuitive conclusions in population ethics may be attributed to the view of positive value as an independent and independently aggregable phenomenon, or a “plus-point” that can be summed up or stacked in isolation from the positive roles of the individual lives or experiences that contain it.
Population ethics is “the philosophical study of the ethical problems arising when our actions affect who is born and how many people are born in the future”.[21] A subfield of population ethics is population axiology, which is about figuring out what makes one state of affairs better than another. Some have argued that this is a tricky question to answer without running into counterintuitive conclusions, at least if we make the assumption of independently positive lives.[22] Minimalist axiologies do not make this assumption, and hence they avoid the conclusions that are pictured in the three diagrams in the next three subsections.[23]
Before looking at the diagrams, let us already note a way in which people might implicitly disagree about how to interpret them. Namely, some of the diagrams contain a horizontal line that indicates a “zero level” of “neutral welfare”, which may be interpreted in different ways. For example, when diagrams illustrating the (Very) Repugnant Conclusion contain lives that are “barely worth living”, some may think that these lives involve “slightly more happiness than suffering”, while others may think, as Derek Parfit originally did, that they “never suffer”.[24]
A different interpretation of the horizontal line is used in antifrustrationism by Christoph Fehige, where welfare is defined as the avoidance of preference dissatisfaction (or ‘frustration’). When Fehige’s own diagrams contain the horizontal line, it just means the point above which the person has “a weak preference for leading her life rather than no life”.[25] On Fehige’s view, the lives with “very high welfare” are much better off than the lives “barely worth living” that still contain a lot of frustration.
Yet if we assume that the lives above the horizontal line have all their preferences satisfied, “never suffer”, and have no bads in their lives whatsoever, then minimalist axiologies would find no problem in the Mere-Addition Paradox or the Repugnant Conclusion. Even so, they would still not strictly prefer larger populations, finding all populations of such problem-free lives rather equally perfect (in causal isolation).
However, it seems unusual to imagine that the lives “barely worth living” would be subjectively completely untroubled or “never suffer”. Thus, we will here assume that the lives just above the line are not completely untroubled, as seems common in population ethics.[26]
Derek Parfit’s Mere-Addition Paradox (Figure 3.1[27]) is based on a comparison of four populations. Each bar represents a distinct group of beings. The bar’s width indicates their numbers, and the height their level of welfare. We assume that every being in this diagram has “a life worth living”. (The populations in A+ and B− consist of two isolated groups; the population in B is simply the two groups of B− combined into one.)
The paradox results from the following evaluations that together contradict some people’s intuitive preference for the high-average population of A over the lower-average population of B:
This paradox is a problem for those who strongly feel that “A is better than B”, yet who are also sympathetic to total utilitarianism. One reason to avoid average utilitarianism or averagism is that it implies “sadistic conclusions”, in which average welfare is increased by the addition of hellish lives.[28] Yet if we assume that the lives in B contain more subjective problems than do the lives in A, then minimalist axiologies would prefer A over B without averagism.
Essentially, Fehige’s solution is to assume that the welfare of a life depends entirely on its level of preference dissatisfaction or ‘frustration’. On this view, a population of satisfied beings cannot, other things being equal, be improved by the “mere addition” of new, less satisfied beings. This is because the frustration of those new beings is an additional subjective problem, as compared to the non-problematic non-existence of their imaginary counterparts in the smaller population.[29]
While this may be a theoretically tidy solution to the Mere-Addition Paradox, critics have objected that it depends on a theory of welfare that they find to be counterintuitive, incomplete, or unconvincing.
However, we would be wise to abstain from hastily dismissing minimalist views as being counterintuitive, because there are plenty of ways to interpret them in more intuitive ways without losing their theoretical benefits. A lot of their perceived incompleteness might result from the thought experiments themselves, which imply that we are not actually supposed to imagine the kind of lives that are familiar to us, but only the hypothetically isolated kind of lives that have absolutely no positive roles beyond themselves.
By continuing the logic of “mere addition”, we arrive at the ‘Repugnant Conclusion’ (Figure 3.2[30]):
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 is a problem for all moral theories which hold that welfare at least matters when all other things are equal.[31]
Minimalist axiologies avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, as they deny that the lives “barely worth living” would constitute a vast heap of independent “plus-points” in the first place. For example, Fehige would assume that the lives with “a very high quality of life” would be quite free from problems, which is better, all else equal, than a much larger set of lives that still have a lot of their preferences unsatisfied.
As noted by another commenter on Fehige’s paper:
Among its virtues, [antifrustrationism] rescues total utilitarianism from the repugnant conclusion. If utility is measured by the principle of harm avoidance instead of aggregated preference satisfaction, utilitarianism does not, as the accusation often goes, entail that it is better the more (acceptably) happy lives there are[, other things being equal].[32]
Fehige’s theory of welfare is seemingly dismissed by some philosophers on the grounds that it would, counterintuitively, deny the possibility of lives worth living:
However, a theory about welfare that denies the possibility of lives worth living is quite counter-intuitive [Ryberg, 1996]. It implies, for example, that a life of one year with complete preference satisfaction has the same welfare as a completely fulfilled life of a hundred years, and has higher welfare than a life of a hundred years with all preferences but one satisfied. Moreover, the last life is not worth living (Arrhenius 2000b).[33]
Yet this objection seems to imply that a life could be worth living only for its own sake, namely for some kind of satisfaction that it independently “contains”, and to deny that a life could be worth living for its positive roles. Again, we need to properly account for the fact that Fehige’s model is only comparing lives in causal isolation.
As soon as we step outside of the hypothetical, isolated case where “other things are equal” and start comparing these lives in our actual, interpersonal world, we may well see how, even on minimalist terms, the subjectively perfect one-year life could be much less valuable (overall, for all beings) than would be the subjectively near-perfect century. After all, many of our preferences and preferred actions have significant implications for the welfare of others.
However, it is not necessarily counterintuitive to prefer the perfect year, or even non-existence, over the imperfect century in the hypothetical case of complete causal isolation, where we can make no positive difference in any way. Regardless of how we felt during the year, or during the century, others would live as if we never had. Thus, we may question the overall worth of extending our life solely for our own sake in the experience machine, or in an equally solipsistic preference satisfaction machine, provided that it solves no problem beyond ourselves.
