You raise lots of good objections there. I think most of them are addressed quite well in the book though. You don’t need any money, because it seems to be online for free: https://www.stafforini.com/docs/Parfit%20-%20Reasons%20and%20persons.pdf And if you’re short of time it’s probably only the last chapter you need to read. I really disagree with the suggestion that there’s nothing to learn from ethical philosophy books.
For point 1: Yes you can value other things, but even if people’s quality of life is only a part of what you value, the mere-addition paradox raises problems for that part of what you value.
For point 2:That’s not really an objection to the argument.
For point 3: I don’t think the argument depends on the ability to precisely aggregate happiness. The graphs are helpful ways of conveying the idea with pictures, but the ability to quantify a population’s happiness and plot it on a graph is not essential (and obviously impossible in practice, whatever your stance on ethics). For the thought experiment, it’s enough to imagine a large population at roughly the same quality of life, then adding new people at a lower quality of life, then increasing their quality of life by a lot and only slightly lowering the quality of life of the original people, then repeating, etc. The reference to what you are doing to the ‘total’ and ‘average’ as this happens is supposed to be particularly addressed at those people who claim to value the ‘total’, or ‘average’, happiness I think. For the key idea, you can keep things more vague, and the argument still carries force.
For point 4: You can try to value things about the distribution of happiness, as a way out. I remember that’s discussed in the book as well, as are a number of other different approaches you could try to take to population ethics, though I don’t remember the details. Ultimately, I’m not sure what step in the chain of argument that would help you to reject.
On the non-transitive preferences being ok: that’s a fair take, and something like this is ultimately what Parfit himself tried to do I think. He didn’t like the repugnant conclusion, hence why he gave it that name. He didn’t want to just say non-transitive preferences were fine, but he did try to say that certain populations were incomparable, so as to break the chain of the argument. There’s a paper about it here which I haven’t looked at too much but maybe you’d agree with: https://www.stafforini.com/docs/Parfit%20-%20Can%20we%20avoid%20the%20repugnant%20conclusion.pdf
Quickly, ’cuz I’ve been spending too much time here lately...
One. If my other values actively conflict with having more than a certain given number of people, then they may overwhelm the considerations were talking about here and make them irrelevant.
Three. It’s not that you can’t do it precisely. It’s that you’re in a state of sin if you try to aggregate or compare them at all, even in the most loose and qualitative way. I’ll admit that I sometimes commit that sin, but that’s because I don’t buy into the whole idea of rigorous ethical philsophy to begin with. And only in extremis; I don’t think I’d be willing to commit it enough for that argument to really work for me.
Four. I’m not sure what you mean by “distribution of happiness”. That makes it sound like there’s a bottle of happiness and we’re trying to decide who gets to drink how much of it, or how to brew more, or how we can dilute it, or whatever. What I’m getting at is that your happiness and my happiness aren’t the same stuff at all; it’s more like there’s a big heap of random “happinesses”, none of them necessarily related to or substitutable for the others at all. Everybody gets one, but it’s really hard to say who’s getting the better deal. And, all else being equal, I’d rather have them be different from each other than have more identical ones.
You raise lots of good objections there. I think most of them are addressed quite well in the book though. You don’t need any money, because it seems to be online for free: https://www.stafforini.com/docs/Parfit%20-%20Reasons%20and%20persons.pdf And if you’re short of time it’s probably only the last chapter you need to read. I really disagree with the suggestion that there’s nothing to learn from ethical philosophy books.
For point 1: Yes you can value other things, but even if people’s quality of life is only a part of what you value, the mere-addition paradox raises problems for that part of what you value.
For point 2:That’s not really an objection to the argument.
For point 3: I don’t think the argument depends on the ability to precisely aggregate happiness. The graphs are helpful ways of conveying the idea with pictures, but the ability to quantify a population’s happiness and plot it on a graph is not essential (and obviously impossible in practice, whatever your stance on ethics). For the thought experiment, it’s enough to imagine a large population at roughly the same quality of life, then adding new people at a lower quality of life, then increasing their quality of life by a lot and only slightly lowering the quality of life of the original people, then repeating, etc. The reference to what you are doing to the ‘total’ and ‘average’ as this happens is supposed to be particularly addressed at those people who claim to value the ‘total’, or ‘average’, happiness I think. For the key idea, you can keep things more vague, and the argument still carries force.
For point 4: You can try to value things about the distribution of happiness, as a way out. I remember that’s discussed in the book as well, as are a number of other different approaches you could try to take to population ethics, though I don’t remember the details. Ultimately, I’m not sure what step in the chain of argument that would help you to reject.
On the non-transitive preferences being ok: that’s a fair take, and something like this is ultimately what Parfit himself tried to do I think. He didn’t like the repugnant conclusion, hence why he gave it that name. He didn’t want to just say non-transitive preferences were fine, but he did try to say that certain populations were incomparable, so as to break the chain of the argument. There’s a paper about it here which I haven’t looked at too much but maybe you’d agree with: https://www.stafforini.com/docs/Parfit%20-%20Can%20we%20avoid%20the%20repugnant%20conclusion.pdf
Quickly, ’cuz I’ve been spending too much time here lately...
One. If my other values actively conflict with having more than a certain given number of people, then they may overwhelm the considerations were talking about here and make them irrelevant.
Three. It’s not that you can’t do it precisely. It’s that you’re in a state of sin if you try to aggregate or compare them at all, even in the most loose and qualitative way. I’ll admit that I sometimes commit that sin, but that’s because I don’t buy into the whole idea of rigorous ethical philsophy to begin with. And only in extremis; I don’t think I’d be willing to commit it enough for that argument to really work for me.
Four. I’m not sure what you mean by “distribution of happiness”. That makes it sound like there’s a bottle of happiness and we’re trying to decide who gets to drink how much of it, or how to brew more, or how we can dilute it, or whatever. What I’m getting at is that your happiness and my happiness aren’t the same stuff at all; it’s more like there’s a big heap of random “happinesses”, none of them necessarily related to or substitutable for the others at all. Everybody gets one, but it’s really hard to say who’s getting the better deal. And, all else being equal, I’d rather have them be different from each other than have more identical ones.