Comments
I'll try to help you understand why (I think) some people feel the sting of the repugnant conclusion (RC), but why I think they are ultimately wrong to do so. I should say that I personally don't find the repugnant conclusion repugnant so what I'm about to say might be completely missing the point. I am slightly stung by the "very repugnant conclusion", but that might be for another time.
In short, I think some people find RC repugnant based on a misunderstanding of what a life "barely worth living" would mean in practice. I think most people imagine such a life to be quite "bad" on the whole, but I think this is a mistake.
Note that the vast majority of people on earth want to continue living. This would include the vast majority of people who live in extreme poverty or who are undergoing horrific abuse. It would also include people who constantly consider suicide to end their pain but never go through with it. In normal parlance we would say these people live "bad" lives. However, we might conclude that these people are living lives worth living if they don't want their life to end / don't choose to end their life. So my guess is people imagine "a life barely worth living" to be a pretty "bad" one. The actual wording of "a life barely worth living" is inherently negative in how it is framed anyway. So RC would amount to a load of people with pretty "bad" lives by intuitive standards, being better than a smaller number of people with absolutely amazing lives. Accepting RC would be like creating another Africa with all it's poverty and hardship instead of creating another Norway with all it's happiness. Or creating loads of people attending daily suicide support groups rather than a smaller number of people living the best lives we can imagine. Most people would find these repugnant things to do and I personally would feel the sting here.
The problem with the above reasoning becomes clear when we think more carefully about "a life barely worth living". Firstly, to state what should be obvious, such a life is worth living by definition. So to be put off by the existence of such lives doesn't really make logical sense, unless you deny the theoretical existence of positive lives in the first place. This doesn't negate people's feeling of repugnance, but I think it should cause them to question it.
Where does this leave us with people attending daily suicide support groups? Well my preferred way forward is to question if these people do in fact have lives worth living, or at least to question if we have any idea on the matter. As is pointed out by Dasgupta (2016), the idea that someone who wants to continue living must be living a life of positive welfare ignores the badness of death. It is certainly possible for someone to be living a life of negative welfare, but be reluctant to end it because the subjective badness of death exceeds the badness of continuing to live. Death is indeed a horrible prospect for most when you consider factors such as religious prohibition, fear of the process of dying, the thought that one would be betraying family and friends, the deep resistance to the idea of taking one’s own life that has been built into us through selection pressure would cause someone even in deep misery to balk, and the revelation of one's misery to others when one wants it to remain undisclosed even after death.
In light of this Dasgupta puts forward the "creation test" as a way to determine the zero-level of wellbeing. What is the worst life that you would willingly create? Dasgupta says that should be the zero level. Most altruists wouldn't create more people living in extreme poverty, or people with constant thoughts of suicide, implying these people probably live negative lives. I personally would only create a life that most of us would say is very good!
I'm not saying Dasgupta's creation test is perfect - I'm undecided on how useful it is. This paper argues that we have no sufficiently clear sense of what a minimally good life is like. If this is indeed true, as the paper argues, the RC loses its probative force because we can not judge lives "barely worth living" as being "bad" as we don't really have a clue.
So to sum up my rather lengthy response, I think that many people who think RC is repugnant assume that "lives barely worth living" are those we would say are "bad" in common parlance which can lead to an understandable feeling of repugnance. I think they are wrong - either "lives barely worth living" are much better than being "bad", in which case RC loses repugnance, or we don't know how good "lives barely worth living" are and RC doesn't even get off the ground at all.
I have asymmetric person-affecting intuitions, and I think the Repugnant Conclusion is a clear example of treating individuals as mere vessels/receptacles for value. Sacrificing the welfare of just one person so that another could be born — even if they would be far better off than the first person — seems wrong to me, ignoring other effects. That I could have an obligation to bring people into existence just for their own sake and at an overall personal cost seems wrong to me. The RC just seems like a worse and more extreme version of this.
In a hypothetical world where I'm the only one around, I feel I basically should be allowed to do whatever I want, as long as no one else will come into existence, and I should have no reason to bring them into existence. In my world, I should do whatever I want. If no one is born, I'm not harming anyone else or failing in my obligations to others, because they don't and won't exist to be able to experience harm (or experience an absence of benefit or worse benefits).