The Repugnant Conclusion was termed repugnant due to the intuition that a legion of lives “barely worth living” cannot be better than a smaller population of lives that each have a very high welfare. Some say that in this case, the intuition is wrong and that we should “bite the bullet” and follow the utilitarian math of additive aggregationism.[34] However, presumably fewer people would accept the ‘Very Repugnant Conclusion’ (VRC), in which the better world, according to many offsetting views, contains a lot of subjectively hellish lives, supposedly “compensated for” by a vast number of lives that are barely worth living (Figure 3.3[35]):
There seems to be more trouble ahead for total [offsetting] utilitarians. Once they assign some positive value, however small, to the creation of each person who has a weak preference for leading her life rather than no life, then how can they stop short of saying that some large number of such lives can compensate for the creation of lots of dreadful lives, lives in pain and torture that nobody would want to live?[36]
In other words:
Let W1 be a world filled with very happy people leading meaningful lives [A]. Then, according to total [offsetting] utilitarianism, there is a world W2 which is better than W1, where there is a population of [purely] suffering people [N] much larger than the total population of W1, and everyone else has lives barely worth living [Z] - but the population is very huge.[37]
One way to avoid the VRC is to follow Fehige’s suggestion and interpret utility as “a measure of avoided preference frustration”. On this view, utilitarianism “asks us to minimize the amount of preference frustration”, which leads us to prefer W1 over W2.[38] As noted by Fehige, “Maximizers of preference satisfaction should instead call themselves minimizers of preference frustration.”[39]
Every minimalist axiology would prefer W1 over W2 due to being structurally similar to Fehige’s view — that is, none of them would say that the supposed “plus-points” of W2 could somehow independently “counterbalance” the agony of the others, regardless of the number of the lives “barely worth living”.
In contrast, the VRC is a problem for many offsetting axiologies besides purely hedonistic ones:
Consider an axiology that maintains that any magnitude of suffering can be morally outweighed by a sufficiently great magnitude of preference satisfaction, virtue, novelty, beauty, knowledge, honor, justice, purity, etc., or some combination thereof. It is not apparent that substituting any of these values for happiness in the VRC makes it any more palatable[.][40]
Minimalist views also avoid what are arguably even stronger objections against offsetting total views, such as the theoretical choices of ‘Creating hell to please the blissful’ (Figure 4.5) and ‘Intense bliss with hellish cessation’ (Figure 5.2). More on the comparative implications between minimalist and offsetting views in the next chapters.
In general, a way to avoid the VRC (and the two other conclusions above) is to hold that ethics is about solving and preventing problems, and not about creating new, unneeded goods elsewhere for their own sake. On this view, any choice between two populations (all else equal) is based on considering which population contains the overall greater amount of problematic states, such as extreme suffering.
This problem-focused view rejects the metaphor that ethical problems could be “counterbalanced” instead of prevented:
[Only] the existence of such problematic states imply genuine victims, while failures to create supposed positive goods (whose absence leaves nobody troubled) do not imply any real victims — such “failures” are mere victimless “crimes”. … According to this view, we cannot meaningfully “cancel out” or “undo” a problematic state found somewhere by creating some other state elsewhere.[41]
Generally, the metaphor of ethical counterbalancing may stem from our common tendency to think in terms of polar opposites. When we speak of a ‘negative’ state, we may naturally assume that it could be counterbalanced by a ‘positive’ state of equal magnitude.[42] Yet the mere observation of a negative state does not imply the possibility of a corresponding positive or ‘anti-negative’ state.[43] The opposite of a problematic state may, instead, be just an unproblematic state, with no equivalent ‘anti-problematic’ state to counterbalance it.[44]
The ceteris paribus assumption is often translated into English as something like “all else equal”, “all else unchanged”, or “other things held constant”.[45] That is, we exclude any changes other than those explicitly mentioned. When we make this assumption in population ethics, the idea is to compare any two hypothetical populations only with respect to their explicit differences, such as the level and distribution of welfare among those populations, with no other factors influencing our judgment.
Yet we need to be mindful of the potential pitfalls when we compare populations in this way. For instance, it is much easier said than done to completely rule out the influence of all factors other than those explicitly mentioned. We may think we have done it upon reading the words “all else equal”, yet we may in fact need to spend some time and imaginative effort to actually prevent such supposedly external factors from influencing our judgment.
This pitfall is exacerbated by the fact that the “all else equal” assumption is often left highly implicit, with little attention paid to how radically it changes what we are talking about. Quite often, we only see it as a parenthetical (as if ignorable) remark, with no instruction for how to best account for it. Or we may not see it at all, as in situations where it is an unvoiced background assumption, in which we are trusted to have the contextual awareness to take it properly into account even with no explicit reminder to do so.
How we account for the ceteris paribus assumption can influence the distance that we see between theory and practice, which in turn can influence our potentially action-guiding views, such as our views on what kinds of lives can be positive or worth living (and what for).
To illustrate, let us imagine a scenario where the ceteris paribus assumption would actually be true: namely, we are comparing only “isolated value-containers” or “isolated Matrix-lives” that never interact with each other in any way.[46] If this sounds radical, then we may not always realize how radical the assumption in fact is. After all, we may intuitively assume that “positive lives” would also play positive social roles and make a difference beyond themselves. Yet these factors are supposed to be ruled out when we are comparing lives ceteris paribus, solely for their own sake.
In effect, when we apply the ceteris paribus assumption to the value of individual lives, we are restricted to a kind of “isolated view” of lives worth living, as if that which makes a life worth living would necessarily have to be something that it contains, rather than its roles and relations beyond itself.
Our practical intuitions about the overall value of lives — such as of all the lives “barely worth living” in the (Very) Repugnant Conclusion — may implicitly be tracking not only the “contents” of these lives (i.e. their own level of welfare), but also their overall effects on the welfare of others.
And in practice, it may indeed seem like a repugnantly bad idea to trade away a high-welfare population for a legion of lives “barely worth living”, as the latter might seem to not have enough wellbeing as a resource to adequately take care of each other in the long term. (A practical intuition in the opposite direction is also possible, namely that a larger population could create more goods, insights, and resources that everyone could benefit from, and thus have a brighter future in the long run.)
Yet to give any weight to such instrumental effects, even implicitly, would already conflate our evaluation of those hypothetical lives solely for their own sake. After all, we are supposed to compare only the level and distribution of welfare as shown in the population ethics diagrams, and to ignore our practical intuitions about how the lives or populations might evolve or unfold in different ways if interpreted as the starting point of a story in the real world.
Our practical intuitions are adapted for an interpersonal world with a time dimension: two features of life that are difficult for us to put aside when entering thought experiments about the value of other beings. Thus, we may need to explicitly remind ourselves that the population ethics diagrams are, in effect, already depicting the complete outcome, with no relevant interactions or time-evolutions left outside the box.
Even if minimalist views avoid many of the conclusions that have been called tricky problems for other views in population ethics, one might still worry that minimalist views could have absurd implications in practice. Yet regardless of what specific implications one has in mind, it is worth noting that many of them might stem not only from the “isolated view” that ignores the positive roles of individual lives, but also from the hasty logic of a “naive” form of consequentialism, which further ignores the positive roles of various widely established social norms, such as those of respecting autonomy, cooperation, and nonviolence.[47]
A naive consequentialism is not based on a nuanced view of expected value thinking,[48] and can instead fall victim to a kind of “narrative misconception” of consequentialism, in which the view would support “any means necessary” to bring about its axiologically ideal “end state”.
