The Mere Cable Channel Addition Paradox

But it might still prove that we should agree to make more people and more resources if it's a package deal.

It does, but by definition.

Let X and Y be populations. Each population has a number of people and an amount of resources. Resources are distributed evenly, so the average utility of a population and each individual's utility is given by: resources over people. We will say the "standard of living", the level at which a life is 'barely worth living', is a utility of 1. And we will say that Z is when the utility is below the standard of living. These are our definitions.

For numbers, let's say X and Y start out with 100 people and 500 resources, giving each a utility of 5. This is good!
In X, we will perform the false method: simply adding people. In one step, we go to 105 people (utility 4.7, still good), then 110 (utility 4.5) and in 80 steps we will have reached our repugnant Z, with 505 people and 500 resources giving us a utility of 0.99.
Now in Y, we will perform the strengthened method: absorb a small population with bare minimum living standards, thus bringing everyone down slightly. In one step, we got to 105 people and 505 resources (4.8 utility, still good) then 110 and 510 (4.6, still good) and then Z arrives ....

No, it doesn't. Utility in Y will asymptotically approach 1 from above and we will never reach Z. Thus, the repugnant conclusion is dead.

You may argue that "just barely above the absolute bare minimum" is not worth living, but you won't get very far: previously, we defined any life above the minimum standard as worth living. So if you say that, instead, 2 utility is the minimum worth living for, Y will asymptotically approach 2. And you can hardly argue that "just above 2" isn't worth living for, because you just said before that 2 is the minimum! So yes, the repugnant conclusion is truly dead.

(An analogy for this population Y is colonising new planets: the older planets will be affluent, but the frontier new colonies will be hardscrabble and just barely worth it. But this is not a repugnant conclusion! This is like Firefly, and that would be badass!)

Or you may argue that comparing our original Y to a Y++ after many steps, it's obvious that Y is better. But this won't get you far either, because in what way is Y better than Y++? If you tell me this comparison beforehand, I will no longer desire to add people when it would reverse that comparison, and if you don't tell me, well, that's unfair - it's no surprise that optimising for one criterion might abandon other criteria, especially ones it didn't know about.

Footnote:
I tried this:

b = 500
a = 100
while (b / a) > 1
b += 5
a += 5
end

and it didn't terminate, thus the student became enlightened.

But it might still prove that we should agree to make more people and more resources if it's a package deal.

As in, "human resources".

But it might still prove that we should agree to make more people and more resources if it's a package deal.

You're right, my argument does not prohibit the particular hypothetical you offered up. The one quibble I have is that I'm not sure how much resources "one unit" is, but it would have to be a sizable amount for a million people to live lives barely worth living on it.

In fact, your hypothetical is pretty much structurally identical to the cable bill hypothetical that Bob offers up. And, if you recall, Alice does not disagree that buying Package A+ would be irrational if the government really was going to give her $50 if she did it.

So I might have only killed the repugnant conclusion 99.9% dead. For now I'm content with that, I've eliminated it as a possibility from any situation that is remotely likely to happen in real life, and that's good enough for now.

As for whether I'd push the button? I probably wouldn't, even though my argument doesn't exclude it. However, I don't know if that's because there is some other moral objection to the repugnant conclusion that I haven't articulated yet, or if it's just because I can be kind of selfish sometimes.

I find it repugnant to even consider creating people with lives worse than the current average. So some resources will just have to remain unused, if that's the condition.

Indeed, I immediately thought “what's the difference between the government giving you $50 that you can only spend on cables, and it just giving you cables?”.

also press the next button that redistributes all existing resources equally among existing people, then the repugnant conclusion isn't completely dead...

I think a button redistribution all existing resources equally among existing people is one I'd almost certainly not press.

This might be getting into semantics, but I don't think your proposed dilemma really qualifies as the RC anymore. The RC was interesting because it seemed to derive an obviously unacceptable conclusion (a world full of people whose lives are barely worth living) from premises / steps that were all individually obviously acceptable. Yours employs a step (create people whose lives are barely worth living, without getting enough extra resources to make up for it) that's already ethically ambiguous, due to clearly leading to a world with a population dominated by people whose lives are barely worth living.

