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What should we agree on about the Repugnant Conclusion?

23 points by yboris 6y ago

comex 6y ago
See also, Wikipedia article on the Repugnant Conclusion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox Edit: Personally, I don't find it intuitive at all that adding more people to the world inherently makes the world better. So I guess my view would be closer to averagism. The Wikipedia article 'Population ethics' states "has never been widely embraced by philosophers, because it leads to counterintuitive implications said to be 'at least as serious' as the repugnant conclusion". But… which implications? The Wikipedia article 'Average and total utilitarianism' gives an example: "More counter intuitively still, average utilitarianism evaluates the existence of a single person with 100 hedons more favorably than an outcome in which a million people have an average utility of 99 hedons." But far from being counterintuitive, this strikes me as 'obviously true'.
- solveit 6y ago
  If you could painlessly kill half the world's population while also rewriting any memories and traces of the past so that they never existed, would you consider this a morally neutral action?
  - praptak 6y ago
    No, but I don't think it carries to not letting them be born. My stance on killing being wrong is that it destroys the freedom of an existing person to decide whether they want to continue to experience life.
  - teekert 6y ago
    I never understood that Thanos reasoning, clearly he underestimates exponential growth. Killing 50% has you back where your started in 1-2 generations. How useless. Second, even though I don't think limiting population growth is a solution, but science is, Thanos should have calculated what the size of minimal gene pool for survival of a population was and went for that, much lower number that would have given him more bang for his (stupid) buck. In any case, I resent the idea that we should stop or limit procreation. All you others can do that, but my of spring will live among the stars and I will maximize my chances of it getting there. And don't even get started on selective procreation, it has been tried. Edit, perhaps this response is more towards the general sentiment in this thread, not op.
    - goatinaboat 6y ago
      never understood that Thanos reasoning, clearly he underestimates exponential growth. Killing 50% has you back where your started in 1-2 generations Thanos’s reasoning makes even less sense when you consider he removed 50% of all life; removing half the fish and half the birds at the same time as removing half the people leaves you no better off even immediately post-snap
      - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
        Also if Thanos had paid more attention in Graph theory class, he might have been able to do a better job of minimizing grief than just randomly killing half the vertices. He probably could have found sub graphs that were not very connected to other parts and eliminated them completely.
        shirleyquirk 6y ago
        DeathStar considered more moral than Thanos
        manicdee 6y ago
        To accomplish his stated goal in the MCU (as opposed to the goal of impressing his girlfriend), he should have gone for maximum grief, along with preserving those islands of isolation since those islands are more likely to be the cultures that don’t engage in the fantasy of unlimited exponential growth.
      - hoseja 6y ago
        Well in the comics he was supposedly just trying to impress Death, a much more reasonable motivation.
    - comex 6y ago
      > In any case, I resent the idea that we should stop or limit procreation. All you others can do that, but my of spring will live among the stars and I will maximize my chances of it getting there. And don't even get started on selective procreation, it has been tried. Personally, I'm not on the "the world needs fewer people" bandwagon either. While I'm not an expert, I've heard that the world population is expected to level off around 2100 at around 10.9 billion, not that much higher than the current 7.8 billion. So we will never get to some Malthusian point where there isn't enough food to go around. Meanwhile, at a small scale, adding one person does marginally increase the cost of feeding everyone and marginally increase pollution, but that person will also contribute to society and the economy. When humanity someday goes to space, perhaps the population will start growing again, but if so, it will be precisely because there will be more resources for them. In other words, the effect on society of having kids seems to be pretty neutral in practice. Given that, I have no reason to oppose your desire to spread your genes, assuming that's what you meant. Personally, I don't care whether the ones living among the stars have my genes or somebody else's, but that's just me. I do think it would be nice to maximize the chance of humanity as a whole someday living among the stars, but increasing the population would not necessarily help with that.
  - dmingod666 6y ago
    If we started with the people who wanted to do this, we'll end up killing a lot less people overall.. :D
  - DubiousPusher 6y ago
    No because this take assumes the crappy neural net in your head that creates grossly inaccurate models from which you draw conclusions is giving you something like a viable perspective on reality under which such a drastic action makes sense. In other words, it disregards neuropsychological humility.
  - comex 6y ago
    I should say my view is closer to averagism when questions of utility start getting involved. But I believe utility is just one moral precept among others. Murder is disallowed no matter how much it might increase others' utility. And murder is murder regardless of pain, memories, or traces. On the other hand, choosing to have fewer or no children is easily justified. So is pursuing outcomes, such as education, that could cause people to choose to have fewer children on average.
