In philosophy there is an objection to utilitarianism called the Repugnant Conclusion, which goes something like this:
“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.”
I don’t think the conclusion is repugnant. The reason it appears repugnant is because of some verbal slight of hand that’s going on: when we think of lives that are “barely worth living”, the lives we actually think of are those that aren’t worth living (for example, an extremely depressed person who will spend the rest of their life in a padded cell.) The reason we do this is because, as you explain, people make the mistake of putting a huge value on life itself.
In philosophy there is an objection to utilitarianism called the Repugnant Conclusion, which goes something like this:
“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.”
I don’t think the conclusion is repugnant. The reason it appears repugnant is because of some verbal slight of hand that’s going on: when we think of lives that are “barely worth living”, the lives we actually think of are those that aren’t worth living (for example, an extremely depressed person who will spend the rest of their life in a padded cell.) The reason we do this is because, as you explain, people make the mistake of putting a huge value on life itself.