I generally don’t see why the conclusion is considered to be repugnant not only as a reaction of gut-feelings but also upon reflection, since we simply deal with another case of “dust speck vs torture”, an example that illustrates how our limbic system is not adapted in a way that it could scale up emotions linearly and prevent intransitive dispositions.
We can imagine a world in which evolutionary mechanisms brought forth human brains that by some sort of limbic limitation simply cannot imagine the integer “17”, whereas all the other numbers from 1 to 20 can be imagined just as we would expect it. In such a world a repugnant conclusion against total utilitarianism could sound somewhat like “Following total utilitarianism you had to prefer a world A where 5 people are being tortured to a world B where “only” 17 people are being tortured. This seems to be absurd.” In both cases we deal with intransitive dispositions. In the first case people tend to adjust downward the disutility of a single dust speck so that when we incrementally examine possible trades between dust speck and torture people find that A<B<C<D<E and E<A. The same goes for the second case. People think that 5 people being tortured is less bad than 10 people, 10 people is less bad than 15 people, but 15 is worse than 17 as the last outcome cannot be imagined as vividly as the others.
I don’t want to make the case that some moral theory seems to be “true”. I don’t know what that even could mean. Though I think can descriptively say that, structurally, refusing total utilitarianism because of the repugnant conclusion is equal to refusing total utilitarianism in another world where we are bad at imagining “17″ and where we find it absurd that 17 people being tortured could be considered as worse than 5 peope being tortured.
Hi! I’ve been lurking around on the blog. I look forward to actively engage from now. Generally, I’m strongly interested in AI research, rationality in general, bayesian statistics and decision problems. I hope that I will keep on learning a lot and will also contribute useful insights for this community as it is very valuable what people here are about to do! So, see you on the “battlefield”. Hi to everyone!