This is how Parfit formulated the Repugnant Conclusion, but the way it's usually referred to in population ethics discussions about the (de)merits of total symmetric utilitarianism, it need not be the case that the muzak and potatoes lives never suffer.

The real RC that some kinds of total views face is that world A with lives of much more happiness than suffering is worse than world Z with more lives of just barely more happiness than suffering. How repugnant this is, for some people like myself, depends on how much happiness or suffering is in those lives on each side. I wrote about this here and here.

I broadly agree that "what does a life barely worth living look like" matters a lot, and you could imagine setting it to be high enough that the repugnant conclusion doesn't look repugnant.

That being said, if you set it too high, there are other counterintuitive conclusions. For example, if you set it higher than people alive today (as it sounds like you're doing), then you are saying that people alive today have negative terminal value, and (if we ignore instrumental value) it would be better if they didn't exist.

Great point. But note that if lives of monk-like tranquility are neutral, that makes the Mirrored Repugnant Conclusion harder to accept:

For any population of hellish lives, there is a population of barely bad lives that is worse.

The total view in population ethics implies this Mirrored Repugnant Conclusion.

If lives of monk-like tranquility are neutral, then lives of monk-like tranquility plus a mosquito bite are barely bad, and so the total view implies:

For any population of hellish lives, there is a population of lives of monk-like tranquility plus a mosquito bite that is worse.

The way you describe it, it sounds downright appealing!

You could even argue that the quality of life in such an instantiation of the repugnant conclusion is, as far as people's experiences are concerned, no worse than the quality of life in a eudaimonic paradise. Not everyone will agree with this intuition, but I'd say that the more intense pleasures seem appealing to us because they connect to life goals or to addictive tendencies and thrill seeking, which we'd no longer bother with if all our life goals were taken care of and we were permanently in a calm and restful state where everything feels fine.

That said, I don't think evaluating lives purely based on the experiences they contain is of much use in most contexts. For instance, many people wouldn't want to enter solipsistic experience machines (whether they're built around eternal contentment or a more adventurous ideal life) if that means giving up on having authentic relationships with loved ones.

To elaborate more on the theme of "contentment as equally good as intense pleasure," here some excerpts from my article on tranquilism:

In the context of everyday life, there are almost always things that ever so slightly bother us. Uncomfortable pressure in one’s shoes, thirst, hunger, headaches, boredom, itches, non-effortless work, worries, longing for better times. When our brain is flooded with pleasure, we temporarily become unaware of all the negative ingredients of our stream of consciousness, and they thus cease to exist. Pleasure is the typical way in which our minds experience temporary freedom from suffering. This may contribute to the view that pleasure is the symmetrical counterpart to suffering, and that pleasure is in itself valuable and important to bring about. However, there are also (contingently rare) mental states devoid of anything bothersome that are not commonly described as (intensely) pleasurable, examples being flow states or states of meditative tranquility. Felt from the inside, tranquility is perfect in that it is untroubled by any aversive components, untroubled by any cravings for more pleasure. Likewise, a state of flow as it may be experienced during stimulating work, when listening to music or when playing video games, where tasks are being completed on auto-pilot with time flying and us having a low sense of self, also has this same quality of being experienced as completely problem-free. 7 Such states – let us call them states of contentment – may not commonly be described as (intensely) pleasurable, but following philosophical traditions in both Buddhism and Epicureanism, these states, too, deserve to be considered states of happiness.

Whether meditative tranquility or flow are called hedonically neutral or not is a matter of interpretation. To most people, they may feel pleasurable in a way, or very positive somehow, though perhaps in a different sense than e.g. orgasms feel positive. This makes perfect sense according to tranquilism, where there is no neutral range for experiences to begin with and where conscious states completely free of cravings should thus elicit very positive associations when we think of them. The important difference between tranquilism and hedonism is whether all of these states free of cravings are equally positive, or whether they form a scale of increasing value, with some such experiences being distinctly worse than others. 8

According to hedonism, where the optimal state corresponds to the highest possible pleasure, states of contentment would fall short: they would be judged (heavily) suboptimal because there could be richer states of pleasure in their place. By contrast, tranquilism proposes that all of these states are in a relevant sense flawless – different in their flavor from intense pleasure, yet equally perfect with respect to the immediate evaluation that occurs internally. While pleasure has great instrumental value according to tranquilism as one way to ensure that everyday conscious experience is problem-free, maximizing pleasure does not constitute an end in itself.

