Weak repugnant conclusion need not be so repugnant given fixed resources

I generally don't see why the conclusion is considered to be repugnant not only as a reaction of gut-feelings but also upon reflection, since we simply deal with another case of "dust speck vs torture", an example that illustrates how our limbic system is not adapted in a way that it could scale up emotions linearly and prevent intransitive dispositions.

We can imagine a world in which evolutionary mechanisms brought forth human brains that by some sort of limbic limitation simply cannot imagine the integer "17", whereas all the other numbers from 1 to 20 can be imagined just as we would expect it. In such a world a repugnant conclusion against total utilitarianism could sound somewhat like "Following total utilitarianism you had to prefer a world A where 5 people are being tortured to a world B where "only" 17 people are being tortured. This seems to be absurd." In both cases we deal with intransitive dispositions. In the first case people tend to adjust downward the disutility of a single dust speck so that when we incrementally examine possible trades between dust speck and torture people find that A<B<C<D<E and E<A. The same goes for the second case. People think that 5 people being tortured is less bad than 10 people, 10 people is less bad than 15 people, but 15 is worse than 17 as the last outcome cannot be imagined as vividly as the others.

I don't want to make the case that some moral theory seems to be "true". I don't know what that even could mean. Though I think can descriptively say that, structurally, refusing total utilitarianism because of the repugnant conclusion is equal to refusing total utilitarianism in another world where we are bad at imagining "17" and where we find it absurd that 17 people being tortured could be considered as worse than 5 peope being tortured.

There's a simple way to kill the RC once and for all: Reject the Mere Addition Principle. That's what I did, and what I think most people do intuitively.

To elaborate, there is an argument, that is basically sound, that if you accept the following two principles, you must accept the RC:

1. Mere Addtion: Adding a new life of positive welfare without impacting the welfare of other people always makes the world better.

2. Nonantiegalitarianism: Redistributing welfare so that those with the least amount of welfare get more than they had before is a good thing, providing their gains outweigh the losses of those it was redistributed from.

These two principles get you to the RC by enabling the Mere Addition Paradox. You add some people with very low welfare to a high welfare world. You redistribute welfare to the low welfare people. They get 1.01 units of welfare for every 1 unit taken from the high welfare people. Repeat until you get the RC.

So we need to reject one of these principles to avoid the RC. Which one? Nonantiegalitarianism seems unplesant to reject. Pretty much everyone believe in charity to some extent, that it's good to give up some of your welfare if it helps someone else who needs it more. So we should probably reject Mere Addition. We need to acknowledge that sometimes adding people to the world makes it worse.

Does rejecting Mere Addition generate any counterintuitive results? I would argue that at first it seems to, but actually it doesn't.

A philosopher named Arrenhius argued that rejecting Mere Addition leads to the Sadistic Conclusion. Basically, he argues that if adding lives of positive welfare can be bad, then it might be better to add a life of negative welfare than a huge amount of lives with positive welfare.

This seems bad, at first, but then I got to thinking. Arrhenius' Sadistic Conclusion was actually a special case of a larger, more general principle, namely that if it is bad to add lives of positive welfare, it might be better to do some other bad thing to prevent lives from being added. Adding a life of negative welfare is an especially nasty example, but there are other examples, people could harm themselves to avoid having children, or spend money on ways to prevent having children instead of on fun stuff.

Do people in fact do that? Do they harm themselves to avoid having children? All the time! People buy condoms instead of candy, and have surgeries performed to sterilize themselves! And they don't do this for purely selfish reasons, most people seem to think that they have a moral duty to not have children unless they can provide them with a certain level of care.

The reason the Sadistic Conclusion seems counterintuitive at first is that Arrhenius used an especially nasty, vivid example. It's the equivalent of someone using the Transplant case to argue against the conclusions of the trolley problem. Let's put it another way: Imagine that you could somehow compensate all the billions of people on Earth for the pain and suffering they undergo, and the opportunities for happiness they forgo, to make sure they don't have children. All you'd have to do is create on person with a total lifetime welfare of -0.01. That doesn't seem any less reasonable to me than tolerating a certain amount of car crashes so everyone benefits from transportation.

So we should accept the Sadistic Conclusion and reject Mere Addition.

What should we replace it with Mere Addition with? I think some general principle that a small population consisting of people with high welfare per capita is better than one with a large population with a low level of welfare per capita, even if the total amount of welfare in the larger population is greater. That's not very specific, I know, but it's on the right track. And it rejects both the Repugnant Conclusion, and the Kill and Replace Conclusion.

Previous discussion of that argument.