- krastanov 6y ago
  On the other hand, I have always found the simplistic utilitarism you described to be just too trivialized to use for any worthwhile conclusions. In particular, your last example assumes that "utility" adds up linearly. I claim that "utility is a linear quantity" should sound preposterous to anyone that has worked in physics, biology, engineering, or some other form of study of dynamical systems. This is the "spherical cow in vacuum on a frictionless plane" of philosophy. Edit: My message, devoid of tone, sounds glib and antagonistic. My bad! I actually find your line of reasoning important and interesting, even if I consider it "obviously" flawed.
  - walleeee 6y ago
    Yes, not only is naive utility-maxing preposterous, it can also launder questionable ethical decisions: "for the greater good", etc. Unexamined consequentialism breeds infinite self-justification, imo As far as I can tell claims to objectivity in ethics tend to translate to "I'm happy to theorize situation X so long as X never happens to me." In the last century this attitude begot a professional class of social engineers working in tandem with state security apparati to optimize for... what exactly?
  - comex 6y ago
    I completely agree; it's very oversimplified. Utility is not a scalar, and to the extent averagism is correct, the "average" is not a literal arithmetic mean. As just one counterexample, I think there is some moral or at least aesthetic value in a breadth of life experiences existing. If the aforementioned one person or one million people were the only people in the universe, the million people would have a much wider breadth of experience, leading to a more interesting society. On the other hand, if we assume a total population of billions, I'd say the significance of this factor dwindles to near nil. Also, I believe utility maximization is only one of many moral precepts in the first place.
- Iv 6y ago
  > But… which implications? On some naive interpretation of averagism, a very efficient way to raise average happiness is to just kill the unhappy. Or sterilize them. And I agree that averagism is more intuitive, at least to me. It does lead to the conclusion that we should discourage making kids and focus on improving the happiness of a small population, but to some people, saying "have fewer kids" is some sort of genocide apologism for some reason...
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Usually “have fewer kids” leads directly to “who gets to have kids”, and the world does not have a great track record on forced abortions and sterilizations affecting all subgroups of people equally.
- keithnz 6y ago
  It's not directly saying adding more people, it's just saying if we take world A, and world B and compared them. This video gives a bit of a feel for the comparison steps that lead you to the repugnant conclusion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqBl50TREHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqBl50TREHU
  - yaur 6y ago
    would you prefer to live in a world where you had a 100% chance to be as happy as possible or a 51% chance to be as happy possible or a 49% chance to be not quite unhappy enough to commit suicide. I know where I stand and think that the "not worse" step presented in the video is a leap of logic taken without any justification.
  - comex 6y ago
    Yes, I'm being a bit sloppy by saying "adding more people". (Although, to be fair, the most obvious way to influence the future population that is morally acceptable is choosing whether or not to add people to it by having children, or influencing others making that choice. Removing people by killing them is not acceptable, for reasons beyond the scope of utilitarianism.) I diverge from the video's argument at 1:10 when she says "it's hard to see how it could be worse". To me, a world with lower average happiness is intuitively worse. I do think there are some aspects where a higher population is better. For example, if there is a wide breadth of life experiences in the world, it makes for a more interesting society. Also, a higher population increases the chance of humanity surviving in the long term. But these effects tend to be logarithmic. A world with one billion people has some advantages over a world with only one million people (though it has some disadvantages too). But if the choice is between a world of 1 billion or 2 billion people, as posited in the video, the breadth of society, and humanity's chance of surviving, are about the same in both. That leaves the higher average happiness of World A as the most significant difference, making it preferable.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >The Wikipedia article 'Average and total utilitarianism' gives an example: "More counter intuitively still, average utilitarianism evaluates the existence of a single person with 100 hedons more favorably than an outcome in which a million people have an average utility of 99 hedons." But far from being counterintuitive, this strikes me as 'obviously true'. Sounds to me as obviously abstract to the point of absurdity BS. E.g. an isolated junky with an endless supply of heroin or a person hooked to some "happiness" drip is better than a community/civilization of a million of almost equal contentment people. Like the "repugnant question" itself, this is a theoritical absurdity, too abstract to have any real value as an ethical experiment.
