Generally it’s a good idea to think twice and reread before assuming that a published and frequently cited paper is saying something so obviously stupid.
It doesn’t seem any less obviously stupid to me then the more moderate conclusion you claim that Parfit has drawn. If you really believe that creating a new lives barely worth living (or “lives someone would barely choose to live,” in your words) is better than increasing the utility of existing lives then the next logical step is to confiscate all the resources people are using to live standards of life higher than “a life someone would barely choose to live” and use them to make more people instead. That would result in a society identical to the previous one except that it has a lower quality of life and a higher population.
Perhaps it would have sounded a little better if I had said “It is the view that if the only ways Z and A differ is that Z has a higher population, and lower quality of life, then Z is preferable to A, providing that Z’s larger population is large enough that it has higher total utility than A.” I disagree with this of course, it seems to me that total and average utility are both valuable, and one shouldn’t dominate the other.
Also, I’m sorry to have retracted the comment you commented on, I did that before I noticed you had commented on it. I decided that I could explain my ideas more briefly and clearly in a new comment and posted that one in its place.
It doesn’t seem any less obviously stupid to me then the more moderate conclusion you claim that Parfit has drawn. If you really believe that creating a new lives barely worth living (or “lives someone would barely choose to live,” in your words) is better than increasing the utility of existing lives then the next logical step is to confiscate all the resources people are using to live standards of life higher than “a life someone would barely choose to live” and use them to make more people instead. That would result in a society identical to the previous one except that it has a lower quality of life and a higher population.
Perhaps it would have sounded a little better if I had said “It is the view that if the only ways Z and A differ is that Z has a higher population, and lower quality of life, then Z is preferable to A, providing that Z’s larger population is large enough that it has higher total utility than A.” I disagree with this of course, it seems to me that total and average utility are both valuable, and one shouldn’t dominate the other.
Also, I’m sorry to have retracted the comment you commented on, I did that before I noticed you had commented on it. I decided that I could explain my ideas more briefly and clearly in a new comment and posted that one in its place.