Edit: I decided that endnote 8 is worth quoting here, too:

8 Thomas Metzinger makes the interesting point that what we envision when we think of "neutral" sates of conscousness may often be "slightly negative" in reality, and that this mistake could reinforce the assumption that pleasure is decidedly better than mere freedom from cravings: "Almost all negatively valenced states involve only a mild emotional sense of preference frustration – perhaps some weak impairment of bodily wellbeing or a diffuse background feeling of boredom, possibly accompanied by an unspecific, generalised worry about the future plus a subtle phenomenology of uncertainty. In addition, as it is plausible to assume that these frequent and much more subtly negative states are forming the majority of our conscious self-model moments, most of us may have long ago begun to perceive them as inescapable and uncontrollable. We may therefore operate under a “domain-general” version of learned helplessness with regard to our own suffering: we become unable or unwilling to avoid subsequent encounters with such inner situations, because on a deep functional level we already believe that we cannot effectively control the total probability of their occurrence. Consequently, we do not take action to avoid more subtle forms of negative everyday phenomenology. Therefore, what we prematurely report as “neutral” states may often actually be the inner experience of subtle preference frustration plus learned helplessness. We report “neutral”, but what we actually mean is “default”. If one introspects carefully, truly neutral moments are something very rare, because some sort of affective valence accompanies almost all of our conscious moments." See Thomas Metzinger’s “Suffering” in The Return of Consciousness, eds. Kurt Almqvist & Anders Haag (Stockholm: Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation, 2017) 221-262.

My understanding is that the people in the repugnant conclusion have lives that are slightly net positive which means those lives could have suffering as long as the good slightly outweighs the suffering. For example, a life could have slightly net positive value if it had 11 positive experiences for every 10 negative experiences.

The closest analog we can imagine is perhaps a Buddhist sanctuary, each member so permanently, universally and profoundly enlightened that they no longer experience suffering of any kind.

This just seems way better than a neutral life.

If you're going to say a neutral life has no bad things then fine, but for me it would also then have to have no good things. So I don't think a Buddhist monk has a neutral life as they do experience lots of bliss.

A neutral life would be more like someone in a life-long coma. Such a life would have no good or bad experiences. Or a life in which the good equals the bad. I say more about what I think a neutral life is here.

This is the standard objection that the line we draw betwen a life worth living and one not is actually high enough that the RC is not repugnant. I think this is plausible but it means accepting that many people today have lives not worth living which could be considered quite harsh - many of the people alive in poverty today believe their own lives are worth living. I cant see how holding this argument is not the same as holding that one knows better than they do abotu the value of their own lives. 

[TL;DR: I guess taking uncertainty seriously takes the sting out of population ethics. And it's usually a good heuristics for counterintuitive quasi-fanatical conclusions.]

Thanks for  the post. But I don't think it works. Your point is that there should be no controversy over RC, because all it implies is that zillions of people living a tranquil nirvana is better than 10 bi (or n) people living in blissful paradise...? It looks like you basically just set a higher bar for what counts as positive value. One could argue along the same line saying that 2 people in bliss is worse than 1k living in nirvana.

The problem is:

1. Parfit called it "repugnant" for a reason, and he tried to find arguments against it. I don't see the  point of making it kind of trivial... Actually, the philosophically interesting point is to explain why it is controversial. I suspect easy answers tend to be wrong here.
2. I don't live in a nirvana-like state, but I still think my life has positive value. I can totally reckon there are lives of negative value, and I can imagine my life becoming one. But it's interesting to acknowledge that other people think about this differently.