  - concordDance 6y ago
    A junky doesn't necessarily have high hedons, depending on how you define hedons (they're somewhat ambiguous)
  - walleeee 6y ago
    > Like the "repugnant question" itself, this is a theoritical absurdity, too abstract to have any real value as an ethical experiment. Utilitarian ethics require that people inhabit thought experiments like this. It's dissociation. One ignores the particulars of the event in question, forfeiting context and substituting detached "objectivity". I think it's a mistake to try to purge contingency from questions of morality. Moral questions turn on context, no matter how effective a social technology is the idea that they don't. This is not to say utilitarianism is bankrupt, but should somebody demand one's stance on some variant of the trolley problem, "I refuse to negotiate with terrorists" is not a bad answer, imo
    - endominus 6y ago
      It's interesting that you say that when we can clearly see trolley-problem style questions affecting real engineering decisions. For example, take self-driving cars. We can take it as a given that at some point such a car will be in a state that it will likely collide with a bystander or else risk the lives of it's passengers. At that point, which lives should it prioritize? Or alternately, the question raised by an international study; if such a car were in a situation where it would either collide with a child or an elder, which outcome would be preferable? Interestingly, different cultures have overwhelmingly different answers to that question. Every moral event has particulars and context, but it's impossible to take in that context at the stage of designing systems, so we need a way of analyzing and reasoning about them in the abstract. Do you disagree with this?
- Ygg2 6y ago
  Adding more people in the universe does make life much greater chance to spread and offers greater resilience to planet destroying events.
  - comex 6y ago
    I do believe there is some moral value in the survival of the human race, or life generally. But the extent to which that applies is very situational. For example, as a concrete scenario that could cause the world population a few decades from now to be a few million lower than it would otherwise be, consider an education or economic development initiative in a poor country that causes its residents to want fewer children on average. This would not meaningfully hurt life's chance to survive or spread. If anything, it would slightly reduce the likelihood of various non-human species being driven to extinction due to habitat loss or pollution or whatnot. So I would consider the reduction in population due to such an initiative to be morally neutral, or positive to the (small) extent that it saved species or improved others' quality of life. Meanwhile, the education or economic development itself would of course be morally positive.
s3tz 6y ago
A good explanation I found since I couldn't wrap my head around this just reading about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqBl50TREHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqBl50TREHU
tom_mellior 6y ago
The actual title is "What Should We Agree on about the Repugnant Conclusion?", and the text doesn't suggest general agreement on it at all.
- dang 6y ago
  Yeah that's bad. Fixed now. Submitted title was "Philosophers Agree on the Repugnant Conclusion". Submitters: please don't do that! This is in the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
haecceity 6y ago
Can some correct me if I'm wrong? This paradox comes from trying to determine which population is better depending by taking averages of happiness of individuals in populations. Then they do some weirdness to take special cases into account?
- _rpd 6y ago
  Suppose happiness can be quantified, e.g., 1 billion people each have 10 happiness, for a total of 10 billion happiness. Then 10 billion people with 1.1 happiness each yield 11 billion total happiness. They are, collectively, happier. And 100 billion people with 0.111 happiness each are, collectively, even happier. And 1 trillion people with 0.01111 happiness each are, collectively, even happier. Etc, etc. The ‘repugnant conclusion’ is that this sequence never ends. You can argue for ever higher populations based on total happiness even though individual happiness approaches zero. It’s obvious nonsense.
  - philipov 6y ago
    But this only makes any sense if you accept that, if you could somehow quantify happiness, that it is a quantity on which the operation of summation has meaning. But happiness is not even a quantity, it is a direction. It is not a destination, it is a journey. Those who arrive at a destination where they think they will find happiness, without having a new destination to seek, inevitably become stagnant and miserable. You can't define a linear sum on such a phenomenon.
    - _rpd 6y ago
      Yes. There is definitely a sense in which every Polio or Malaria free person increases collective happiness, but the ‘repugnant conclusion’ is flat Earth levels of ignorance.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    So one person with 1 happiness and one person with 0 happiness combine to make two people with 0.5 happiness? Or a billion people with one happiness each are almost exactly equal to one person with a billion happiness and a billion people with 0 happiness? It's not so much repugnant as ridiculous.
Iv 6y ago
Academic philosophers will never agree on anything because modern academic philosophy lacks a method to do so, and the incentives are in standing your ground and do performative arguing instead of reaching out for truths, agreements, compromises or consensus.