One could argue that the idea of a ‘utilitronium shockwave’ (i.e. turning all accessible matter into pure bliss) amounts to such a misconception about the practical implications of classical utilitarianism.[49] In the case of minimalist axiologies, this misconception looks like the claim that we must, at any cost, “seek a future where problems are eventually reduced to zero”, which is very different from minimizing the amount of problems over all time in expectation.
After all, only the second kind of thinking — namely, expected value thinking without any fixed destination — is sensitive to risks of making things worse. By contrast, the first, misconceived view is more like fixating on a particular story of what we must eventually achieve at some particular time in the future.
And instead of being sensitive to risks of making things worse, the story might include a point, as many stories do, at which the protagonists must engage in an “all in” gamble to ensure that they bring about an ideal world “in the end”. In other words, the narrative misconception of consequentialism might hold that “what justifies the means” is the endpoint, or the possibility of reaching it, rather than the overall minimization of problems with no fixed destination.
More concretely, a naive version of minimalism might lead us to ignore the positive norms of everyday morality as soon as there would (apparently) be even the slightest chance of bringing about its hypothetically ideal “end state”, such as an empty world, even if doing so would violate the preferences of others or risk multiplying the amount of problems in the future by many orders of magnitude.
By contrast, a nuanced or “sophisticated” version of minimalism would be concerned with the “total outcome” — which spans all of time — and be highly sensitive to the risk of making things worse overall. For instance, any aggressively violent strategy for “preventing problems” would very likely backfire in various ways, such as by undermining one’s credibility as a potential ally for large-scale cooperation, ruining the reputation of one’s (supposedly altruistic) cause, and eroding the positive norm of respecting individual autonomy.[50]
Given that the backfire risks depend on complex interactions that happen over considerable spans of time, we are likely to pay them insufficient attention if our thinking of real-world interventions is as simplistic as the boxes that collapse hypothetical populations into two-dimensional images. Of course, a nuanced, practical minimalism would not be like thinking in terms of boxes, and would instead take the relational factors and empirical uncertainties into account.[51]
What, then, do these views imply in practice, assuming a sophisticated minimalism over all time? The second half of Magnus Vinding’s Suffering-Focused Ethics is an accessible and extensive treatment of basically the same question, particularly for views that prioritize minimizing extreme suffering.[52] That is, the practical implications of minimalist views are probably in large part the same as those of many suffering-focused views.
Yet minimalist views differ from at least some suffering-focused views in one respect, which is that minimalist views work completely without the concept of independent positive value, placing full emphasis on relational positive value.
For that reason, minimalist views may appear as if they were somehow uniquely opposed to many things that we might intuitively cherish as being intrinsically valuable — as if none of our intuitively positive pursuits would have any positive worth or weight to justify their inevitable costs.
Yet minimalist views need not imply anything radical about the quantity of positive value that we intuitively attribute to many things at the level of our everyday perception.
After all, the kinds of things that we may deem “intrinsically valuable” at an intuitive level are often precisely the kinds of things that rarely need any extrinsic justification in everyday life, such as sound physical and mental health, close relationships, and intellectual curiosity.
If required, we often could “unpack” the value of these things in terms of their indirect, long-term effects, namely their usefulness for preventing more problems than they cause. But when our intuitively positive pursuits have many beneficial effects across a variety of contexts, we are often practically wise to avoid spending the unnecessary effort to separately “unpack” their value in relational terms.
Additionally, the more we unpack and reflect on the relational benefits of our intuitively positive pursuits, the more we may realize the full magnitude of their positive value, even according to minimalist views. After all, if our perception and attribution of positive value is focused on our positive feelings in the immediate moment, we may actually underestimate the overall usefulness of things such as maintaining good health and relationships, learning new skills, and coming up with new insights. Namely, it is of course desirable when such things help us feel better, yet perhaps the bulk of their value is not how they affect our own feelings in the moment, but what roles they play for all beings.
In other words, while minimalist views may not assign positive value to any particular experiences solely for their own sake, they can still value all the physical, emotional, intellectual, and social work, as well as any other activities, that best enable us collectively to alleviate problems for all beings.
Overall, if the goal is to minimize problems, we are faced with the dauntingly complex meta-problem of identifying interventions that can reasonably be expected to prevent more problems than they cause. And this meta-problem will require us to combine a vast amount of knowledge and supportive values. That is, minimalist views do not imply that we hyper-specialize in this meta-problem in a way that would dismiss all seemingly intrinsic values as superfluous. Rather, they imply that we adhere to a diverse range of these values so as to advance a mature and comprehensive approach to alleviating problems.[53]
Of course, it would be a ‘suspicious convergence’[54] if all the things that we may perceive as being intrinsically valuable would also be relationally aligned with the impartial minimization of problems. Yet the everyday implications of minimalist views need not be very different from those of other consequentialist views, as all of them imply a personal ideal of living an effective life in alignment with some overall optimization goal — which, in turn, may recommend a broadly shared set of habits and heuristics for everyday living.
Where the views differ the most may be in their large-scale implications. For instance, instead of primarily ensuring that we expand out into space, minimalist views would imply that we prioritize steering the future away from worst-case scenarios. After all, many scenarios of space colonization may, depending on their guiding values, vastly increase the amount of suffering over all time (in expectation).[55]
When psychologists speak of flourishing, it can have many meanings. As a value-laden concept, it is often bundled together with things like “optimal growth and functioning”, “social contribution”, or “having a purpose in life”.[56]
Before we load the concept of flourishing with independent positive value, as is seemingly done by the authors of works such as Utilitarianism.net[57], The Precipice[58], and What We Owe the Future[59], it is worth carefully considering whether this value is best seen as independent or relational in the axiological sense.
Minimalist views would not see positive flourishing as any kind of “self-contained” phenomenon of isolated value for one’s own sake. Yet minimalist views are perfectly compatible with a relational notion of positive flourishing as personal alignment with something beyond ourselves. For instance, minimalist flourishing could mean that we are skillfully serving the unmet needs of all sentient beings, aligning our wellbeing with the overall prevention of illbeing.
In practice, a minimalist understanding of “optimal growth and functioning” would probably entail a combination of strategic self-investment and healthful living (similar to other impartial welfarist views). After all, we first need to patiently grow our strengths, skills, and relationships before we can sustainably and effectively apply ourselves to help others. And because life can be long, it makes sense to keep growing these capacities, meeting our needs in harmony with the needs of others, and to seek and find the best ways for us to play positive roles for all sentient beings.[60]
In standard, theoretical population ethics, what we see are only the isolated “welfare bars” of what all the individual lives independently “contain”. Yet in practice, we also have hidden “relational roles bars” of what our lives “do” beyond ourselves.
On any impartial and welfarist view, our own “aggregate welfare” is often a much smaller part of our life’s overall value than is what we do for the welfare of others. Thus, when we think of our own ideal life (or perhaps the life of our favorite historical or public figure), we are often practically right to focus on this life’s roles for others, and not only, or even mostly, on how it feels from the inside.