That I should make sacrifices to prevent people with bad lives from being born or to help future people who would exist anyway (including ensuring better off people are born instead of worse off people) does seem right to me. If and because these people will exist, I can harm them or fail to prevent harm to them, and that would be bad.
I have some more writing on the asymmetry here.
I'm confused by your answer.
This comment seems to me to be requesting clarification in good faith. Might someone who downvoted it explain to why, if it wouldn't take too much time or effort? I'm fairly new to the forum and would like a more complete view of the customs.
Edited to add: Perhaps because it was perceived as lower effort than the parent comment, and required another high-effort post in response, which might have been avoided by a closer reading?
I never downvoted his comments, and have (just now) instead upvoted them.
However, I would interpret all of Pablo's points in his response not just as requesting clarification but also as objections to my answer, in a post that's only asking for people's reasons to object to the RC and is explicitly not about technical philosophical arguments (although it's not clear this should extend to replies to answers), just basic intuitions.
I don't personally mind, and these are interesting points to engage with. However, I can imagine others finding it too intimidating/adversarial/argumentative.
Thank you for the explanation!
(I've made a bunch of edits to the following comment within 2 hours of posting it.)
If you're a consequentialist whose views are transitive and complete, and satisfy the independence of irrelevant alternatives, then the RC implies what I wrote (ignoring other effects and opportunity costs). The situation is not necessarily symmetrical in practice if you hold person-affecting views, which typically require the rejection of the independence of irrelevant alternatives. I'd recommend the "wide, hard view" in The Asymmetry, Uncertainty, and the Long Term by Teruji Thomas as the view closest to common sense that satisfies the intuitions of my answer above (that I'm aware of), and the talk is somewhat accessible, although the paper can get pretty technical. This view allows future contingent good lives to make up for (but not outweigh) future contingent bad lives, but, as a "hard" view, not to make up for losses to "necessary" people, who would exist regardless. Because it's "wide", it "solves" the Nonidentity problem. The wide version would still reject the RC even if we're choosing between two disjoint contingent populations, I think because "excess" (in number) contingent people with good lives wouldn't count in this particular pairwise comparison. Another way to think about it would be like matching counterparts across worlds, and then we can talk about sacrifices as the differences in welfare between an individual and their counterpart, although I'm not sure the view entails something equivalent to this.
My own views are much more asymmetric than the views in Thomas's work, and I lean towards negative utilitarianism, since I don't think future contingent good lives can make up for future contingent bad lives at all.
I tell them that I did it to prevent a greater harm that would have otherwise been experienced. The foregoing of benefit caused by someone never being born would not be experienced by that non-existent person. I have some short writing on the asymmetry here that I think can explain this better.
Lives most people consider good overall can still involve disappointment or suffering, so the RC doesn't necessarily differ only in how much positive welfare there is, depending on how exactly we're imagining it. If we're only talking about positive welfare and no negative welfare, preferences aren't more frustrated/less satisfied than otherwise, and everyone is perfectly content in the "repugnant" world, then I wouldn't object. If I had to make a personal sacrifice to bring someone into existence, I would probably not be perfectly content, possibly unless I thought it was the right thing to do (although I might feel some dissatisfaction either way, and less if I'm doing what I think is the right thing).
Plus, it's worth sharing my more general objection regardless of my denial of positive welfare, since it may reflect others' views, and they can upvote or comment to endorse it if they agree.
Assuming intrapersonal and interpersonal tradeoffs should be treated the same (ignoring indirect effects), yes. It's not obvious that they should be, and I think common sense ethics does not treat them the same.
But even then, the intrapersonal version (+welfarist consequentialism) also violates autonomy and means I shouldn't do whatever I want in my world, so my objection is similar. I think "preference-affecting" views (person-affecting views applied at the level of individual preferences/desires, especially Thomas's "hard, wide view") would likely fare better here for structurally similar reasons, so the "solution" could be similar or even the same.