- a-nikolaev 6y ago
  Well, as if non-academic internet? philosophers are better at agreeing or reaching any form of truth. I'm very skeptical about that.
  - Iv 6y ago
    I certainly hope that the "internet-philosophers" include some academics as well. No I am more talking about people who do philosophy "accidentally" as part of their jobs: scientists or engineers mostly. And on many philosophical questions, yes, most specialists in a field will tend to reach more agreement than academic philosophers. To take an example I know, I think you will find far more agreement on things like the nature of qualia or the relevance of Searle's Chinese room amongst AI researchers than you would among academic philosophers. Nowadays, many philosophical questions benefit from a scientific background that academic philosophers just lack. Some philosophical positions are simply wrong or come from a misunderstanding solved decades ago by scientists.
    - a-nikolaev 6y ago
      Yeah, but what you are saying now is more like that academic/professional non-philosophers are easier to reach an agreement on particular philosophy-adjacent questions from their field of expertise. Yeah, this is totally possible, but I think, this is not the same as your original statement.
- keiferski 6y ago
  Academic philosophers have consensus on many things. That doesn’t make them correct, merely a reflection of what a societal group thinks. The notion of agreement or compromise is antithetical to philosophy, so I’m not sure how that would be relevant. That is the domain of politics.
randomsearch 6y ago
in my own amateur philosopher can't get to sleep what should i think about sort of thinking, i "solved" this by stating that when considering global outcomes you must use statistics, and that not just the sum of the distribution but also its means, variance, and (in particular) lower quartile also matters. So for me the repugnant conclusion fails because there's some point where it's unfair to the person least well off on the planet to add an additional person, as they will as a result fall below some bar for quality of life. i'm not a philosopher but i can't see the holes in this argument. it also applies to "eating meat allows cows to live so is good" -- well, no, because you have to dig into the details of what the distribution of welfare looks like for those cows.
- yboris 6y ago
  I think this is what is meant by "life barely worth living" in The Repugnant Conclusion: whatever the lowest quality of life permissible for life to be worth living. This is what you call "some bar for quality of life". The claim is that if everyone is above this quality of life, when the number of those living is sufficiently large enough, it is a better world than 10 billion individuals living amazing lives.
coldtea 6y ago
Had to look it up: "In Derek Parfit’s original formulation the Repugnant Conclusion is stated as follows: “For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living” (Parfit 1984)." Befine "better"? Who said that "the more the better"? More people are better than less people (in such a notion) was never a part of historically/socially derived ethics. And who said "all other things" could be "equal"? That's a 'perfectly spherical cow' level BS.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
hirundo 6y ago
So the most ethically optimal population is one in which adding new members will cause life to no longer be worth living to at least the same number of other members. The effects of each new person tends to push another person into a suicidal state. I think the problem here is in using happiness as the thing to be optimized in ethics. A better measure may be the odds of survival. A maximally large but miserable population may have lower adaptability, and thus survival potential, than a somewhat smaller but happier one. The most ethical population becomes the one that can increase its own evolutionary fitness the most efficiently, and that is not one so resource constrained that growth creates equivalent death. Optimizing for survival, we optimize for the population's potential to explore its fitness space, a kind of computation. If you design a computer cluster to make this calculation, you would choose a smaller number of highly capable computers rather than a larger number of barely functional ones. Optimizing for survival is something like optimizing the cumulative parallel computational capacity of a population rather than its cumulative happiness. The fact that it may imply greater average happiness might just be a happy side effect. It would also tend to lead to a larger population in the long run, and thus a greater cumulative happiness in the fullness of time, considering future generations ... which would make the two measures eventually equivalent.
- bobmichael 6y ago
  I think your reasoning is sound, but one problem I see with your suggestion to optimize for odds of survival is that it would reward societies that most would consider incredibly unethical. As a simplistic example, imagine a scenario where 10,000 of the richest, most intelligent, and most physically fit wipe out the rest of the human race and establish a high-tech self-sustaining town from which they live full happy lives and conduct research on how to face existential threats to the species. Reproduction is allowed, but every cohort of children goes through a Hunger-Games-style test when they reach a certain age to keep the population stable and select for the fittest children. Wouldn't that be a more survival-optimized society? Would it be a society you'd want to live in?