In particular, since the value of the life’s roles is ultimately measured in the same unit of value as its own welfare, we can directly say that the roles can be much bigger than what any single life independently “contains”.[61]
In the case of minimalist views, we may find that a sufficient reason to endure hardship is to prevent hardship, reduce inner conflict, and lighten the load for all sentient beings over all time.
And if we further zoom into the nature of “effort”, we may find that basically all of our daily struggles are much easier to bear compared to instances of the most intense pains.[62] Thus, we may already find some lightness and relief in being relatively problem-free at the personal level. And we may further realize that we can play highly worthwhile roles by focusing our spare efforts on helping to relieve such extreme burdens in the big picture.
By contrast, if we assume that our burdens are worthwhile for the sake of some intrinsic positive value, then we again face theoretical tradeoffs like the VRC, as well as the practical question of whether we would allow astronomical amounts of extreme suffering to take place for the sake of creating astronomical amounts of purported positive goods.
Finally, we might question the practical relevance of thinking that a life could be worth living only for some kind of “self-contained” satisfaction. After all, our practical intuitions and dilemmas never concern tradeoffs between fully self-contained lives, which none of us ever are.
Even without the concept of intrinsic positive value, a life can be worth living for its positive roles.
Special thanks to Magnus Vinding for help with editing, and to Aaron Gertler for commenting on an early draft.
I am also grateful for helpful comments by Tobias Baumann, Simon Knutsson, and Winston Oswald-Drummond.
Commenting does not imply endorsement of any of my claims.
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Breyer, D. (2015). The cessation of suffering and Buddhist axiology. Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 22, 533–560. blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethics/files/2015/12/Breyer-Axiology-final.pdf
Chappell, R. Y., Meissner, D., & MacAskill, W. (2021). Population Ethics: The Total View. utilitarianism.net/population-ethics#the-total-view
DiGiovanni, A. (2021a). A longtermist critique of “The expected value of extinction risk reduction is positive”. forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RkPK8rWigSAybgGPe
Fehige, C. (1998). A Pareto Principle for Possible People. In C. Fehige & U. Wessels (Eds.), Preferences (pp. 508–543). Walter de Gruyter. fehige.info/pdf/A_Pareto_Principle_for_Possible_People.pdf
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Karlsen, D. S. (2013). Is God Our Benefactor? An Argument from Suffering. Journal of Philosophy of Life, 3, 145–167. philosophyoflife.org/jpl201309.pdf
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Knutsson, S. (2024). Answers in population ethics were published long ago. centerforreducingsuffering.org/research/answers-in-population-ethics-were-published-long-ago
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Schroeder, 2018.
Ryder, 2001, p. 27.
1.3.2.1; Fehige, 1998. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifrustrationism.
Häyry, 2024.
Cf. iep.utm.edu/care-ethics. Specifically, a minimalist interpretation of care ethics could say that our main responsibility is to ensure that there are fewer unmet needs, and not to create additional needs at the cost of neglecting existing or expected needs.
On moral impartiality, see Jollimore, 2023.
Thus, the chapter is not meant to cover axiologies that might be technically minimalist, yet which are partial or focused on non-welfarist avoidance goals (like minimizing human intervention in nature, or avoiding the loss of unique information).
More on the assumption of causally isolated value in 3.4.
Cf. Vinding, 2020d, chap. 3.
More in 3.4.
Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010b, “Independent and interdependent self-concepts”.
Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Remmelt, 2021, “We view individuals as independent”.
The conclusions are named “paradoxical” or “repugnant” after the intuitions of people who find them troubling. Generally, people differ a lot in which intuitions they are willing to “give up” in population ethics.
As noted by Anthony DiGiovanni (2021a) on Parfit’s original formulation of the Repugnant Conclusion (RC):
[Parfit] explicitly says the beings in this world “never suffer.” Many suffering-focused axiologies would accept the RC under this formulation—see e.g. Wolf (1997)—which is arguably a plausible conclusion rather than a “repugnant” bullet to bite. However, in many common formulations of the RC, the distinguishing feature of these beings is that their lives are just barely worth living according to axiologies other than strongly suffering-focused ones, hence they may contain a lot of suffering as long as they also contain slightly more happiness.
Fehige, 1998, p. 534.
See, for instance, Knutsson, 2024, sec. 4.4.
Fehige, 1998. Fehige’s use of the term ‘preference frustration’ is much broader than the everyday feeling that we call frustration. After all, basically all lives in the real world have at least some of their preferences frustrated, even if some may be free from the feelings of frustration.
From Arrhenius, Ryberg, & Tännsjö, 2014.
Arrhenius, Ryberg, & Tännsjö, 2014.
Karlsen, 2013, p. 160.
Quote from Arrhenius, Ryberg, & Tännsjö, 2014, sec. 2.4.
Additive aggregation entails that the total value of a group or state of affairs is simply the sum of the individual value of each of its members.
From Tännsjö, 2020.
Fehige, 1998, pp. 534–535.
Fehige, 1998, pp. 535–536.
Fehige, 1998, p. 518.
DiGiovanni, 2021a, sec. 1.1.1.
Vinding, 2020c, sec. 2.4.
Vinding, 2022e.
Cf. Figure A1.1.
Not even by acausal “influence”.
Cf. Todd, 2021; probablygood.org/core-concepts/expected-value.
For the utilitronium shockwave thought experiment by David Pearce, see hedweb.com/social-media/pre2014.html.
More on the “narrative misconception” of consequentialism in 5.3.
Vinding, 2020d, pp. 141–277.
For more on what minimalist views might support in practice, see 2.3.2.2; 5.3; and Chapter 6.
Cf. Lewis, 2016.
Tomasik, 2013d.
Chappell, Meissner, & MacAskill, 2021, “flourish”.
Ord, 2020, “flourish”.
MacAskill, 2022, “flourish”.
More in 6.4.1. For a book-length exploration of compassionate impact as a positive purpose in life, see Vinding, forthcoming.
More in 6.2.
This seems wrong to me, and confusing 'finding the VRC counter-intuitive' with 'counterbalancing (/extreme) bad with with good in any circumstance is counterintuitive' (e.g. the linked article to Omelas) is unfortunate - especially as this error has been repeated a few times in and around SFE-land.
First, what is turning the screws in the VRC is primarily the aggregation, not the (severe/) suffering. If the block of 'positive lives/stuff' in the VRC was high magnitude - say about as much (or even more) above neutral as the block of 'negative lives/stuff' lie below it - there is little about this more Omelas-type scenario a classical utilitarian would find troubling. "N terrible lives and k*N wonderful lives is better than N wonderful lives alone" seems plausible for sufficiently high values of k. (Notably, 'Minimalist' views seem to fare worse as it urges no value of k - googleplexes, TREE(TREE(3)), 1/P(Randomly picking the single 'wrong' photon from our light cone a million times consecutively), etc. would be high enough.)
