I’m familiar with Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion, and was actually planning to do a post on it at some point or another, because I took one look and said “Isn’t that just scope insensitivity?” But I also automatically translated the problem into Small World terms so that new people were actually being brought into existence; and, in retrospect, even then, visualized it in terms of a number of people small enough that they could have reasonably unique experiences (that is, not a thousand copies of Robin Hanson looking at a dust speck in slightly different places).
With those provisos in place, the Repugnant Conclusion is straightforwardly “repugnant” only because of scope insensitivity. By specification, each new birth is something to celebrate rather than to regret—it can’t be an existence just marginally good enough to avoid mercy-killing after being born, with the disutility of the death taken into account. It has to be an existence containing enough joys to outweigh any sorrows, so that we celebrate its birth. If each new birth is something to celebrate, then the “repugnance” of the Repugnant Conclusion is just because we’re tossing the thousandfold multiplier of a thousand celebrations out the window.
But if there are diminishing moral returns on diversity, or if people already exist and we’re allocating reality-fluid among them, then you can “shut up and calculate” and find that you shouldn’t create new low-quality people; and then the Repugnant Conclusion fails because each additional birth is not something to celebrate.
By saying “we should ask ourselves what we want”, I didn’t mean to imply that we could trust the answers. But I don’t think that my own answer leads to a preference reversal (in the absence of anthropic paradoxes, where I don’t know what to expect to see either). If I’ve missed the reversal, by all means point it out.
I’m familiar with Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion, and was actually planning to do a post on it at some point or another, because I took one look and said “Isn’t that just scope insensitivity?” But I also automatically translated the problem into Small World terms so that new people were actually being brought into existence; and, in retrospect, even then, visualized it in terms of a number of people small enough that they could have reasonably unique experiences (that is, not a thousand copies of Robin Hanson looking at a dust speck in slightly different places).
With those provisos in place, the Repugnant Conclusion is straightforwardly “repugnant” only because of scope insensitivity. By specification, each new birth is something to celebrate rather than to regret—it can’t be an existence just marginally good enough to avoid mercy-killing after being born, with the disutility of the death taken into account. It has to be an existence containing enough joys to outweigh any sorrows, so that we celebrate its birth. If each new birth is something to celebrate, then the “repugnance” of the Repugnant Conclusion is just because we’re tossing the thousandfold multiplier of a thousand celebrations out the window.
But if there are diminishing moral returns on diversity, or if people already exist and we’re allocating reality-fluid among them, then you can “shut up and calculate” and find that you shouldn’t create new low-quality people; and then the Repugnant Conclusion fails because each additional birth is not something to celebrate.
By saying “we should ask ourselves what we want”, I didn’t mean to imply that we could trust the answers. But I don’t think that my own answer leads to a preference reversal (in the absence of anthropic paradoxes, where I don’t know what to expect to see either). If I’ve missed the reversal, by all means point it out.