This is a bit of an aside, but:

the other [reason Stuart rejects total utilitarianism] being that total utilitarianism sees no problem with painlessly killing someone by surprise, as long as you also gave birth to someone else of equal happiness

I think that's a misleading way of putting it. Conditional on having given birth to someone else of equal happiness, total utilitarianism says not to kill the other person. What it does say is that if your choice is between killing-and-giving-birth and doing nothing, those are of equal merit. (You also need to suppose that the killing-and-giving-birth option leaves others' net utility the same -- e.g., because the newly born equally happy person will contribute as much to others' happiness as the person getting killed.) I agree that that's counterintuitive, but it doesn't seem obviously insane. What would be insane would be to say that because you gave birth, you're exempt from criticism for the killing -- but that's not true at all; if you can give birth and then not kill, that's much better than either of the other options according to total utilitarianism.

I tend to think that exact duplication doesn't double utility. More of exactly the same isn't really making things better. So I don't think millions of exactly identical villages of a few thousand, isolated from one another (else their relationships would undermine the perfect identities between them; they'd be at different places in the pattern of relationships) are more valuable than just one instance of the same village, and if one village is slightly happier than any of the millions of identical villages, the one village is preferable. But between a more normal world of billions of unique, diverse, barely worth living lives, and one village of thousands of almost but not quite a million times happier lives, I guess I think the billions may be the better world if that's how the total utilitarian math works out. Further, though, I think that while it doesn't take very much difference for me to think that an additional worthwhile life is an improvement, once you get very, very close to exact duplication, it again stops being as much of an improvement to add people. When you're talking about, say, a google people instead of mere billions, it seems likely that some of them are going to be getting close enough to being exact duplicates that the decreased value of mere duplication may start affecting the outcome.

I think the repugnant conclusion is exhaustively defeated by separating out what resources are used to build something with how those resources are used.

Given a fixed set of resources R, there are a variety of things W that you can do, and you can evaluate the effectiveness of doing so with an ethics system S. There's some W that is "best' according to S, and anything better cannot be accomplished with R.

If you add more resources to R, then you can do something like adding a single person, and you wind up better off. But W + 1 person isn't necessarily the best use of (R + stuff needed to add one person), as evaluated by S.

Of course, since it accepts the repugnant conclusion, there will be a barely-worth-living world Y' which it prefers to X'. But then it might prefer reallocating the resources of Y' to the happy world X'', and so on.

I'm pretty sure we're saying the same thing here, now. But I have something to add - preferring additional resources screens off the desire for Y above X. Once you separate world-building into magnitude (resources) and direction (distribution of resources), wanting Y above X means that you prefer larger magnitudes, rather than a different direction.

It seems like there's a fairly simple solution to the problem. Instead of thinking of utilitarianism as the sum of the utility value of all sentient beings, why not think of it in terms of increasing the average amount of utility value of all sentient beings, with the caveat that it is also unethical to end the life of any currently existing sentient being.

There's no reason that thinking of it as a sum is inherently more rational then thinking of it as an average. Of course, like I said, you have to add the rule that you can't end the currently existing life of intelligent beings just to increase the average happiness, or else you get even more repugnant conclusions. But with that rule, it seems like you get overall better conclusions then if you think of utility as a sum.

For example, I don't see why we have any specific ethical mandate to bring new intelligent life into the world, and in fact I would think that it would only be ethically justified if that new intelligent being would have a happiness level at least equal to the average for the world as a whole. (IE: you shouldn't have kids unless you think you can raise them at least as well as the average human being would.)

Question: How does time fit into this algorithm?

My understanding is the repugnant conclusion is generally thought of as worse than the alternative, but not bad.

I think that implies if someone offered you 3^^^3 years of the repugnant conclusion, or 1 year of true bliss, and the repugnant conclusion gave happiness a mere trillionth as intense as true bliss, and we are simply multiplying S by time, then 3^^^3 years of the repugnant conclusion is better than a year of true bliss.

But I don't know if it is assumed that we need to simply multiply by time, unadjusted (for instance, in S, the logarithm of population size is used.)

So S is not utilitarian, right? (At least in your example). So your point is that it's possible to have an agent that accepts the repugnant conclusion but agrees with our intuitions in more realistic cases? Well, sure, but that's not really a defense of total utilitarianism unless you can actually make it work in the case where S is total utilitarianism.

there is another universe Y which is better - and that is filled with nothing but dull, boring people whose quasi-empty and repetitive lives are just one tiny iota above being too miserable to endure.

No. Lives that are just one tiny iota above being too miserable to endure are far below being worth enduring. In order for Y to be better, or even good, the lives cannot be miserable at all. Parts can be miserable, but only if they are balanced by parts that are equally good.