Exactly. The original post is straightforwardly wrong, and doesn't even do its readers the courtesy of including a one-line summary that lets them avoid having to read the whole thing. The fact that it's at +40 is a damning indictment of LessWrong's ability to tell good arguments from bad.

As I understand it, Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion was that, given any possible world (even one with billions of people who each have an extremely high quality of life), there is a better possible world in which everyone has a life that is barely worth living (better because the population is much larger, and "barely worth living" is better than nothing).

The Mere Addition Paradox was the main argument Parfit used to argue that a possible world with a larger population and a lower quality of life was necessarily better. My argument is that the MAP doesn't show this at all. I am aware that it was not the only argument Parfit used, but it was the most effective, in my opinion, so I wanted to take it on.

The argument he made was that the Repugnant Conclusion followed from most theories of population ethics (that is, most attempts to define "better" in this context), but most people refused to accept it.

It helps that I am already using a somewhat abnormal theory of population ethics. Alice and Bob elucidate it to a limited extent, but it's somewhat similar to the "variable value principle" described in Stanford's page on the subject. Basically I argue that having high total and high average utility are both valuable and that it's morally good to increase both. I use the somewhat clunkier phrases "use resources to create lives worth living" and "use resources to enhance the utility of existing people" to avoid things like Ng's Sadistic Conclusion and Parfit's Absurd Conclusion.

According to the theory I am using, possible World 1 is worse than hypothetical World 2, providing both worlds have access to the same level of resources. My solution to the Mere Addition Paradox seems to indicate that World 1 might be better than World 2 if it has access to many more resources to convert into utility. However, a world with a smaller population, higher average utility, and the same level of resources as World 1 would always be better (providing the higher average utility was obtained by spending resources enhancing existing people's utility, not by killing depressed people or something like that).

I think 'barely worth living' is universally applicable. Anyone's life can be seen as 'barely worth living' by sufficiently advanced spoiled child. E.g. we would see all cavemen's lives as 'barely worth living' all while those guys say, ohh the hunting been great this year.

Reading your comment (and others in this vein) and realizing that the RC isn't as bad as I'd thought it was, and therefore doesn't show human morals to be so inconsistent as I'd thought them to be, makes me update towards human morals in general maybe not being so inconsistent at all. (At least within an individual; not so much between cultures.)

What Parfit postulates should be called, to avoid equivocation, "A life barely worth celebrating" - it's good news and you say "Yay!" but very softly. I'd even argue that this should be a universal standard for all discussions of the Repugnant Conclusion.

Excellent point. I'll try to remember to do that if I end up discussing this again.

Yes, I had thought about setting the zero of the function to be summed across individuals to a higher level than “just barely good enough for them not to want to die”. The problem with that is that then there would be people who don't want to die but still have a negative utility, and even a total utilitarian would conclude they had better die (at least in “dry water” models when you neglect the grief of their friends and family, and the cessation of the externalities of their life).

Edit: It looks like “dry water” has acquired a meaning totally unrelated to the one I had in mind. (It was the derogatory term John von Neumann used to refer to models of fluids without viscosity, whose proprieties are very different from those of real fluids.)

Indeed, for a person affecting view we can make it so that the 'original' set of people in A get even better:

A : 10 people at wellbeing 10 A+: 10 People at wellbeing 20 & 1 million at wellbeing 9.5 B: 1 million and ten people at wellbeing 9.8.

A to A+ and A+ to B increase total utility. Moving from A to A+ is a drop in average utility by a bit under 0.5 points, but multiples the total utility by around 100 000, and all the people in A have double their utility. So it seems a pluralist average/total person view is should accept these moves, and so should we're off to the repugnant conclusion again (and if they don't, we can make even stronger examples like 10^10 new people in A with wellbeing 9.99 and everyone originally in A gets 1 million utility, etc.)

I've been thinking about this argument (which is formally called the Benign Addition Paradox) for a few months, and I'm no longer sure it holds up. I began to think about if I would support doing such a thing in real life. For instance, I wondered if I would push a button that would create a bunch of people who are forced to be my slaves for a couple days per week, but are freed for just long enough each week that their lives could be said to be worthwhile. I realized that I would not.