I invite you to take uncertainty seriously. Some argue that, because of that, RC doesn't have "any probative force", particularly if some comparisons are highly imprecise or impossible

My personal take so far is that RC is right: there is a *logically possible* world w with a huge population m with lives barely worth living which is better than a world with n people living in ultimate bliss. For instance, I'm pretty confident that 10 bi living in nirvana is better than 2 people living in bliss; just like 10^18 people in nirvana is probably better than 10bi living in bliss.

But as the comparison between the corresponding worlds gets harder, for a determinate world w’, it might become more unlikely that you can prove that U(w ) > U(w’ ) – i.e., that you can justifiably believe that such-and-such w  and w' are those worlds. Uncertainty increases with each step in the chain of your argument.

Plus, I think that a good (and old) heuristics for consequentialists to avoid counterintuitive solutions is to consider uncertainty, and check if the conclusion remains sound – especially if you have something like “inductive steps”. E.g.: Sure, a world w where 1 person is tortured for 50y for n others to live in bliss is better than our current world… but how certain can you be that such-and-such precise world  is w?

I have some moral uncertainty regarding totalism vs. averageism, and have at times vacillated between the two. However, one of the points that has led me to increasingly favor totalism is a rebuttal to the veil of ignorance argument in favor of averageism (I.e., “wouldn’t you prefer to be a random person in [averageist paradise] vs [totalist paradise]?”).

The rebuttal is partially just that averageism arbitrarily ignores people that don’t exist in its calculations. If you can get an averageist to agree that such non-people should be considered, then it becomes mathematically obvious that the repugnant conclusion is at least less repugnant than the alternative, which is “some number of people exist and live happy lives, but some orders-of-magnitude-larger number of people just have completely net-zero existences (whereas they could have had slightly net-positive lives), completely swamping the average.” In other words, whenever a supposed averageist paradise is described, you should basically just add in what I call “grey people”: a number of purely net-zero-experience people who would have existed in the totalist alternative world.

Thus, this seems to largely defeat the “repugnant conclusion” objection: you can’t call it more repugnant than the alternative even according to the average wellbeing.

Of course, getting averageists to accept “non-people should be considered” seems to be the far trickier part. I was already somewhat open to this idea so I was somewhat probably easier to persuade than most people. However, some of the points here that persuaded me were:

1. We are naturally biased in favor of caring about moral ideas which validate/benefit us, and we can only examine this question if we already exist. Thus, our intuitions and feelings will probably be biased in favor of frameworks that only care about existing people.
2. Why shouldn’t we care about potential people? (This is especially important to pair with the previous point.) It seems like the onus should be on averageists, since totalists can at least point out “you would prefer to be a person who exists with a net-positive life to having no existence at all.” (Admittedly, there may be a flaw/circularity in this assumption, but circularities are sometimes hard to avoid in ethics (and descriptive logic), and I’m not confident it is actually problematically circular: is it really unreasonable to assume that a rational person, presented with a “never exist” button and a “live millions of extremely happy years with no suffering” button would prefer the latter? If not, there doesn’t seem to be a reason to think that changes at any point before the experience in the latter option diminishes to “live a pure net-zero-happiness life”.) One rebuttal to this which I think I often returned to (perhaps subconsciously or indirectly) when I defended averageism was “but the repugnant conclusion!”—but, as I describe above, that does not seem to be a problem if you accept the idea that potential people matter.
3. It seems that averageism has its own extreme ends: according to it, a world with only 1 person suffering a torturous life is worse than a world with billions of people suffering slightly-less-torturous lives on average. Of course, if one doggedly insists that averages are all that matter, then this is all consistent. But it seems hard to reject the intuition that there is some moral relevance in the aggregate experience vs. the average experience.

Interesting post, thanks!

As far as I can tell, it is easy to understand why the Repugnant Conclusion is repugnant. It explores scope neglect, a very well-known cognitive bias, to a great extent.