  - hirundo 6y ago
    Say those 10k are elite supercomputers, Newtons and Einsteins, and the rest of us average out as five year old smart phones. If those smart phones are still effective computers, then there is negative utility to deleting them. We want both. But we want a high enough average so that the supercomputers can still reach most of their potential, and the average is not crushed by the desperate. I think that means that six orders of magnitude more of lesser computers can still contribute massively to the calculation, compared to the 10k elite. It still implies a very large population, just not a barely functioning one.
Der_Einzige 6y ago
Negative utilitarianism resolves this "paradox" and is probably the only objectively harm reducing philosophical system in existence.
- yboris 6y ago
  Negative utilitarianism claims that it is better to not exist at all, than to live a 1,000 years of pure bliss but also experience one mildly-annoying mosquito bite. Seems very counterintuitive to me.
sgt101 6y ago
Imagine that the existence of a person now meant that another 10 people would not exist in the future. What conclusion do you come to then?
- dmingod666 6y ago
  That either we have reached new levels of being able to predict the future or someone is just making stuff up.
lostmsu 6y ago
The paradox is a false paradox due to assumption, that Happiness(A+B) = H(A) + H(B) for which I see no good reason.
- _dps 6y ago
  Indeed this is all of utilitarianism debunked in a nutshell. Even the concept of aggregate utility is incoherent, because it requires unjustifiable assumptions about intersubjective utility comparisons. It's not surprising that it leads to perverse conclusions if you dial the framework to 11, because it doesn't make much sense even in the small. The only thing aggregate utility does is put a veneer of objectivity over the subjective social preferences of the person doing the supposed aggregate utility calculation (one way you can view this is as a manifestation of Arrow's theorem).
keiferski 6y ago
The logical solution is to fund space travel. The Earth is small, while Space is essentially infinite. Having a universe, or even solar system, full of human beings seems preferable to artificially limiting their population in order to fit Earth’s constraints. I also personally think such a “positive” attitude toward human life is probably necessary in order to avoid civilizational nihilism. This is the fundamental challenge of the modern era.
- DubiousPusher 6y ago
  > The logical solution is to fund space travel. Why? We have the technology and resources now to house, clothe and feed most the world's population. The main reason we do not is we choose "deserving" and "undeserving" populations and individuals. As our technology improves further and the global population begins to decline this will become even more evident. Space exploration is great. But suffering is a choice we collectively make every day.
  - keiferski 6y ago
    I’m not really sure how to understand your comment. I am replying to the linked article about the repugnant conclusion. Housing, clothing and food are not the only things necessary for maximizing happiness. Even if every human being had these, there would still be differences of happiness.
    - DubiousPusher 6y ago
      And space exploration solves happiness for a significant portion of the human population? If we're talking about minimizing the repugnant conclusion we're generally talking about resources and how they're distributed.
      - keiferski 6y ago
        Well, because space travel would enable more resource acquisition and more humans to then use those resources productively to be happy. If we limit ourselves to Earth, we quickly run out. Basically the old argument about expanding the size of the pie vs. fighting over the current one.
dmingod666 6y ago
A genocide with equal representation of all types of people is just as reprehensible as the other option. So if you're contemplating bumping off 50% of the population, because of reason 'x' -- but, not because of some '..ist' or '..phobe' reasons, you're still as big as a scum as that guy with the funny mustache and stupid ideas.
hoseja 6y ago
What a funny thing to be ethically concerned about. Conflict is not over (will never be), anyone taking ethically and not functionally motivated positions on demographics will simply be replaced by evolution.
e67f70028a46fba 6y ago
Utilitarians utilitarianiazing utilitarianly. It would be funny, if these folks didn’t wield so much power.
- yboris 6y ago
  It is very sad that many people in power are not utilitarian - they do not want "the greatest good for the greatest number" but instead want something more selfish.
bitshiftfaced 6y ago
My main problem is with the premise that as long as it meets some minimum level of happiness, then it's a life worth living. That means that you keep getting a bigger (wider) happiness area by adding those almost miserable people. But what if the threshold wasn't whether they'd rather commit suicide? What if there was no threshold? Suppose that you measured the difference from the max happiness anyone could possibly achieve with the actual happiness of the individual. Subtract the "missed out happiness" from the happiness level, and do this for each individual that has ever existed through the course of the population's history. If the average happiness is below half of whatever the max happiness is, then you add a negative value each time you add a person. This decreases the population/history net happiness. When things are good, then adding one person will have a positive effect on the population/history net happiness. Just like in real life animal populations, when things get too dense for a space and its resources, then net happiness decreases, so the optimal value lies in some middle sweet spot. Since we're calculating the value for the entire history of the population, killing unhappy people won't increase the population's net happiness value. Only adding more people will increase or decrease it.