Why? Because if I created those people with lower utility than me, I would immediately possess an obligation to free them and then transfer some of my utility to them, which would reduce my level of utility. So, if we adopt a person-affecting view, we can adopt the following rule: Adding new people to the world is worse if the addition makes existing people worse off, or confers upon the existing people a moral obligation to take an action that will make them worse off.

So A+ is worse than A because the people who previously existed in A have a moral duty to transfer some of their utility to the new people who were added. They have a duty to convert A+ into B, which would harm them.

Now, you might immediately bring up Parfit's classic argument where the new people are geographically separated from the existing people, and therefore incapable of being helped. In that case, hasn't no harm been done, since the existing people are physically incapable of fulfilling the moral obligation they have? No, I would argue. It seems to me that a world where a person has a moral obligation and is prevented from fulfilling it is worse than one where they have one and are capable of fulfilling it.

I think that the geographic separation argument seems plausible because it contaminates what is an essentially consequentialist argument with virtue ethics. The geographic separation is no one's fault, no one choose to cause it, so it seems like it's morally benign. Imagine, instead, that you had the option of pushing a button that would have two effects:

1) It would create a new group of people who would be your slaves for a few days each week, but be free long enough that their life could be said to be barely worthwhile.

2) It would create an invincible, unstoppable AI that will thwart any attempt to equalize utility between the new people and existing people. It will even thwart an attempt by you to equalize utility if you change your mind.

I don't know about you, but I sure as hell wouldn't push that button, even though it does not differ from the geographic separation argument in any important way.

Of course, this argument does create some weird implications. For instance, it implies that there might be some aliens out there with a much higher standard of living than we have, and we are inadvertently harming them by reproducing. However, it's possible that the reason that this seems so counterintuitive is that when contemplating it we are mapping it to the real world, not the simplified world we have been using to make our arguments in so far. In the real world we can raise the following practical objections:

1) We do not currently live in a world where utility is Pareto efficient. In the various addition paradox arguments it is assumed to be, but that is a simplifying assumption that does not reflect the real world. Generally when we create a new person in this day and age we increase utility, both by creating new family members and friends for people, and by allowing greater division of labor to grow the economy. So adding new people might actually help the aliens by reducing their moral obligation.

2) We already exist, and stopping people from having children generally harms them. So even if the aliens would be better off if we had never existed, now that we exist our desire to reproduce has to be taken into account.

3) If we ever actually meet the aliens, it seems likely that through mutual trade we could make each other both better off.

Of course, as I said before, these are all practical objections that don't affect the principle of the thing. If the whole "possibly harming distant aliens by reproducing" thing still seems too counterintuitive to you, you could reject the person-affecting principle, either in favor of an impersonal type of morality, or in favor of some sort of pluralist ethics that takes both impersonal and person-affecting morality into account.

You've been one of my best critics in this, so please let me know if you think I'm onto something, or if I'm totally off-base.

Aside: Another objection to the Benign Addition Paradox I've come up with goes like this.
A: 10 human beings at wellbeing 10.

A+: 10 human beings at wellbeing 50 &1million sadistic demon-creatures at wellbeing 11. The demon-creatures derive 9 wellbeing each from torturing humans or watching humans being tortured.

B: 10 human beings at wellbeing -10,000 (from being tortured by demons) & 1 million sadistic demon creatures at wellbeing 20 (9 of which they get from torturing the 10 humans).

All these moves raise total utility, average utility, and each transition benefits all the persons involved, yet B seems obviously worse than A. The most obvious solutions I could think of were:

1) The "conferring a moral obligation on someone harms them" argument I already elucidated.

2) Not counting any utility derived from sadism towards the total.

I'm interested in what you think.

I agree with Unnamed that this post misunderstands Parfit's argument by tying it empirical claims about resources that have no relevance.

My argument was against the Mere Addition Paradox, which works by progressively adding more and more people, and the common belief that one of the implications of the MAP is that we have a moral duty to devote all our resources to creating extremely large amounts people.

My main goal is to integrate the common intuition that A+ is better than A with the intuition that creating a vast number of people with low quality of life is bad. Parfit supports the intuition that A+ is better than A by pointing out that the extra people are not doing the inhabitants of A any harm by existing. I point out the reason that this is true is that the extra inhabitants come with their own resources, and that a society with those extra resources, but less people (A++), would be even better.

