Thinking from the perspective of a beneficiary, I would rather get $100 than remove a 1/10,000,000 risk of death. That level of risk is in line with traveling a few kilometers by walking, and a small fraction of the risk associated with a day skiing: see the Wikipedia entry on micromorts. We all make such tradeoffs every day, taking on small risks of large harm for high probabilities of smaller benefits that have better expected value.

So behind the veil of ignorance, for a fixed population size, the 'altruistic repugnant conclusion' is actually just what beneficiaries would want for themselves. 'Repugnance' would involve the donor prioritizing their scope-insensitive response over the interests of the beneficiaries.

An article by Barbara Fried makes a very strong case against this sort of anti-aggregationism based on the ubiquity of such tradeoffs.

It might be objected that the problem is imagining how the benefits of sparing few days of malaria to 1 billion people are aggregated, and that our feeling or repugnance derives from our failure to see that this aggregated benefit is immensely larger than the benefit of increased educational opportunities for few people. But this begs the question. The problem with ARC is exactly that to many of us the benefit of giving better education to 100 people seems worthy of giving up the tiny aggregated benefit of sparing few days of non-fatal malaria to 1 billion people.

I think he fails to do justice to this objection. It not mere question-begging to suggest that people's intuitions fail to deal with the large numbers correctly; it is a well-known fact that people's intuitions struggle to deal with such cases! This is commonly referred to as Scope Insensitivity - it occurs even in cases where the outcome 'should' be obvious.

I don't agree with the response suggested (recognising that it cites an article I co-authored). The DALY and QALY metrics imply the ARC. It seems reasonable that these metrics or ones similar are in some sense definitive of EA in global poverty and health.

Then the question is whether it is correct to aggregate small benefits. It's fair to say there is philosophical disagreement about this, but nevertheless (in my view) a strong case to be made that the fully aggregative view is correct. One way to approach this, probably the dominant way in moral philosophy, is to figure out the implications of philosophical views and then to choose between the various counterintuitive implications these have. e.g. you could say that the badness of minor ailments does not aggregate. Then you choose between the counterintuitive implications of this vs the aggregative view. This seems to be a bad way to go about it because it starts at the wrong level.

What we should do is assess at the level of rationales. The aggregative view has a rationale, viz (crudely) more of a good thing is better, Clearly, it's better to cure lots of mild ailments that it is to cure one. The goodness of doing so does not diminish: curing one additional person is always as valuable no matter how many other people you have cured. If so, it follows that curing enough mild ailments must eventually be better than curing one really bad ailment. A response to this needs to criticise this rationale not merely point out that it has a weird seeming implication. Lots of things have weird seeming implications, including e.g. quantum physics, evolution. Pointing out that quantum physics has counterintuitive implications should not be the primary level at which we debate the truth of quantum physics.

See this - http://spot.colorado.edu/~norcross/Comparingharms.pdf

This is, IMO, a pretty unpersuasive argument. At least if you are willing, like me, to bite the bullet that SUFFICIENTLY many small gains in utility could make up for a few large gains. I don't even find this particularly difficult to swallow. Indeed, I can explain away our feeling that somehow this shouldn't be true by appealing to our inclination to (as a matter of practical life navigation) to round down sufficiently small hurts to zero.

Also I would suggest that many of the examples that seem problematic are delibrately rigged so the overt description (a world with many people with a small amount of positive utility) presents the situation one way while the flavor text is phrased so as to trigger our empathetic/whats it like response as if it it didn't satisfy the overt description. For instance if we remove the flavor about it being a very highly overpopulated world and simply said consider a universe with many many beings each with a small amount of utility then finding that superior no longer seems particularly troubling. It just states the principle allowing addition of utilities in the abstract. However, sneak in the flavor text that the world is very overcrowded and the temptation is to imagine a world which is ACTIVELY UNPLEASANT to be in, i.e., one in which people have negative utility.

More generally, I find these kind of considerations far more compelling at convincing me I have very poor intuitions for comparing the relative goodness/badness of some kinds of situations and that I better eschew any attempt to rely MORE on those intuitions and dive into the math. In particular, the worst response I can imagine is to say: huh, wow I guess I'm really bad at deciding which situations are better or worse in many circumstances, indeed, one can find cases where A seems better than B better than C better than A considered pairwise, guess I'll throw over this helpful formalism and just use my intuition directly to evaluate which states of affairs are preferable.

1. C^^ is better than C^, which is better than C;
2. C^^ is better than B;
3. B is better than C and C^.

But these three rankings are inconsistent, and one of them should go. To endorse all of them means to breach transitivity. Is EA committed to rejecting transitivity? This view is very controversial, and if EA required it, this would need serious inquiry and defence.

These rankings do not seem inconsistent to me? C^^ > B > C^ > C

edit: substituted with '^' due to formatting issues.

From my perspective as an evolutionary psychologist, I wouldn't expect us to have reliable or coherent intuitions about utility aggregation for any groups larger than about 150 people, for any time-spans beyond two generations, or for any non-human sentient beings.

This is why consequentialist thought experiments like this so often strike me as demanding the impossible of human moral intuitions -- like expecting us to be able to reconcile our 'intuitive physics' concept of 'impetus' with current models of quantum gravity.

Whenever we take our moral intuitions beyond their 'environment of evolutionary adaptedness' (EEA), there's no reason to expect they can be reconciled with serious consequentialist analysis. And even within the EEA, there's no reason to expect out moral intuitions will be utilitarian rather than selfish + nepotistic + in-groupish + a bit of virtue-signaling.

If EAs have shitty lives many fewer people will become EAs. EAs should give up to the limit of their ability to have the same to slightly better lives than their peers by being more efficient with their money in purchasing happiness. Modulo other considerations such as reinvesting in human capital for giving later etc. This will also lead to greater productivity which is often too heavily discounted in people's calculation on the basis of the introspection illusion: thinking that their future self will be able to tank the hits from a crappier life for the sake of values than they actually will be able to.