This isn’t the exact thing Vladimir_M was talking about, but: An Impossibility Theorem for Welfarist Axiologies seems rather worrying for utilitarianism in particular, though you could argue that no ethical system fully escapes its conclusions.
In brief, the paper argues that if we choose for an ethical system the following three reasonable-sounding premises:
The Dominance Principle: If population A contains the same number of people as population B, and every person in A has higher welfare than any person in B, then A is better than B.
The Addition Principle: If it is bad to add a number of people, all of with welfare lower than the original people, then it is at least as bad to add a greater number of people, all with even lower welfare than the original people.
The Minimal Non-Extreme Priority Principle: There is a number n such that an addition of n people with very high welfare and a single person with negative welfare is at least as good as an addition of the same number of people but with very low positive welfare.
then we cannot help but to accept one of the following:
The Repugnant Conclusion: For any perfectly equal population with very high positive welfare, there is a population with very low positive welfare which is better.
The Sadistic Conclusion: When adding people without affecting the original people’s welfare, it can be better to add people with negative welfare rather than positive welfare.
The Anti-Egalitarian Conclusion: A population with perfect equality can be worse than a population with the same number of people, inequality, and lower average (and thus lower total) positive welfare.
This seems rather bad. I haven’t had a chance to work through the proof to make sure it checks out, however.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find an ungated version of the paper to link to. However I did find this paper by the same author, where he argues that if we define
The Egalitarian Dominance Condition: If population A is a perfectly equal population of the same size as population B, and every person in A has higher welfare than every person in B, then A is better than B, other things being equal.
The General Non-Extreme Priority Condition: There is a number n of lives such that for any population X, and any welfare level A, a population consisting of the X-lives, n lives with very high welfare, and one life with welfare A, is at least as good as a population consisting of the X-lives, n lives with very low positive welfare, and one life with welfare slightly above A, other things being equal.
The Non-Elitism Condition: For any triplet of welfare levels A, B, and C, A slightly higher than B, and B higher than C, and for any one-life population A with welfare A, there is a population C with welfare C, and a population B of the same size as A U C and with welfare B, such that for any population X consisting of lives with welfare ranging from C to A, B U X is at least as good as A U C U X, other things being equal.
The Weak Non-Sadism Condition: There is a negative welfare level and a number of lives at this level such that an addition of any number of people with positive welfare is at least as good as an addition of the lives with negative welfare, other things being equal.
The Weak Quality Addition Condition: For any population X, there is a perfectly equal population with very high positive welfare, and a very negative welfare level, and a number of lives at this level, such that the addition of the high welfare population to X is at least as good as the addition of any population consisting of the lives with negative welfare and any number of lives with very low positive welfare to X, other things being equal.
then no axiology can satisfy all of these criteria. (I have not worked through this logic either.)
Me too. 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.
then we cannot help but to accept one of the following:
*The Repugnant Conclusion: For any perfectly equal population with very high positive welfare, there is a population with very low positive welfare which is better.
*The Sadistic Conclusion: When adding people without affecting the original people’s welfare, it can be better to add people with negative welfare rather than positive welfare.
*The Anti-Egalitarian Conclusion: A population with perfect equality can be worse than a population with the same number of people, inequality, and lower average (and thus lower total) positive welfare.
This seems rather bad. I haven’t had a chance to work through the proof to make sure it checks out, however.
I don’t think this reveals any inconsistencies about moral reasoning at all. Upon reflection it seems obvious to me that the vast majority of the human population accepts the Sadistic Conclusion and considers it morally obvious. And I think that they are right to do so.
What makes me say this? Well, let’s dissect the Sadistic Conclusion. Basically, it is a specific variant of another, broader conclusion, which can be stated thusly:
If it the addition of a person or persons with positive welfare can sometimes be bad, then it is sometimes preferable to do other bad things than to add that person or persons. Examples of these other bad things include harming existing people to avoid adding that person, failing to increase the welfare of existing people in order to avoid adding that person, or the Sadistic Conclusion.
What would a world where people accepted this conclusion look like? It would be a world where people refrained from doing pleasurable things in order to avoid adding another person to the world (for instance, abstaining from sex out of fear of getting pregnant). It would be a world where people spent money on devices to prevent the addition of more people, instead of on things that made them happy (for example, using money to buy condoms instead of candy). It would be a world where people chose to risk harm upon themselves rather than add more people to the world (by having surgical procedures like vasectomies, which have a nonzero risk of complications). In other words, it’s our world.
So why does the Sadistic Conclusion seem unpalatable, even though it’s obvious that pretty much everyone accepts the principle it is derived from? I think it’s probably same reason that people reject the transplant variant of the trolley problem, even though nearly everyone accepts the normal version of it. The thought of directly doing something awful to other people makes us squeemish and queasy, even if we accept the abstract principle behind it in other situations.