The challenge of the V/RC is the counter-intuitive 'nickel and diming' where a great good or bad is outweighed by a vast multitude of small/trivial things. "N terrible lives and c*k*N barely-better-than-nothing lives is better than N wonderful lives alone" remains counter-intuitive to many who accept the first scenario (for some value of k) basically regardless of how large you make c. The natural impulse (at least for me) is to wish to discount trivially positive wellbeing rather than saying it can outweigh severe suffering if provided in sufficiently vast quantity.
If it were just 'The VRC says you can counterbalance severe suffering with happiness' simpliciter which was generally counterintuitive, we could skip the rigmarole of A, A+, B etc. and just offer Omelas-type scenarios (as Tomasik does in the linked piece) without stipulating the supposedly outweighing good stuff comprises a lot of trivial well-being.
Second, although scenarios where one may consider counterbalancing (/severe) suffering with happiness in general may not be purely theoretical (either now or in the future) the likelihood of something closely analogous to the VRC in particular looks very remote. In terms of 'process' the engine of the counter-intuitiveness relies on being able to parcel out good stuff in arbitrarily many arbitrarily small increments rather than in smaller more substantial portions; in terms of 'outcome' one needs a much smaller set of terrible lives outweighed by a truly vast multitude of just-about-better-than-nothing ones. I don't see how either arise on credible stories of the future.
Third, there are other lines classical utilitarians or similar can take in response to the VRC besides biting the bullet (or attempting to undercut our intuitive responses): critical level views, playing with continuity, and other anti-aggregation devices to try and preserve trading-off in general but avoid the nickel and diming issues of the VRC in particular . Obviously, these themselves introduce other challenges (so much so I'm more inclined to accept the costly counter-examples than the costs of (e.g.) non-continuity) and surveying all this terrain would be a gargantuan task far beyond the remit of work introducing a related but distinct issue.
But I bring this up because I anticipate the likely moves you will make to avoid the counter-example Shulman and I have brought up will be along the lines of anti-aggregationist moves around lexicality, thresholds, and whatnot. If so, what is good for the goose is good for the gander: it seems better to use similarly adapted versions of total utilitarianism as a 'like for like' comparison. 'Lexical threshold total utilitarianism', which lexically de-prioritises dis/value below some magnitude can accept mere addition, accept trading off suffering for sufficient (non-trivial) happiness, but avoid both the RC and VRC. This seems a better point of departure for weighing up minimalism or not, rather than discussing counter-examples to one or the other view which only apply given an (ex hypothesi) mistaken account of how to aggregate harms and benefits.
(Edit: Added a note(*) on minimalist views and the extended VRC of Budolfson & Spears.)
Thanks for highlighting an important section for discussion. Let me try to respond to your points. (I added the underline in them just to unburden the reader’s working memory.)
The quoted passage contained many claims; which one(s) seemed wrong to you?
My argument was rather the other way around. Namely, if we accept any kind of counterbalancing of harms with isolated goods, then CU-like views would imply that it is net positive to create space colonies that are at least as good as the hellish + barely positive lives of the VRC. And given arguments like astronomical waste (AW) (Bostrom, 2003), the justified harm could be arbitrarily vast as long as the isolated positive lives are sufficiently numerous. (Tomasik’s Omelas article does not depend on the VRC, but speaks of the risk of astronomical harms given the views of Bostrom, which was also my intended focus.)
(To avoid needless polarization and promote fruitful dialogue, I think it might be best to generally avoid using “disjointing” territorial metaphors such as “SFE-land” or “CU-land”, not least considering the significant common ground among people in the EA(-adjacent) community.)
For minimalist views, there is a very relevant difference between the RC and VRC, which is that the RC can be non-problematic (provided that we assume that the lives “never suffer”, cf. footnote 16 here), but minimalist views would always reject the VRC. For minimalist views, the (severe) suffering is, of course, the main concern. My point about the VRC was to highlight how CU can justify astronomical harms even for (supposedly) barely positive isolated lives, and an even bigger commonsensical worry is how much harm it can justify for (supposedly) greatly positive isolated lives.
It seems true that more people would find that more plausible. Even so, this is precisely what minimalists may find worrying about the CU approach to astronomical tradeoffs, namely that astronomical harms can be justified by the creation of sufficiently many instances of isolated goods.
Additionally, I feel like the point above applies more to classical utilitarianism (the view) rather than to the views of actual classical utilitarians, not to mention people who are mildly sympathetic to CU, which seems a particularly relevant group in this context given that they may represent an even larger number of people in the EA(-adjacent) community.
After all, CU-like views contain a minimalist (sub)component, and probably many self-identified CUs and CU-sympathetic people would thereby be at least more than a “little” troubled by the implication that astronomical amounts of hellish lives — e.g. vastly more suffering than what has occurred on Earth to date — would be a worthwhile tradeoff for (greater) astronomical amounts of wonderful lives (what minimalist views would frame as unproblematic lives), especially given that the alternative was a wonderful (unproblematic) population with no hellish lives.
(For what it’s worth, I used to feel drawn to a CU axiology until I became too troubled by the logic of counterbalancing harm for some with isolated good for others. For many people on the fence, the core problem is probably this kind of counterbalancing itself, which is independent of the VRC but of course also clearly illustrated by it.)
Of course, minimalist views (as explored here) would deny all counterbalancing of severe problems with isolated goods, independent of the VRC.
The Mere-Addition Paradox, RC, and VRC are often-discussed problems to which minimalist views may provide satisfying answers. The first two were included in the post for many reasons, and not only as a build-up to the VRC. The build-up was also not meant to end with the VRC, but instead to further motivate the question of how much harm can be justified to reduce astronomical waste (AW).
If CU-like views can justify the creation of a lot of hellish lives even for vast amounts of isolated value-containers that have only “barely positive” contents (the VRC), then how much more hellish lives can they supposedly counterbalance once those containers are filled (cf. AW)?
MichaelStJules already responded to this in the sibling comment. Additionally, I would again emphasize that the main worry is not so much the practical manifestation of the VRC in particular, but more the extent to which much worse problems might be justified by CU-like views given the creation of supposedly even greater amounts of isolated goods (i.e. reducing AW).
MichaelStJules already mentioned an arbitrariness objection to those lines. Additionally, my impressions (based on Budolfson & Spears, 2018) are that “the VRC cannot be avoided by any leading welfarist axiology despite prior consensus in the literature to the contrary” and that “[the extended] VRC cannot be avoided by any other welfarist axiology in the literature.”
Their literature did not include minimalist views(*). Did they also omit some CU-like views, or are the VRC-rejecting CU-like views not defended by anyone in the literature?
