My primary niggling concern with standard utilitarianism is “The Repugnant Conclusion”: the way it always wants to maximize population at the carrying capacity of the available resources, at the point where well-being per individual is already starting to go down significantly, by enough for the slope of the well-being against resources curve to counter-balance the increase in population. Everyone ends up on the edge of starvation. Which is, of course, what natural populations do. Admittedly, once you allow for things like resource depletion, or just the possibilities of famines/poor weather, that probably pushes that down a bit, to the point where you’re normally keeping some resource capacity reserve. But I just can’t shake the feeling that if we all just agreed to decrease the population by only ~20%, we’d all individually be ~10-15% happier. However I can’t see a good way to make the math balance, short of making utility mildly nonlinear in population, which seems really counterintuitive, and like it might give the wrong answers for gambles about loss of a lot of lives. [I’m thinking this through and might do a post if I come up with anything interesting.]
I do think it’s work giving some moral worth to a species too, so we make increasing efforts to prevent extinction if a species’ population drops, but that’s basically just a convenient shorthand for the utility of future members of that species who cannot exist if it goes extinct.
we make increasing efforts to prevent extinction if a species’ population drops, but that’s basically just a convenient shorthand for the utility of future members of that species who cannot exist if it goes extinct.
In additional to the concept of utility of hypothetical future beings, there’s also the utility of the presently living members of that species who are alive thanks to the extinction-prevention efforts in this scenario.
The species is not extinct because these individuals are living. If you can help the last members of a species maintain good health for a long time, that’s good even if they can’t reproduce.
My primary niggling concern with standard utilitarianism is “The Repugnant Conclusion”: the way it always wants to maximize population at the carrying capacity of the available resources, at the point where well-being per individual is already starting to go down significantly, by enough for the slope of the well-being against resources curve to counter-balance the increase in population. Everyone ends up on the edge of starvation. Which is, of course, what natural populations do. Admittedly, once you allow for things like resource depletion, or just the possibilities of famines/poor weather, that probably pushes that down a bit, to the point where you’re normally keeping some resource capacity reserve. But I just can’t shake the feeling that if we all just agreed to decrease the population by only ~20%, we’d all individually be ~10-15% happier. However I can’t see a good way to make the math balance, short of making utility mildly nonlinear in population, which seems really counterintuitive, and like it might give the wrong answers for gambles about loss of a lot of lives. [I’m thinking this through and might do a post if I come up with anything interesting.]
I do think it’s work giving some moral worth to a species too, so we make increasing efforts to prevent extinction if a species’ population drops, but that’s basically just a convenient shorthand for the utility of future members of that species who cannot exist if it goes extinct.
In additional to the concept of utility of hypothetical future beings, there’s also the utility of the presently living members of that species who are alive thanks to the extinction-prevention efforts in this scenario.
The species is not extinct because these individuals are living. If you can help the last members of a species maintain good health for a long time, that’s good even if they can’t reproduce.