Just imagine God is offering you choices between different universes with inhabitants of the stipulated level of wellbeing: he offers you A, then offers you to take A+, then B, then B+, etc.

If each world had the same amount of resources then I'd choose A, it's the most efficient one at converting resources into overall value.

My understanding of Parfit's point is that it let you argue that all other things being equal, a huge population with low quality of life is better than a small one with high quality of life. This is what I am trying to refute. Like Unnamed, you don't seem to think this is necessarily what the MAP implies.

This is what the repugnant conclusion is all about: it has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not Z (or the 'mechanism' of mere addition to get from A to Z) is feasible under resource constraint, but that if this were possible, maximizing aggregate value obliges we take this repugnant conclusion. I don't want to be mean, but this is a really basic error.

Again, my main point in writing this was to attack the chain of logic that leads from the intuition that adding a few people to A+ will do no harm to the Repugnant Conclusion. In other words, to attack the paradoxical nature of the MAP. I am aware that there are other arguments for the RC that require other responses such as the one about maximizing aggregate utility. Would you buy those cable packages if the government wasn't forcing you to?

Perhaps I should have started with the pluralist values, since they were sort of the underpinning of my argument. I am basically advocating a system where both creating new lives worth living, improving the utility of those who exist, and possibly other values such as equality, contribute to Overall Value. However, they have diminishing returns relative to each other (if saying that the value of creating a life worth living changes gives you the creeps just keep the value of doing that constant and change the value of the others, it's essentially the same). I'm not sure if increasing total utility should be a contributing value on its own, or if it is just a side-effect of increasing both the number of lives worth living and the average utility simultaneously.

So the more lives worth living you have, the greater the contributions that enhancing the utility existing lives contributes to overall value. For instance, in a very small population using resources to create a life worth living might contribute 1 Overall Value Point (OVP) while using those same resources to improve existing lives might only produce 0.5 OVPs. However, as the population grows larger, improving existing lives generates more and more OVPs, while creating lives worth living shrinks or remains constant.*

So maybe, if you added a vast amount of lives worth living to a you could generate the same amount of OVP that you could by increasing the average utility just a little. But it would be a fantastically inefficient way to generate OVP. A world where some of the resources used to sustain all those lives were instead used to enhance the lives of those who already exist would be a world with vastly more overall value.

Given the 'average term' doesn't dominate (or is lexically prior to) the total utility term, there will be acceptable deals this average total pluralist should accept where we lose some average but gain more than enough total utility to make up for it.

Is this any different from the Zeno's paradoxes of motion? I.E. you're basically saying that there is no point where the changes are big enough to become undesirable, so eventually we'll get to a point that everyone agrees is undesirable. How is that any different from saying Achilles will never catch the tortoise?

*I imagine that actually the values might also change relative to the resources available. Having 8 billion lives worth living on one planet seems like a good amount, but having just 8 billion lives worth living in a whole galaxy seems like a waste.

I have followed your advice and added a recap at the end.

Thats interesting, after reading this I thought it was one of the best examples I'd seen of the dialogue format being used to explain and argument and its objections.

If our difference of opinion isn't just due to some arbitrary factors about our aesthetic preferences it might be that you are more familiar with the original argument, so didn't benefit as much from having it explained it detail. Do you think thats accurate?

I found that the dialog format made it easy for me to follow, but still overly drawn out.

Another dimension to the ups and downs, as I mentioned elsewhere:

I think the "Repugnancy" comes from picturing a very low but positive quality of life as some kind of dull gray monotone, instead of the usual ups and downs, and then feeling enormous boredom, and then projecting that boredom onto the scenario.

But let's say you meet this person in college and you can tell how the rest of their life is going to go. Would you encourage them to commit suicide, thereby reaping a moral surplus?

One problem I see is that there is no way to tell. You may have an idea, but there is no way to know with 100% certainty that they won't turn things around and lead a net happy life down the line.

They've discovered long enlightening dialogues are not cost effective in time usage to sales made. Therefore they've established a rationalist blacklist who they avoid calling.

Why do I never have discussions like this with telemarketers?