This again leaves me wondering: Are all of the VRC-rejecting CU-like views so arbitrary or counterintuitive that people will just rather accept the VRC? And will even the most attractive of those views still justify astronomical harms for a sufficiently high amount of isolated lives that are “taller” than those in the VRC?
This does not ease the worry that CU-like views can justify astronomically large harms in order to create isolated positive lives that never needed to exist in the first place.
First, in terms of practical relevance, one could argue that the choice to “prefer hell to prevent an imperfect heaven” is much more speculative and unlikely than is the VRC for CU-like views, not to mention the likelihood of CU justifying astronomical harms for supposedly greater goods regardless of the VRC (i.e. for reducing AW). In other words, the former can much more plausibly be disregarded as practically irrelevant than can the latter.
Second, lexical views do indeed avoid the conclusion in question, but these need not entail abrupt thresholds (per the arguments here and here), and even if they do, the threshold need not be an arbitrary or ad hoc move. For example, one could hold that there is a difference between psychologically consentable and unconsentable suffering, which is normally ignored by the logic of additive aggregationism. Moreover, the OP entails no commitment to additive aggregationism, as it only specifies that the minimalist views in question are monist, impartial, and welfarist.
First, I am happy to compare like views in this way in my forthcoming post. I would greatly appreciate it if people were to present or refer me to specific such views to be compared.
Second, the point above may seem to imply that there is a symmetry between these lexical adaptations, i.e. that we can “similarly” construct lexical minimalism and lexical symmetric totalism (if you allow the short expression). Yet the fact that we can make formally symmetric constructions for these different views does not imply that the respective plausibility of these constructions is symmetric at the substantive level. In this sense, what is good for the goose may do nothing for the gander. (But again, I’m happy to explore the possibility that it might.)
Specifically, how would one set the threshold(s) on the lexical symmetric view in a non-arbitrary way, and has anyone presented and defended plausible versions of such views?
Furthermore, most people would probably find it much more plausible that some harms cannot be counterbalanced by any amount of isolated goods (“a lexical minimalist component”), than that some goods can counterbalance any amount of isolated harms (a similarly lexical positive component). At least I’ve never heard anyone defend or outline the latter kind of view. (By contrast, beyond examples in academic philosophy, there are numerous examples in literature hinting at “minimalist lexicality”.)
Overall, I remain worried about the vast harms that CU-like views could justify for the supposed greater good, also considering that even you feel inclined to rather accept the VRC than deal with the apparently arbitrary or counterintuitive features of the versions of CU-like views that avoid it. (And if one proposes a positive lexical threshold, it seems that above the lexical threshold there is always a higher isolated good that can justify vast harms.)
Lastly, why do we need to “accept trading off suffering for sufficient (non-trivial) [isolated] happiness” in the first place? Would not a relational account of the value of happiness suffice? What seems to be the problem with relational goods, without isolated goods?
(*) A note on minimalist views and the extended VRC of Budolfson & Spears (2018).
Strictly speaking, the extended VRC in the formulation of Budolfson & Spears does not pertain to minimalist views, because they say "u^h>0" (i.e. strictly greater than zero). So minimalist views fall outside of the domain that they draw conclusions for.
But if we allow the "high-utility lives" to be exactly zero, or even less than zero, then their conclusion would also hold for (continuous, aggregationist) minimalist views. (But the conclusion arguably also becomes much less implausible in the minimalist case compared to the symmetric case, cf. the final point below.)
So it (also) holds for continuous aggregationist minimalist views that there exists a base population "such that it is better to both add to the base population the negative-utility lives and cause [a sufficiently large number of] ε-changes".
But beyond questioning the continuous aggregationist component of these views (indeed a possibility that lies open to many kinds of views with such a component), and beyond questioning the practical relevance of this conclusion for minimalist views versus for symmetric views (as I do above), one may further argue that the conclusion is significantly more plausible in the minimalist case than in the case where we allow torture for the sake of isolated, purported goods that arguably do not need to exist. For in the minimalist case, the overall burden of subjective problems is still lessened (assuming continuous aggregationist minimalism). We are not creating extreme suffering for the mere sake of isolated, "unrelieving" goods.
Thanks for the reply, and with apologies for brevity.
Re. 1 (ie. "The primary issue with the VRC is aggregation rather than trade-off"). I take it we should care about plausibility of axiological views with respect to something like 'commonsense' intuitions, rather than those a given axiology urges us to adopt. It's at least opaque to me whether commonsense intuitions are more offended by 'trade-offy/CU' or 'no-trade-offy/NU' intuitions. On the one hand:
But on the other:
However, I am confident the aggregation views - basically orthogonal to this question - are indeed the main driver for folks finding the V/RC particularly repugnant. Compare:
A minimalist view may well be concerned with increasing the amount of aggregate harm in 1 vs. 2, and so worry that (re. 2) if CU was willing to accept this, it would accept a lot more aggregate harm if we increase the upside to more than compensate (e.g. TREE(3) great lives). Yet I aver commonsense intuitions favour 1 over 2, and would find variants of 2 where the downside is increased but the upside is reduced but concentrated (e.g. a trillion great lives) more palatable.
So appeals along the lines of "CU accepts the VRC, and - even worse - would accept even larger downsides if the compensating upside was composed of very- rather than marginally- happy lives" seems misguided, as this adaptation of the VRC aligns it better, not worse, with commonsense (if not minimalist) intuitions.
Re. 3 I've read Budolfson & Spears, and as you note (*) it seems we can construct xVRCs which minimalist views (inc. those which introduce lexical thresholds) are susceptible to. (I also note they agree with me re. 1 - e.g. s8: "Whenever aggregation is done over an unbounded space, repugnant outcomes inevitably occur"; their identification with the underlying mechanism for repugnance being able to aggregate e-changes.)
The replies minimalists can make here seem very 'as good for the goose as the gander' to me:
[Finally, I'm afraid I can't really see much substantive merit in the 'relational goods' approach. Minimalism (like SFE and NU) straightforwardly offends the naive intuition that happiness is indeed 'better than nothing', and I don't find relational attempts to undercut this by offering an account of these being roundabout ways/policies of reducing problems either emotionally satisfying (e.g. All the rich relationships between members of a community may make everyone have 'lives worth living' in the sense that 'without me these other people would be worse off', but minimalism appears still committed to the dispiriting claim that this rich tapestry of relationships is still worse than nothing) or intellectually credible (cf. virtually everyone's expressed and implied preferences suggest non-assent to 'no-trade-off' views).
Similarly, I think assessing 'isolated' goods as typical population cases do is a good way to dissect out the de/merits of different theories, and noting our evaluation changes as we add in a lot of 'practical' considerations seems apt to muddy the issue again (for example, I'd guess various 'practical elaborations' of the V/RC would make it appear more palatable, but I don't think this is a persuasive reply).
I focus on the 'pure' population ethics as "I don't buy it" is barren ground for discussion.]
Thanks for the reply!