But how could the addition of more people with positive welfare be bad? I think we probably have some sort of moral principle that smaller populations with higher welfare per person are better than larger populations with lower levels of welfare per person, even if the total amount of welfare per person is larger overall in the larger population. (If you don’t believe in the concept of “personal identity” just replace the word “person” with the phrase “sets of experiences that are related in certain ways,” it doesn’t change anything).
A helpful way of looking at it would be to consider this principle on an individual level, rather than a population wide one. Suppose, as in Parfit’s classic example someone gets me addicted to a drug that causes me to have a burning desire to take it, and then gives me a lifetime supply of that drug. I have more satisfied desires than I used to have, but my life has not been made any better. This is because I have a set of higher-order preferences about what sort of desires I want to have, if giving me a new desire conflicts with those higher-order preferences then my life has been made worse or the same, not better.
Similarly if adding more people conflicts with higher-order moral principles about how the world should be, adding them makes the world worse, not better. Before I understood this there was a short, dark time where I actually accepted the Repugnant Conclusion, rather than the Sadistic one. Fortunately those dark days are over.
Incidentally, I think the Sadistic Conclusion is poorly named, as it still considers the addition of people with negative welfare to be a bad thing.
Well, let’s dissect the Sadistic Conclusion. Basically, it is a specific variant of another, broader conclusion, which can be stated thusly:
If it the addition of a person or persons with positive welfare can sometimes be bad, then it is sometimes preferable to do other bad things than to add that person or persons.
Wait what? That’s the direct opposite of the Sadistic Conclusion. If the Sadistic Conclusion was commonly accepted, then people would abstain from using contraception if they thought that they could create new suffering-filled lives that way. And if they thought their kids were about to live happy lives, they might try to arrange it so that the kids would live miserable lives instead.
That’s not the Sadistic Conclusion as presented by Arrhenius. Arrhenius’ Sadistic Conclusion is that, if it is bad to add more people with positive welfare, then it might be less bad to add someone with negative welfare instead of a large amount of people with positive welfare. Obviously the amount of people with negative welfare must be considerably smaller than the amount of people with positive welfare in order for the math to check out.
Under Arrhenius’ Sadistic Conclusion adding unhappy, miserable lives is still a very bad thing. It makes the world a worse place, and adding no one at all would be preferable. Adding a miserable life isn’t good, it’s just less bad than adding a huge amount of lives barely worth living. Personally, I think the conclusion is misnamed, since it doesn’t consider adding suffering people to be good.
Okay, you’re right that the Sadistic Conclusion does consider it better to avoid adding any people at all, and says that it’s better to add people with negative welfare only if we are in a situation where we have to add someone.
So you’re saying that by spending resources on not creating the new lives, people are essentially choosing the “create a life with negative welfare” option, but instead of creating a new life with negative welfare, an equivalent amount is subtracted from their own welfare. Am I understanding you correctly?
So you’re saying that by spending resources on not creating the new lives, people are essentially choosing the “create a life with negative welfare” option, but instead of creating a new life with negative welfare, an equivalent amount is subtracted from their own welfare. Am I understanding you correctly?
This isn’t the exact thing Vladimir_M was talking about, but: An Impossibility Theorem for Welfarist Axiologies seems rather worrying for utilitarianism in particular, though you could argue that no ethical system fully escapes its conclusions.
In brief, the paper argues that if we choose for an ethical system the following three reasonable-sounding premises:
The Dominance Principle: If population A contains the same number of people as population B, and every person in A has higher welfare than any person in B, then A is better than B.
The Addition Principle: If it is bad to add a number of people, all of with welfare lower than the original people, then it is at least as bad to add a greater number of people, all with even lower welfare than the original people.
The Minimal Non-Extreme Priority Principle: There is a number n such that an addition of n people with very high welfare and a single person with negative welfare is at least as good as an addition of the same number of people but with very low positive welfare.
then we cannot help but to accept one of the following:
The Repugnant Conclusion: For any perfectly equal population with very high positive welfare, there is a population with very low positive welfare which is better.
The Sadistic Conclusion: When adding people without affecting the original people’s welfare, it can be better to add people with negative welfare rather than positive welfare.
The Anti-Egalitarian Conclusion: A population with perfect equality can be worse than a population with the same number of people, inequality, and lower average (and thus lower total) positive welfare.
This seems rather bad. I haven’t had a chance to work through the proof to make sure it checks out, however.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find an ungated version of the paper to link to. However I did find this paper by the same author, where he argues that if we define
The Egalitarian Dominance Condition: If population A is a perfectly equal population of the same size as population B, and every person in A has higher welfare than every person in B, then A is better than B, other things being equal.
The General Non-Extreme Priority Condition: There is a number n of lives such that for any population X, and any welfare level A, a population consisting of the X-lives, n lives with very high welfare, and one life with welfare A, is at least as good as a population consisting of the X-lives, n lives with very low positive welfare, and one life with welfare slightly above A, other things being equal.
The Non-Elitism Condition: For any triplet of welfare levels A, B, and C, A slightly higher than B, and B higher than C, and for any one-life population A with welfare A, there is a population C with welfare C, and a population B of the same size as A U C and with welfare B, such that for any population X consisting of lives with welfare ranging from C to A, B U X is at least as good as A U C U X, other things being equal.