xg15 6y ago
Maybe I misunderstood but seems to me that even if you bite and accept their assumption that happiness can be quantified, it's still nonsense. In particular, they quantified happiness, but they conveniently seemed to have forgotten to quantify unhappiness. Sure, if you add more people, the total amount of happiness grows, but it's not clear at all how much the total amount of unhappiness would grow in comparision. (And the note that each newly added life is "barely worth living" suggests each individual contributes a lot more unhappiness than happiness to the total) Alternatively, you could stick with a single number and use positive values for overall happiness and negative values for overall unhappiness. This still won't work: Let's assume N is the total number of people and h(i) is the happyness of person #i in "hedons" (don't ask me...) N is a natural number > 0 and h(i) is... some number. Than their conjecture says in effect that: lim(N -> +infinity) sum(i = 0 to N) h(i) = +Infinity. As every math student can explain to you, that's not how this works. Even if each h(i) was a real strictly > 0, the sum wouldn't necesserily grow to infinity. If elements keep having negative values - not a chance. The whole thing only works if you constrain that each h(i) must be > some positive number - or if you define h(i) as a count of descrete "hedons" of which most people have at least one. But that's picking a model to support your conclusion.
anm89 6y ago
My repugnant conclusion is that these ivory tower sophists need to get new jobs because they are outputting low quality research.

23 points by yboris 6y ago

See also, Wikipedia article on the Repugnant Conclusion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox Edit: Personally, I don't find it intuitive at all that adding more people to the world inherently makes the world better. So I guess my view would be closer to averagism. The Wikipedia article 'Population ethics' states "has never been widely embraced by philosophers, because it leads to counterintuitive implications said to be 'at least as serious' as the repugnant conclusion". But… which implications? The Wikipedia article 'Average and total utilitarianism' gives an example: "More counter intuitively still, average utilitarianism evaluates the existence of a single person with 100 hedons more favorably than an outcome in which a million people have an average utility of 99 hedons." But far from being counterintuitive, this strikes me as 'obviously true'.

solveit 6y ago
If you could painlessly kill half the world's population while also rewriting any memories and traces of the past so that they never existed, would you consider this a morally neutral action?
- praptak 6y ago
  No, but I don't think it carries to not letting them be born. My stance on killing being wrong is that it destroys the freedom of an existing person to decide whether they want to continue to experience life.
- teekert 6y ago
  I never understood that Thanos reasoning, clearly he underestimates exponential growth. Killing 50% has you back where your started in 1-2 generations. How useless. Second, even though I don't think limiting population growth is a solution, but science is, Thanos should have calculated what the size of minimal gene pool for survival of a population was and went for that, much lower number that would have given him more bang for his (stupid) buck. In any case, I resent the idea that we should stop or limit procreation. All you others can do that, but my of spring will live among the stars and I will maximize my chances of it getting there. And don't even get started on selective procreation, it has been tried. Edit, perhaps this response is more towards the general sentiment in this thread, not op.
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    never understood that Thanos reasoning, clearly he underestimates exponential growth. Killing 50% has you back where your started in 1-2 generations Thanos’s reasoning makes even less sense when you consider he removed 50% of all life; removing half the fish and half the birds at the same time as removing half the people leaves you no better off even immediately post-snap
    - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
      Also if Thanos had paid more attention in Graph theory class, he might have been able to do a better job of minimizing grief than just randomly killing half the vertices. He probably could have found sub graphs that were not very connected to other parts and eliminated them completely.
      - shirleyquirk 6y ago
        DeathStar considered more moral than Thanos
      - manicdee 6y ago
        To accomplish his stated goal in the MCU (as opposed to the goal of impressing his girlfriend), he should have gone for maximum grief, along with preserving those islands of isolation since those islands are more likely to be the cultures that don’t engage in the fantasy of unlimited exponential growth.
    - hoseja 6y ago
      Well in the comics he was supposedly just trying to impress Death, a much more reasonable motivation.