Agreed, and this is also why I focus also on the psychological and practical implications of axiological views, and not only on their theoretical implications. Especially in the EA(-adjacent) community, it seems common to me that the plausibility of theoretical views is assessed also based on the plausibility of their practical implications, which tap into further important intuitions than what may be involved by staying at the abstract level.
E.g., people may bite bullets in theory to retain a consistent view, but still never bite those bullets in practice due to some still unarticulated reasons, which may indicate an inconsistency between their explicit and implicit axiology.
By ‘trade-offy’ and ‘no-trade-offy’, I’d like to emphasize that we mean trade-offs between isolated things. In other words, the diagrams of population ethics could just as well consist of causally isolated experience machines (“isolated Matrix-lives”), which is plausibly a confounding factor for our practical (“commonsense”) intuitions, as our practical intuitions are arguably adapted for trade-offs in an interpersonal (“relational”) world.
It’s very unclear to me how many people actually believe that any arbitrarily awful thing can be counterbalanced by sufficiently many (and/or awesome) isolated Matrix-lives, or other isolated goods. By default, I would assume that most people do not (want to) think about torture, and also do not properly respect the “all else being equal” assumption, and thereby would not count as votes of “informed consent” for those claims. Additionally, in at least one small Mechanical Turk survey about a tradeoff for people themselves, more than 40 percent of people said that they would not accept one minute of extreme suffering for any number of happy years added to their lives.
The first claim (i.e. “a lexical minimalist component”) is precisely what has been defended in the philosophical (and fictional) literature. And again, this claim might be something that most people have not thought about, because only a minority of people have had first- or even second-person experience of an awful thing that might be defended as being categorically “impossible to compensate for with isolated goods”, such as torture.
(The second claim does not strictly follow from the first, which was about “awful” things; e.g. some SFE views hold that sufficiently awful things are lexical bads, but not that all kinds of tiny bads are. This is also relevant for the practical implications of lexical minimalist views with relational goods, on which pinpricks may be practically ignored unless they increase the risk of lexically bad things, whereas anything worthy of the name “great thing” would probably play positive roles to help reduce that risk.)
Here I would again note that our commonsense intuitions are arguably not adapted to track the isolated value of lives, and so we should be careful to make it clear that we are comparing e.g. isolated Matrix-lives. By default, I suspect that people may think of the happy populations as consisting of lives like their own or of people they know, which may implicitly involve a lot of effects on other lives.
Of course, the framings of “isolated Matrix-lives” or “experience machines” may themselves bring in connotations that can feel pejorative or dismissive with regard to the actual subjective experience of those lives, but my point is just to drive home the fact that these lives are, by hypothesis, radically devoid of any positive roles for others, or even for their future selves. And if people implicitly have a relational notion of positive value (e.g. if they think of positive value as implying an inverse causal relation to some subjective problems), then they may feel very differently about harms counterbalanced by isolated goods vs. harms counterbalanced by relational goods (of which minimalist views can endorse the latter).
To be clear, the inverse relations include not only subjective problems prevented by social relationships, but also e.g. any desirable effects on wild animals and future s-risks. Admittedly, probably neither of the latter two is a very commonsensical contributor to positive tradeoffs, but I’d guess that neither would many people find it intuitive to counterbalance astronomical harms with (“even greater amounts of”) isolated experience machines, or with a single “utility monster”. Arguably, all of these cases are also tricky to measure against people’s commonsense intuitions, given that not many people have thought about them in the first place.
Yeah, we can formally construct xVRCs for minimalist views, including for lexical minimalist views, but my claim is that these are consistently less repugnant in like-like comparisons with symmetric views (relative to commonsense or widely shared intuitions). Specifically in the lexical minimalist xVRC — i.e. these comments which you refer to in your point #3 below — the tradeoff results in ever less (and less intense) suffering if followed repeatedly. By comparison, every symmetric xVRC would keep on increasing suffering if scaled up in an analogous way, which is arguably the most repugnant aspect of the VRC.
Additionally, this comment (upstream of the linked ones) points out a source of intra-personal repugnance in the symmetric cases, namely that CU-like views would be fine with the “marginally good” ε-lives being “roller coaster” lives that also contain a lot of extreme suffering:
Of course, in some minimalist examples it is arguably repugnant to create extreme suffering to avoid a vast number of mildly problematic states. But I would claim that commonsense (and not only minimalist) intuitions would find even more repugnant the analogous symmetric case, namely to create extreme suffering for a vast number of mildly positive states which are not needed to relieve anyone’s burden. (The latter case may appear especially repugnant if the symmetric view in question would allow the mildly positive states to be “roller coaster” lives that are not even themselves free of, but would in fact contain a lot of, extreme suffering.) Consider, for instance, that:
Agreed, although it is unclear whether continuous aggregation is in fact more typical. But since I’m interested in defending lexical minimalism (which many people already hold with a priority for extreme suffering), I’d be curious to hear if anyone has defended an analogous symmetric view, or how that view would be constructed in the first place. E.g., should I compare “priority for the worst-off” with a view that (also) entails “priority for the best-off”, even if no one (to my knowledge) defends the latter priority?
The literature is mostly not written by people trying to figure out whether to prioritize the reduction of AW versus the reduction of s-risks. And once we accept some tradeoff in theory, it becomes relevant to ask if we would plausibly accept similar tradeoffs that could practically occur on an astronomical scale, for which the e-changes could of course first be “enlarged” so as to make more practical sense. (At least I feel like none of my intended points depend on the e-changes being tiny, nor on the base populations consisting of lives with mutually equal welfare, so I’m fine with discussing x/VRCs that are in those ways more realistic — especially if we account for the “roller coaster” aspects of more realistic lives.)
In other words, whether we affirm or reject the claim that purported positive goods can outweigh extreme suffering has great relevance for our priorities, whereas the question of whether lexical minimalist views are more plausible than non-lexical minimalist views has limited practical relevance, since the real-life implications (e.g. for ideal population sizes) are roughly convergent for minimalist views.
Again, I’m happy to pick the closest symmetric view to compare with the minimalist priority for extreme suffering, but I’m still unsure what that view might be (and eager to hear if there is anything to be read about such views).
I don’t agree that the points about the minimalist xVRCs’ comparatively greater plausibility are mostly re-statements of minimalism itself. Rather, I claim that commonsense intuitions would favor the lexical minimalist xVRC — in which suffering is “spread more equally between those who already exist and those who do not” (and eventually minimized if iterated) — over any symmetric xVRC of “expanding hell to help the best-off”. (In other words, even if one finds it somewhat plausible that happiness has independent value, or value in isolation, it still seems that the symmetric xVRCs are worse than the minimalist xVRC.)
(For subjective perfection equated with the absence of something, I was thinking of tranquilism as a need-based account of the isolated value of different experiential states, which is centered on cravings to change one’s subjective experience.)