Have you ever tried? As it turns out, I haven't. On the other hand, when I was a kid, I remember my dad once giving an entire sales lecture to a telemarketer (he was a sales manager at the time) who was demonstrating poor marketing skills.

Not even close. The primary content of the OP is based on a straw man due to a massive misunderstanding of the mathematical arguments about the Repugnant Conclusion.

The conclusion of what Partfit actually demonstrated goes something more like this:

For any coherent mathematical definition of utility such that there is some additive functions which allows you to sum the utility of many people to determine U(population), the following paradox exists:

Given any world with positive utility A, there exists at least one other world B with more people, and less average utiity per person which your utility system will judge to be better, i.e.: U(B) > U(A).

Parfit does not conclude that you necessarily reach world B by maximizing reproduction from world A nor that every world with more people and less average utility is better. Only worlds with a higher total utility are considered "better". This of course implies either more resources, or more utility efficient use of resources in the "better" world.

The cable channel analogy would be to say "As long as every extra cable channel I add provides at least some constant positive utility epsilon>0, even if it is vanishingly small, there is some number of cable channels I can put into your feed that will make it worth $100 to you." Is this really so hard to accept? It seems obviously true even if irrelevant to real life where most of us would have diminishing marginal utility of cable channels.

Parfit's point is that it is hard for the human brain to accept the possibility that some world with uncounted numbers of people with lives just barely worth living could possibly be better than any world with a bunch of very happy high utility people (he can't accept it himself), even though any algebraically coherent system of utility will lead to that very conclusion.

John Maxwell's comment gets to the heart of the issue, the term "just barely worth living". Philosophy always struggles where math meets natural language, and this is a classic example.

The phrase "just barely worth living" conjures up an image of a life that is barely better than the kind of neverending torture/loneliness scenario where we might consider encouraging suicide.

But the taboos against suicide are strong. Even putting aside taboos, there are large amounts of collateral damage from suicides. The most obvious is that anyone who has emotional or family connections to a suicide will suffer. Even people who are very isolated, will have some connection, and suicide could trigger grief or depression in any people who encounter them or their story. There are also some very scary studies about suicide and accident rates going up in the aftermath of publicized suicides or accidents, due to social lemming like programming in humans.

So it is quite rational for most people to not consider suicide until their personal utility is highly negative if they care at all about the people or world around them. For most of us, a life just above the suicide threshold would be a negative utility life and a fairly large negative utility.

A life with utility positive epsilon is not a life of sadness or pain, but a life that we would just barely choose to live, as a disembodied soul given a choice of life X or non-existence. Such a life, IMO will be comfortably clear of the suicide threshold, and would, in my opinion, represent an improvement in the world. Why wouldn't it? It is by definition, a life that someone would choose to have rather than not have! How could that not improve the world?

Given this interpretation of "just barely worth living", I accept the so-called Repugnant conclusion, and go happily on my way calculating utility functions.

RC is just the mirror image of the tortured person versus 3^^^^3 persons with dust specks in their eyes debate.

Tabooing "life just barely worth living", and then shutting up and multiplying led me to realize that the so-called Repugnant conclusion wasn't repugnant after all.

Ditto.

Agreed. This is an argument I haven't heard before.

We can make the same dance of moves from B to B+ (more people, worthwhile lives) and then B+ to C (redistribution and aggregate value increase). So, unless you are willing to deny transitivity, then moving from B to C is what we should do. Rinse and repeat until Z.

(This is assuming you mean resources as well being. However, the OPs resources point isn't responsive to Parfit's argument).

while Ry is only enough to grant some very low number of utilions per person: say .0001

And it doesn't have to stop there, if we imagine some future population Sx who have resources Sy that allows them to get 10^-10 utilions per person, for example.

Part of the original premise of the paradox is that even the people of population Z, the vast population the paradox leads to, still have lives that are "barely worth living." So you can't go that far, the population has to have enough utilons per person that their lives are barely worth living.

Which means that as long as doing so adds some arbitrarily small amount of resources, adding people is a net benefit.

Yes, one weakness in this argument is that it still allows the Mere Addition Paradox to happen if the following criteria are met:

1. The addition of a new person also adds more resources.

2. The amount of new resources added is enough to give the new person a life "barely worth living."

3. The only way to obtain those new resources is to create that new person. The people currently existing would be unable to obtain the resources without creating that person.

