Integral versus differential ethics

I think the seeming contradiction can be broken and located on a more or less precisely defined point between the extremes. And this goes as follows:

Most humans don't value all lives the same. The ancestral environment has made us to value people near us more than distant people. People more distant than the closest 150 (dunbars number) receive significantly less attention (and in some hunter gatherer communities the value may be actually zero or possibly even negative). Our modern society has allowed us to apply ethics and empathize will all beings and this flattens out the valuation of human lives. But only in the idealized case does it value all beings equally. Humans intuitively don't.

So if you add people and redistribute most people even if they consciously accept equal valuation will be caught by the conclusion repugnant to their intuition. They don't really value all those many beings equally after all. If you'd apply some transitional valuation function the math works out a bit differnt as each add-and-redistribute step adds a little bit less value - because the added being is more distant to you after all - even if only a very small bit.

I think this model is more honest to what humans really feel. Societies opinion may differ though.

One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens...

I accept the "repugnant" conclusion, on its own merits, namely because it seems obviously true to me.

I agree with what you call an integral reasoning (if you end up with an "obviously" bad outcome, you should not accept it based on your individual steps, no matter how solid they seem or even are). But to me it is not a symptom of a flaw in your premises or logical steps. Rather, this is an indication that human ethics is a complicated mess of heuristics and contradictions, and any attempt to formalize it inevitably hits one of these contradictions, when extrapolated outside its domain of applicability.

Re your other points, it seems like a typical Sorites emergence scenario. Human life/agency/society are all emergent concepts which make no sense outside the domain of the models describing them. For example, of course there is such a thing as "society". It's a good statistical model of how thousands of interacting humans act on aggregate. No, there is no society of one or two humans. Though I don't understand what "build a rigorous definition of society as something morally valuable, rather than focusing on individual" is supposed to mean.

Why are the small steps necessary? Axiom 1 is sufficient to add an arbitrarily large population of minimally-happy people. If you think that this is repugnant, then you should not assume Axiom 1.

(You then need Axiom 2 to get from the state of "tiny-but-happy A, plus huge and minimally happy B" to a state of uniform minimal happiness. But I don't think that changes much, except that if you're imagining yourself as living in A you might selfishly prefer to remain very happy.)

I apologize for engaging with the example rather than the thesis.

People who don't object to the way in which the problem leading to the "repugnant conclusion" is set up, and who accept that B is preferable or equal to B-, which is preferable or equal to A+, which is preferable or equal to A, as defined here, must either accept that B is preferable or equal to A, or reject transitivity.

Most decision theories which would be viewed as sane around LW accept transitivity. I prefer A+ to B-, though, so I don't have to accept all forms of the "repugnant conclusion", even though I accept transitivity, and prefer A+ to A. I do agree that "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”, though-- I don't value the lives of people with high standards of living infinitely more than the lives of people with lives barely worth living.

Also see dust specks vs. torture.

I agree with this point, and I am glad you articulated it. Do you think differential reasoning is an analytic thing, though?

I've thought about the same kind of distinction in politics, with the terms 'bottom-up' and 'top-down'. 'Bottom-up' view: "Does it make sense for citizens to pay police officers to fine them money if they drive without seat belts?" 'Top-down view': "Do seat belt laws reduce fatalaties?"

This example may not be the most impartial, but I think it's an important principle that if you did both methods perfectly, they'd agree; in the absence of such perfection, it's worth looking at both. So too for ethics.

Speaking of the world probably changing quite a bit, what's the likelihood of a future that won't wake you up because they think something about you makes it not worthwhile to have you around? It could be something you think is completely normal, and it's not necessarily on the current lists of what the future won't like about us.

If you're lucky, they leave you frozen because a society that wants you might appear sooner or later. If you're not lucky, they're very sure they're right, so they destroy your body.

I think this logic applies to a whole class of problems, not just ethics. Specifically, if we are unsure of both our premises and our conclusion, then we might want to apply a method of reflective equilibrium, which combines what you call the "integral" and "differential" perspectives.

Is the differential way of reasoning the same thing as reductionism and the intergral -- as the big-picture approach?

If your differentials don't add up to the integral, pick a better epsilon. Seriously - inconsistent implies untrue, but reversing it by changing one of the premises arbitrarily doesn't help get to truth either.

Another dilemma where the same dichotomy applies is torture vs. dust specks. One might reason that torturing one person 50 years is better than torturing 100 people infinitesimally less painfully for 50 years minus one second, and that this is better than torturing 10,000 people very slightly less painfully for 50 years minus two seconds……. and at the end of this process accept the unintuituive conclusion that torturing someone 50 years is better than having a huge number of people suffer a tiny pain for a second (differential thinking). Or one might refuse to accept the conclusion and decide that one of these apparently unproblematic differential comparisons is in fact wrong (integral thinking).

I fail to understand what is repugnant about the repugnant conclusion. Are there any arguments here except discrediting the conclusion using the label "repugnant"?