(Strictly speaking, minimalism is a category that contains NU but only overlaps with SFE; some SFE views may recognize isolated positive value even as they prioritize reducing suffering, and e.g. Fehige’s view represents a preference-based instead of suffering-focused minimalism.)
About the naive intuition that happiness is indeed ‘better than nothing’, I’m curious if that really applies also for isolated Matrix-lives (for most people). As I’ve noted in this section, by focusing on isolated value we may often underestimate the relational value of some goods, which may be greater than the amount of intrinsic value we perceive them to have.
About the relational account having dispiriting or emotionally unsatisfying implications, those can also be compared between views (to the extent that they matter for the plausibility of axiological views). E.g., on minimalist views, unlike CU-like views, it’s not a tragedy or atrocity if we fail to reduce astronomical waste. In this sense, minimalist views may be less dispiriting than CU-like views. Moreover, I’d practically emphasize that our positive roles need not be limited to the confines of our social communities, but extend all the way to those communities’ effects on things like factory farming, wild-animal suffering, and the risks of future suffering (and thus potentially match or even exceed our commonsense feelings about the positive value of many lives, even if this would formally consist of “only” relational instead of independently positive value).
However, we should also be careful to account for our personal emotional responses to the implications of a given axiology. By analogy with empirical claims, we would probably want our views on (e.g.) global catastrophic risks to be unaffected by whether we find them dispiriting or not. Similarly, we should arguably account for such feelings in our axiological considerations of what, if anything, would constitute an axiologically positive life in causal isolation (and, specifically, what would constitute a life capable of counterbalancing the suffering of others without the consent of the latter).
EDIT:
Do you mean trivial pains adding up to severe suffering? I can see how if you would accept lexicality or thresholds to prevent this, you could do the same to prevent trivial pleasures outweighing severe suffering or greater joys.
My original comment follows.
I think your first and third points are mostly right, but I would add that minimalist axiologies can avoid the (V)RC without (arbitrary) critical levels, (arbitrary) thresholds, giving up continuity, or giving up additivity/separability, which someone might find as counterintuitive as the VRC. Views like these tend to look more arbitrary, or assuming transitivity, the independence of irrelevant alternatives and a far larger unaffected population, often reduce to solipsism or recommend totally ignoring value that's (weakly or strongly) lexically dominated in practice. So, if you find the (V)RC, and these aggregation tricks or their implications very counterintuitive, then minimalist and person-affecting views will look better than otherwise (not necessarily best), and classical utilitarianism will look worse than otherwise (but potentially still best overall or better than minimalist axiologies, if the other points in favour are strong enough).
Furthermore, the VRC is distinguished from the RC by the addition of severe suffering. Someone might find the VRC far worse than the RC (e.g. the person who named it, adding the "Very" :P), and if they do, that may indeed say something about their views on suffering and bad lives, and not just about the aggregation of the trivial vs values larger in magnitude. I do suspect like you that considering Omelas (or tradeoffs between a more even number of good and bad lives) would usually already get at this, though, but maybe not always.
That being said, personally, I am also separately sympathetic to lexicality (and previously non-additivity, but less so now because of the arguments in the papers I cited above), but not because of the RC or VRC, but because of direct intuitions about torture vs milder suffering (dust specks or even fairly morally significant suffering). EDIT: I guess this is the kind of "counter-example" you and Shulman have brought up?
On your second point, I don't think something like the VRC is remote, although I wouldn't consider it my best guess for the future. If it turns out that it's more efficient to maximize pleasure (or value generally) in a huge number of tiny systems that produce very little value each, classical utilitarians may be motivated to do so at substantial cost, including sacrificing a much higher average welfare and ignoring s-risks. So, you end up with astronomically many more marginally good lives and a huge number of additional horrible lives (possibly astronomically many, although far fewer than the marginally good lives) and missing out on many very high welfare lives. This is basically the VRC. This seems unlikely unless classical utilitarians have majority control over large contiguous chunks of space in the future.
Yeah, that's it. As you note these sorts of moves seem to have costs elsewhere, but if one thinks on balance they nonetheless should be accepted, then the V/RC isn't really a strike against 'symmetric axiology' simpliciter, but merely 'symmetric axiologies with a mistaken account of aggregation'. If instead 'straightforward/unadorned' aggregation is the right way to go, then the V/RC is a strike against symmetric views and a strike in favour of minimalist ones; but 'straightforward' aggregation can also produce highly counter-intuitive results for minimalist views which symmetric axiologies avoid (e.g. "better N awful lives than TREE(N+3) lives of perfect bliss and a pin-prick").
Hence (per 3) I feel the OP would be trying to have it both ways if they don't discuss argumentative resources which could defend a rival theory from objections they mount against it, yet subsequently rely upon those same resources to respond to objections to their preferred theory.
(Re. 2, perhaps it depends on the value of "tiny" - my intuition is the dynamic range of (e.g.) human happiness is much smaller than that for future beings, so 'very small' on this scale would still typically be greatly above the 'marginally good' range by the lights of classical util. If (e.g.) commonsenically happy human lives/experiences are 10, joyful future beings could go up to 1000, and 'marginally good' is anything <1, we'd be surprised to find the optimal average for the maximal aggregate is in the marginally good range. Adding in the 'V' bit to this RC adds a further penalty).
That all seems fair to me.
With respect to 2, I'm thinking something on the order of insect brains. There are reasons to expect pleasure to scale sublinearly with brain size even in artificial brains optimized for pleasure, e.g. a lot of unnecessary connections that don't produce additional value, greater complexity in building larger brains without getting things wrong, or even giving weight to the belief that integrating minds actually reduces value, say because of bottlenecks in some of the relevant circuits/functions. Smaller brains are easier/faster to run in parallel.
This is assuming the probability of consciousness doesn't dominate. There may also be scale efficiencies, since the brains need containers and to be connected to things (even digitally?) or there may be some other overhead.
So, I don't think it would be too surprising to find the optimal average in the marginally good range.
I think it's useful to have a thought experiment to refer to other than Omelas to capture the intuition of "a perfect, arbitrarily large utopia is better than a world with arbitrarily many miserable lives supposedly counterbalanced by sufficiently many good lives." Because:
So while I agree that aggregation is an important part of the VRC, I also disagree that the "nickel and diming" is at the heart of this. To my intuitions, the VRC is still horrible and borderline unacceptable if we replace the just-barely-worth-living lives with lives that have sufficiently intense happiness, intense enough to cross any positive lexical threshold you want to stipulate. In fact, muzak and potatoes lives as Parfit originally formulated them (i.e., with no suffering) seem much better than lots of lives with both lexically negative and lexically "positive" experiences. I'll eagerly accept Parfit's version of the RC. (If you want to say this is contrary to common sense intuitions, that's fine, since I don't put much stock in common sense when it comes to ethics; there seem to be myriad forces pushing our default intuitions in directions that make evolutionary sense but are disturbing to me upon reflection.)
[edited for some clarifications]