I think that my argument is still useful because of the low odds of encountering a situation that fulfills all those criteria, especially 3, in real life. It means that people no longer need to worry that they are committing some horrible moral wrong by not having as many children as possible.

If you try to formalize this theory of population ethics, I believe you will find that it's susceptible to Mere Addition type paradoxes.

It is, but the important point is that the paradoxes that it is vulnerable to do not seem to mandate reproduction, as a more traditional theory would.

For instance, my theory would say that Planet A with a moderate population of people living excellent lives is better than Planet B with a larger population whose lives are barely worth living. However, it might also say that Galaxy B full of people with lives barely worth living is better than Planet A, because it has so many people that it produces enough value to swamp planet A, even if it does so less efficiently. However, my theory would also say that Galaxy A, which has a somewhat smaller population and a higher quality of life than Galaxy B, is better than Galaxy B.

My theory is not for finding the best population, it is about finding the optimal population. It is about finding what the best possible population is given whatever resource constraints a society has. It does not bother me that you are able to dream up a better society if you remove those resource constraints, such a society might be better, but it would also be using resources less optimally. The best sort of society is one that uses the resources it has available to both create lives worth living, and using resources to enhance the utility of already existing people.

Not that I accept A<Z. I resolve the non-transitivity by taking A+<A.

That's really interesting. Why?

And would you also take A+ < A if we fiddled the numbers to get.

A: P1 at 10
A+: P1 at 20, P2-20 at 8
B: P1-20 at 9

So we can still get to the RP, yet A+ seems a really good deal versus A.

In the original, the A+ to B- transition RAISES the average. It's the A to A+ transition that lowers the average.

I edited the post to fix that. Thank you for pointing that out.

Also, I think it's rather aside from the point to begin talking about resource management.

It is, that's why Alice tells Bob to stop fighting the hypothetical and puts the conversation back on track. The reason I added that line was to illustrate a wrong way to approach the MAP.

From the perspective of the thought experiment adding resources that didn't exist before and making resources that are already there available are not different in any significant way.

What's the difference between "On a purely selfish basis, is it better for me, personally, to exist or not to exist?" and "Would I commit suicide, all other things being equal?"?

So once your misery goes below one unit, you get insane gains in utility for small reductions in misery?

Your conclusion seems to be that the "repugnant conclusion" is not actually repugnant. That is, the "dystopian" world of a large population leading barely worthwhile lives is better than the original world of a smaller population leading fulfilled lives.

My impression of the repugnant conclusion was that it claimed that a large population leading barely worthwhile lives is, all other things being equal, always better than a smaller one leading much better lives, even if the worlds they exist in are otherwise identical. For this reason I thought that I had refuted the repugnant conclusion if I demonstrated that in two worlds with identical access to resources, the one with the smaller population with high average utility is optimal.

In other words I thought that the repugnant conclusion implied: Earthly Paradise<Galactic Paradise with trillions of people<Galactic Dystopia with quadrillions of people.

I thought that it was enough to refute the repugnant conclusion if I demonstrated: Earthly Paradise<Galactic Dystopia<Galactic Paradise.

No one is claiming that the galactic dystopia is optimal, given any quantity of resources.

The impression I got was that the Repugnant Conclusion claimed precisely that. I thought it claimed that it is always better to use resources to create another life barely worth living then it is to improve existing lives, as long as everyone else was already at the "barely worth living" level.

But you need to revise your ethical theory if, of those two choices, your ethical theory prefers the galactic dystopia, and your ethical intuitions disagree.

You may be right. The idea that the galactic dystopia is better than the Earthly paradise is still kind of repugnant. I may just have to accept that A+ is worse than A for some reason.

It should be noted that if you have any tradeoff between average and total util you can still get MAPed into the RP: just add enough 'total' utility in the A+-->B move so this compensates for the drop in average, and then iterate.

Lexical priority would work (read average util, and only use total util as a tiebreaker), but this view seems to stand or fall with average util: if we find average util too costly, average util+lexically inferior total util is unlikely to be significantly cheaper.