One line of attack against the idea that we should reject the repugnant conclusion is to ask why the lives are barely worth living. If it’s because the many people have the same good lives but they’re p-zombies 99.9999% of the time, I can easily believe that increasing the population until there’s more total conscious experiences makes the tradeoff worthwhile.
In thought experiments about utilitarianism, it’s generally a good idea to consider composite beings. A bus is a utility monster in traffic. If it has 30 people in it, its interests count 30 times as much. So maybe there could be things we’d think of as one mind whose internals mapped onto the internals of a bus in a moral-value-preserving way. (I guess the repugnant conclusion is about utility monsters but for quantity instead of quality.)
One line of attack against the idea that we should reject the repugnant conclusion is to ask why the lives are barely worth living. If it’s because the many people have the same good lives but they’re p-zombies 99.9999% of the time, I can easily believe that increasing the population until there’s more total conscious experiences makes the tradeoff worthwhile.
In thought experiments about utilitarianism, it’s generally a good idea to consider composite beings. A bus is a utility monster in traffic. If it has 30 people in it, its interests count 30 times as much. So maybe there could be things we’d think of as one mind whose internals mapped onto the internals of a bus in a moral-value-preserving way. (I guess the repugnant conclusion is about utility monsters but for quantity instead of quality.)