My own resolution to the “repugnant conclusion” is that the goodness of a population isn’t a state function: you can’t know if a population is better than another simply by looking at the well-being of each currently existing person right now. Instead, you have to know the history of the population as well as its current state.
Observation: seemingly, consequentialists should be using “integral reasoning”, while deontologists use “differential reasoning”. If what you really care about is the final outcome, then you shouldn’t assign much weight to what your intuitions say about each individual step, you care about the final outcome.
Well when you’re dealing with real people, their memories in the present time record all kinds of past events, or at least information about such, so any coherent, real-life state-function for values of people must either take past events into true account (which sounds like the right thing), or take memories into account (which sounds like a very, very hacky and bad idea).
My own resolution to the “repugnant conclusion” is that the goodness of a population isn’t a state function: you can’t know if a population is better than another simply by looking at the well-being of each currently existing person right now. Instead, you have to know the history of the population as well as its current state.
Very integral reasoning ^_^
Observation: seemingly, consequentialists should be using “integral reasoning”, while deontologists use “differential reasoning”. If what you really care about is the final outcome, then you shouldn’t assign much weight to what your intuitions say about each individual step, you care about the final outcome.
Well when you’re dealing with real people, their memories in the present time record all kinds of past events, or at least information about such, so any coherent, real-life state-function for values of people must either take past events into true account (which sounds like the right thing), or take memories into account (which sounds like a very, very hacky and bad idea).