Symmetric total preference utilitarianism and average preference utilitarianism would imply that it's good for a person to create enough sufficiently strong satisfied preferences in them, even if it means violating their consent and the preferences they already have or will have. Classical utilitarianism implies involuntary wireheading (done right) is good for a person. Preference-affecting views and antifrustrationism (negative preference utilitarianism) would only endorse violating consent or preferences for a person's own sake in ways that depend on preferences they would have otherwise or anyway, so you violate consent/some preferences to respect others (although I think antifrustrationism does worse than asymmetric preference-affecting views for respecting preferences/consent, and deontological constraints or limiting aggregation would likely do even better).
[ETA: You say you've made edits to your post, so it's possible some of my replies are addressed by your revisions. I am always responding to the text I'm quoting, which may differ from the final version of your comment.]
I don't have time to look into this right now, but I also feel that this probably won't provide an answer to the question I meant to ask. (Apologies if my wording was unclear.) Call the world with few, very happy people, A, and the world with lots of mildly happy people, Z. The question is, then, simply: "If bringing about Z sacrifices people in A, why doesn't bringing about A sacrifice people in Z?" You say that you'd be sacrificing someone "even if they would be far better off than the first person", which seems to commit you to the claim that you would indeed be sacrificing people in Z by bringing about A.
I don't understand how this answer explains why you are not treating the person as a value receptacle, given that you believe this is what the total utilitarian does in the Repugnant Conclusion. I can see why a negative utilitarian and/or a person-affecting theorist would treat these two cases differently. What I don't understand is why the difference is supposed to consist in that people are being treated as value receptacles in one case, but not in the other. This just seems to misdiagnose what's going on here.
The comment you shared helps me understand the Asymmetry, but not your claim about value receptacles.
I agree that you can have people with lifetime wellbeing just above neutrality either because they live their entire lives at that level or because they have lots of ups and downs that almost perfectly cancel each other out (and anything in between). I think discussions of the Repugnant Conclusion sometimes make the stronger assumption that people's lives are continuously just above neutrality ("muzak and potatoes"), and that people may respond to the thought experiment differently depending on whether or not this assumption is made.
For a negative utilitarian, it seems that whether the assumption is made is in fact crucial, since the "muzak and potatoes" life is as good as it can be (it lacks any unpleasantness) whereas lives in other Repugnant Conclusion scenarios could contain huge amounts of suffering. I handn't appreciated this point when I wrote my previous comment, but now that I do, I feel even more confused.
Oh, I wasn't saying they should be treated the same. It's pretty clear that commonsense morality treats them differently.
My point is that the phenomenology of the intuitions at the interpersonal and intrapersonal levels is essentially the same, which strongly suggests that the same factor is triggering those intuitions in both cases. Any explanation of the counterintuitiveness of the Repugnant Conclusion in terms of factors that are specific to the interpersonal case is therefore implausible.
Although I'm not sure I'm understanding you correctly, you then seem to be suggesting that your views can in fact vindicate the claim that people would also in some sense be sacrificed in the intrapersonal case. Is this what you are claiming? It would help me if you describe what you yourself believe, as opposed to discussing the implications of a wide variety of views.
[Of course, feel free to ignore any of this if you aren't interested, etc.]
(FWIW, I never downvoted your comments and have upvoted them instead, and I appreciate the engagement and thoughtful questions/pushback, since it helps me make my own views clearer. Since I spent several hours on this thread, I might not respond quickly or at all to further comments.)
Sorry, I tried to respond to that in an edit you must have missed, since I realized I didn't after posting my reply. In short, a wide person-affecting view means that Z would involve "sacrifice" and A would not, if both populations are completely disjoint and contingent, roughly because the people in A have worse off "counterparts" in Z, and the excess positive welfare people in Z without counterparts don't compensate for this. No one in Z is better off than anyone in A, so none are better off than their counterparts in A, so there can't be any sacrifice in a "wide" way in this direction. The Nonidentity problem would involve "sacrifice" in one way only, too, under a wide view.
(If all the people in Z already exist, and none of the people in A exist, then going from Z to A by killing everyone in Z could indeed mean "sacrificing" the people in Z for those in A, under some person-affecting views, and be bad under some such views.
Under a narrow view (instead of a wide one), with disjoint contingent populations, we'd be indifferent between A and Z, or they'd be incomparable, and both or neither would involve "sacrifice".)