  - comex 6y ago
    > In any case, I resent the idea that we should stop or limit procreation. All you others can do that, but my of spring will live among the stars and I will maximize my chances of it getting there. And don't even get started on selective procreation, it has been tried. Personally, I'm not on the "the world needs fewer people" bandwagon either. While I'm not an expert, I've heard that the world population is expected to level off around 2100 at around 10.9 billion, not that much higher than the current 7.8 billion. So we will never get to some Malthusian point where there isn't enough food to go around. Meanwhile, at a small scale, adding one person does marginally increase the cost of feeding everyone and marginally increase pollution, but that person will also contribute to society and the economy. When humanity someday goes to space, perhaps the population will start growing again, but if so, it will be precisely because there will be more resources for them. In other words, the effect on society of having kids seems to be pretty neutral in practice. Given that, I have no reason to oppose your desire to spread your genes, assuming that's what you meant. Personally, I don't care whether the ones living among the stars have my genes or somebody else's, but that's just me. I do think it would be nice to maximize the chance of humanity as a whole someday living among the stars, but increasing the population would not necessarily help with that.
- dmingod666 6y ago
  If we started with the people who wanted to do this, we'll end up killing a lot less people overall.. :D
- DubiousPusher 6y ago
  No because this take assumes the crappy neural net in your head that creates grossly inaccurate models from which you draw conclusions is giving you something like a viable perspective on reality under which such a drastic action makes sense. In other words, it disregards neuropsychological humility.
- comex 6y ago
  I should say my view is closer to averagism when questions of utility start getting involved. But I believe utility is just one moral precept among others. Murder is disallowed no matter how much it might increase others' utility. And murder is murder regardless of pain, memories, or traces. On the other hand, choosing to have fewer or no children is easily justified. So is pursuing outcomes, such as education, that could cause people to choose to have fewer children on average.
krastanov 6y ago
On the other hand, I have always found the simplistic utilitarism you described to be just too trivialized to use for any worthwhile conclusions. In particular, your last example assumes that "utility" adds up linearly. I claim that "utility is a linear quantity" should sound preposterous to anyone that has worked in physics, biology, engineering, or some other form of study of dynamical systems. This is the "spherical cow in vacuum on a frictionless plane" of philosophy. Edit: My message, devoid of tone, sounds glib and antagonistic. My bad! I actually find your line of reasoning important and interesting, even if I consider it "obviously" flawed.
- walleeee 6y ago
  Yes, not only is naive utility-maxing preposterous, it can also launder questionable ethical decisions: "for the greater good", etc. Unexamined consequentialism breeds infinite self-justification, imo As far as I can tell claims to objectivity in ethics tend to translate to "I'm happy to theorize situation X so long as X never happens to me." In the last century this attitude begot a professional class of social engineers working in tandem with state security apparati to optimize for... what exactly?
- comex 6y ago
  I completely agree; it's very oversimplified. Utility is not a scalar, and to the extent averagism is correct, the "average" is not a literal arithmetic mean. As just one counterexample, I think there is some moral or at least aesthetic value in a breadth of life experiences existing. If the aforementioned one person or one million people were the only people in the universe, the million people would have a much wider breadth of experience, leading to a more interesting society. On the other hand, if we assume a total population of billions, I'd say the significance of this factor dwindles to near nil. Also, I believe utility maximization is only one of many moral precepts in the first place.
Iv 6y ago
> But… which implications? On some naive interpretation of averagism, a very efficient way to raise average happiness is to just kill the unhappy. Or sterilize them. And I agree that averagism is more intuitive, at least to me. It does lead to the conclusion that we should discourage making kids and focus on improving the happiness of a small population, but to some people, saying "have fewer kids" is some sort of genocide apologism for some reason...
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  Usually “have fewer kids” leads directly to “who gets to have kids”, and the world does not have a great track record on forced abortions and sterilizations affecting all subgroups of people equally.
keithnz 6y ago
It's not directly saying adding more people, it's just saying if we take world A, and world B and compared them. This video gives a bit of a feel for the comparison steps that lead you to the repugnant conclusion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqBl50TREHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqBl50TREHU
- yaur 6y ago
  would you prefer to live in a world where you had a 100% chance to be as happy as possible or a 51% chance to be as happy possible or a 49% chance to be not quite unhappy enough to commit suicide. I know where I stand and think that the "not worse" step presented in the video is a leap of logic taken without any justification.
