What’s your reason for not agreeing with that position?
I ask because my own experience is that I feel strongly inclined to disagree with it, but when I look closer I think that’s because of a couple of confusions.
Confusion #1. Here are two questions we can ask about a life. (1) “Would it be an improvement to end this life now?” (2) “Would it be an improvement if this life had simply never been?”. The question relevant to the Repugnant Conclusion is #2 (almost—see below), but there’s a tendency to conflate it with #1. (Imagine tactlessly telling someone that the answer to #2 in their case is yes. I think they would likely respond indignantly with something like “So you’d prefer me dead, would you?”—question #1.) And, because people value their own lives a lot and people’s preferences matter, a life has to be much much worse to make the answer to #1 positive than to make the answer to #2 positive. So when we try to imagine lives that are just barely worth having (best not to say “worth living” because again this wrongly suggests #1) we tend to think about ones that are borderline for #1. I think most human lives are well above the threshold for saying no to #1, but quite a lot might be below the threshold for #2.
Confusion #2. People’s lives matter not only to themselves but to other people around them. Imagine (ridiculously oversimple toy model alert) a community of people, all with lives to which the answer to question 2 above is (all things considered) yes and who care a lot about the people around them; let’s have a scale on which the borderline for question 2 is at zero, and suppose that someone with N friends scores −1/(N^2+1). Suppose everyone has 10 friends; then the incremental effect of removing someone with N friends is to improve the score by about 0.01 for their life and reduce it by 10(1/82-1/101) or about 0.023. In other words, this world would be worse off without any individual in the community—if what you imagine when assessing that is that that individual is gone and no one else takes their place in others’ social relationships. But everyone in the community has a life that, all told, is negative, the world would be better off if none of them had ever lived, and it would be better off if any individual one had never lived and their place in others’ lives had been taken by someone else*.
(By the way—do you feel that sense of outrage as if I’m proposing dropping bombs on this hypothetical community? That’s the difference between question 1 and question 2, again. For the avoidance of doubt, I feel it too.)
This second effect, like the first one, tends to make us overestimate how bad a life has to be before the world would have been better off without it, because even if we’re careful not to confuse question 1 with question 2 we’re still liable to think of a “borderline” life as one for which the world would be neither better nor worse off if it were simply deleted, which accounts for social relationships in the wrong way.
What’s your reason for not agreeing with that position?
I ask because my own experience is that I feel strongly inclined to disagree with it, but when I look closer I think that’s because of a couple of confusions.
Confusion #1. Here are two questions we can ask about a life. (1) “Would it be an improvement to end this life now?” (2) “Would it be an improvement if this life had simply never been?”. The question relevant to the Repugnant Conclusion is #2 (almost—see below), but there’s a tendency to conflate it with #1. (Imagine tactlessly telling someone that the answer to #2 in their case is yes. I think they would likely respond indignantly with something like “So you’d prefer me dead, would you?”—question #1.) And, because people value their own lives a lot and people’s preferences matter, a life has to be much much worse to make the answer to #1 positive than to make the answer to #2 positive. So when we try to imagine lives that are just barely worth having (best not to say “worth living” because again this wrongly suggests #1) we tend to think about ones that are borderline for #1. I think most human lives are well above the threshold for saying no to #1, but quite a lot might be below the threshold for #2.
Confusion #2. People’s lives matter not only to themselves but to other people around them. Imagine (ridiculously oversimple toy model alert) a community of people, all with lives to which the answer to question 2 above is (all things considered) yes and who care a lot about the people around them; let’s have a scale on which the borderline for question 2 is at zero, and suppose that someone with N friends scores −1/(N^2+1). Suppose everyone has 10 friends; then the incremental effect of removing someone with N friends is to improve the score by about 0.01 for their life and reduce it by 10(1/82-1/101) or about 0.023. In other words, this world would be worse off without any individual in the community—if what you imagine when assessing that is that that individual is gone and no one else takes their place in others’ social relationships. But everyone in the community has a life that, all told, is negative, the world would be better off if none of them had ever lived, and it would be better off if any individual one had never lived and their place in others’ lives had been taken by someone else*.
(By the way—do you feel that sense of outrage as if I’m proposing dropping bombs on this hypothetical community? That’s the difference between question 1 and question 2, again. For the avoidance of doubt, I feel it too.)
This second effect, like the first one, tends to make us overestimate how bad a life has to be before the world would have been better off without it, because even if we’re careful not to confuse question 1 with question 2 we’re still liable to think of a “borderline” life as one for which the world would be neither better nor worse off if it were simply deleted, which accounts for social relationships in the wrong way.