On value receptacles, here's a quote by Frick (on his website), from a paper in which he defends the procreation asymmetry:
I haven't thought much about this particular way of framing the receptacle objection, and what I have in mind is basically what Frick wrote later:
This is a bit vague: what do we mean by "conditional"? But there are plausible interpretations that symmetric person-affecting views, asymmetric person-affecting views and negative axiologies satisfy, while the total view, reverse asymmetric person-affecting views and positive axiologies don't really seem to have such plausible interpretations (or have fewer and/or less plausible interpretations).
I have two ways in mind that seem compatible with the procreation asymmetry, but not the total view:
First, in line with my linked shortform comment about the asymmetry, a person's interests should only direct us from outcomes in which they (the person, or the given interests) exist or will exist to the same or other outcomes (possibly including outcomes in which they don't exist), and all reasons with regards to a given person are of this form. I think this is basically an actualist argument (which Frick discusses and objects to in his paper). Having reasons regarding an individual A in an outcome in which they don't exist direct us towards an outcome in which they do exist would not seem conditional on A's existence. It's more "conditional" if the reasons regarding a given outcome come from that outcome than from other outcomes.
Second, there's Frick's approach. Here's a simplified evaluative version:
Setting P(A)="A has a life worth living" would give us reason to prevent lives not worth living. Plus, there's no P(A) we could use that would imply that a given world with A is in one way better (due to the statement with P(A)) than a given world without A. So, this is compatible with the procreation asymmetry, but not the total view.
It could be "wide" and solve the Nonidentity problem, since we can find P such that P would be satisfied for B but not A, if B would be better off than A, so we would have more reasons for A not to exist than for B not to exist.
It's also compatible with antifrustrationism and negative utilitarianism in a few ways:
I think part of what follows in Frick's paper is about applying/extending this in a way that isn't basically antinatalist.
Ya, this seems right to me.
What do you mean by "the phenomenology of the intuitions" here?
One important difference between the interpersonal and intrapersonal cases is that in the intrapersonal case, people may (or may not!) prefer to live much longer overall, even sacrificing their other interests. It's not clear they're actually worse off overall or even at each moment in something that might "look" like Z, once we take the preference(s) for Z over A into account. We might be miscalculating the utilities before doing so. For something similar to happen in the interpersonal case, the people in A would have to prefer Z, and then similarly, Z wouldn't seem so objectionable.
It's more about my interests/preferences than my future selves, and not sacrificing them or treating them as value receptacles. I think respect for autonomy/preferences requires not treating our preferences as mere value receptacles that you can just make more of to get more value and make things go better, and this can rule out both the interpersonal RC and the intrapersonal RC. This is in principle, ignoring other reasons, indirect effects, etc., so not necessarily in practice.
I have moral uncertainty, and I'm sympathetic to multiple views, but what they have in common is that I deny the existence of terminal goods (whose creation is good in itself, or that can make up for bads or for other things that matter going worse than otherwise) and that I recognize the existence of terminal bads. They're all versions of negative prioritarianism/utilitarianism or very similar.
Thanks for the detailed reply. For now, I will only address your comments at the end, since I haven't read the sources you cite and haven't thought about this much beyond what I wrote previously. (As a note of color, Johann and I did the BPhil together and used to meet every week for several hours to discuss philosophy, although he kept developing his views about population ethics after he moved to Harvard; you have rekindled my interest in reading his dissertation.)
I mean that the intuitions triggered by the interpersonal and the intrapersonal cases feel very similar from the inside. For example, if I try to describe why the interpersonal case feels repugnant, I'm inclined to say stuff like "it feels like something would be missing" or "there's more to life than that"; and this is exactly what I would also say to describe why the intrapersonal case feels repugnant. How these two intuitions feel also makes me reasonably confident that fMRI scans of people presented with both cases would show very similar patterns of brain activity.
I think that supposed difference is ruled out by the way the intrapersonal case is constructed. In any case, what I regard as the most interesting intrapersonal version is one where it is analogous to the interpersonal version in this respect. Of course, we can discuss a scenario of the sort you describe, but then I would no longer say that my intuitions about the two cases feel very similar, or that we can learn much by comparing the two cases.
Makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.
Thanks, I appreciated reading this. I think you and I think about morality very differently, which means this doesn't update me very much, but it's still good to get a more emotional grasp of what people feel about these questions.