The Weak Non-Sadism Condition: There is a negative welfare level and a number of lives at this level such that an addition of any number of people with positive welfare is at least as good as an addition of the lives with negative welfare, other things being equal.
The Weak Quality Addition Condition: For any population X, there is a perfectly equal population with very high positive welfare, and a very negative welfare level, and a number of lives at this level, such that the addition of the high welfare population to X is at least as good as the addition of any population consisting of the lives with negative welfare and any number of lives with very low positive welfare to X, other things being equal.
then no axiology can satisfy all of these criteria. (I have not worked through this logic either.)
The premises sound much less intuitive than the conclusions, and I accept the Repugnant Conclusion anyway.
Me too. 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.
I don’t think this reveals any inconsistencies about moral reasoning at all. Upon reflection it seems obvious to me that the vast majority of the human population accepts the Sadistic Conclusion and considers it morally obvious. And I think that they are right to do so.
What makes me say this? Well, let’s dissect the Sadistic Conclusion. Basically, it is a specific variant of another, broader conclusion, which can be stated thusly:
If it the addition of a person or persons with positive welfare can sometimes be bad, then it is sometimes preferable to do other bad things than to add that person or persons. Examples of these other bad things include harming existing people to avoid adding that person, failing to increase the welfare of existing people in order to avoid adding that person, or the Sadistic Conclusion.
What would a world where people accepted this conclusion look like? It would be a world where people refrained from doing pleasurable things in order to avoid adding another person to the world (for instance, abstaining from sex out of fear of getting pregnant). It would be a world where people spent money on devices to prevent the addition of more people, instead of on things that made them happy (for example, using money to buy condoms instead of candy). It would be a world where people chose to risk harm upon themselves rather than add more people to the world (by having surgical procedures like vasectomies, which have a nonzero risk of complications). In other words, it’s our world.
So why does the Sadistic Conclusion seem unpalatable, even though it’s obvious that pretty much everyone accepts the principle it is derived from? I think it’s probably same reason that people reject the transplant variant of the trolley problem, even though nearly everyone accepts the normal version of it. The thought of directly doing something awful to other people makes us squeemish and queasy, even if we accept the abstract principle behind it in other situations.
But how could the addition of more people with positive welfare be bad? I think we probably have some sort of moral principle that smaller populations with higher welfare per person are better than larger populations with lower levels of welfare per person, even if the total amount of welfare per person is larger overall in the larger population. (If you don’t believe in the concept of “personal identity” just replace the word “person” with the phrase “sets of experiences that are related in certain ways,” it doesn’t change anything).
A helpful way of looking at it would be to consider this principle on an individual level, rather than a population wide one. Suppose, as in Parfit’s classic example someone gets me addicted to a drug that causes me to have a burning desire to take it, and then gives me a lifetime supply of that drug. I have more satisfied desires than I used to have, but my life has not been made any better. This is because I have a set of higher-order preferences about what sort of desires I want to have, if giving me a new desire conflicts with those higher-order preferences then my life has been made worse or the same, not better.
Similarly if adding more people conflicts with higher-order moral principles about how the world should be, adding them makes the world worse, not better. Before I understood this there was a short, dark time where I actually accepted the Repugnant Conclusion, rather than the Sadistic one. Fortunately those dark days are over.
Incidentally, I think the Sadistic Conclusion is poorly named, as it still considers the addition of people with negative welfare to be a bad thing.
Wait what? That’s the direct opposite of the Sadistic Conclusion. If the Sadistic Conclusion was commonly accepted, then people would abstain from using contraception if they thought that they could create new suffering-filled lives that way. And if they thought their kids were about to live happy lives, they might try to arrange it so that the kids would live miserable lives instead.
That’s not the Sadistic Conclusion as presented by Arrhenius. Arrhenius’ Sadistic Conclusion is that, if it is bad to add more people with positive welfare, then it might be less bad to add someone with negative welfare instead of a large amount of people with positive welfare. Obviously the amount of people with negative welfare must be considerably smaller than the amount of people with positive welfare in order for the math to check out.
Under Arrhenius’ Sadistic Conclusion adding unhappy, miserable lives is still a very bad thing. It makes the world a worse place, and adding no one at all would be preferable. Adding a miserable life isn’t good, it’s just less bad than adding a huge amount of lives barely worth living. Personally, I think the conclusion is misnamed, since it doesn’t consider adding suffering people to be good.
Okay, you’re right that the Sadistic Conclusion does consider it better to avoid adding any people at all, and says that it’s better to add people with negative welfare only if we are in a situation where we have to add someone.
So you’re saying that by spending resources on not creating the new lives, people are essentially choosing the “create a life with negative welfare” option, but instead of creating a new life with negative welfare, an equivalent amount is subtracted from their own welfare. Am I understanding you correctly?
Yes, that’s what I was trying to say.