- comex 6y ago
  Yes, I'm being a bit sloppy by saying "adding more people". (Although, to be fair, the most obvious way to influence the future population that is morally acceptable is choosing whether or not to add people to it by having children, or influencing others making that choice. Removing people by killing them is not acceptable, for reasons beyond the scope of utilitarianism.) I diverge from the video's argument at 1:10 when she says "it's hard to see how it could be worse". To me, a world with lower average happiness is intuitively worse. I do think there are some aspects where a higher population is better. For example, if there is a wide breadth of life experiences in the world, it makes for a more interesting society. Also, a higher population increases the chance of humanity surviving in the long term. But these effects tend to be logarithmic. A world with one billion people has some advantages over a world with only one million people (though it has some disadvantages too). But if the choice is between a world of 1 billion or 2 billion people, as posited in the video, the breadth of society, and humanity's chance of surviving, are about the same in both. That leaves the higher average happiness of World A as the most significant difference, making it preferable.
coldtea 6y ago
>The Wikipedia article 'Average and total utilitarianism' gives an example: "More counter intuitively still, average utilitarianism evaluates the existence of a single person with 100 hedons more favorably than an outcome in which a million people have an average utility of 99 hedons." But far from being counterintuitive, this strikes me as 'obviously true'. Sounds to me as obviously abstract to the point of absurdity BS. E.g. an isolated junky with an endless supply of heroin or a person hooked to some "happiness" drip is better than a community/civilization of a million of almost equal contentment people. Like the "repugnant question" itself, this is a theoritical absurdity, too abstract to have any real value as an ethical experiment.
- concordDance 6y ago
  A junky doesn't necessarily have high hedons, depending on how you define hedons (they're somewhat ambiguous)
- walleeee 6y ago
  > Like the "repugnant question" itself, this is a theoritical absurdity, too abstract to have any real value as an ethical experiment. Utilitarian ethics require that people inhabit thought experiments like this. It's dissociation. One ignores the particulars of the event in question, forfeiting context and substituting detached "objectivity". I think it's a mistake to try to purge contingency from questions of morality. Moral questions turn on context, no matter how effective a social technology is the idea that they don't. This is not to say utilitarianism is bankrupt, but should somebody demand one's stance on some variant of the trolley problem, "I refuse to negotiate with terrorists" is not a bad answer, imo
  - endominus 6y ago
    It's interesting that you say that when we can clearly see trolley-problem style questions affecting real engineering decisions. For example, take self-driving cars. We can take it as a given that at some point such a car will be in a state that it will likely collide with a bystander or else risk the lives of it's passengers. At that point, which lives should it prioritize? Or alternately, the question raised by an international study; if such a car were in a situation where it would either collide with a child or an elder, which outcome would be preferable? Interestingly, different cultures have overwhelmingly different answers to that question. Every moral event has particulars and context, but it's impossible to take in that context at the stage of designing systems, so we need a way of analyzing and reasoning about them in the abstract. Do you disagree with this?
Ygg2 6y ago
Adding more people in the universe does make life much greater chance to spread and offers greater resilience to planet destroying events.
- comex 6y ago
  I do believe there is some moral value in the survival of the human race, or life generally. But the extent to which that applies is very situational. For example, as a concrete scenario that could cause the world population a few decades from now to be a few million lower than it would otherwise be, consider an education or economic development initiative in a poor country that causes its residents to want fewer children on average. This would not meaningfully hurt life's chance to survive or spread. If anything, it would slightly reduce the likelihood of various non-human species being driven to extinction due to habitat loss or pollution or whatnot. So I would consider the reduction in population due to such an initiative to be morally neutral, or positive to the (small) extent that it saved species or improved others' quality of life. Meanwhile, the education or economic development itself would of course be morally positive.

s3tz 6y ago

A good explanation I found since I couldn't wrap my head around this just reading about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqBl50TREHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqBl50TREHU

tom_mellior 6y ago

The actual title is "What Should We Agree on about the Repugnant Conclusion?", and the text doesn't suggest general agreement on it at all.

dang 6y ago
Yeah that's bad. Fixed now. Submitted title was "Philosophers Agree on the Repugnant Conclusion". Submitters: please don't do that! This is in the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

haecceity 6y ago

Can some correct me if I'm wrong? This paradox comes from trying to determine which population is better depending by taking averages of happiness of individuals in populations. Then they do some weirdness to take special cases into account?

_rpd 6y ago
Suppose happiness can be quantified, e.g., 1 billion people each have 10 happiness, for a total of 10 billion happiness. Then 10 billion people with 1.1 happiness each yield 11 billion total happiness. They are, collectively, happier. And 100 billion people with 0.111 happiness each are, collectively, even happier. And 1 trillion people with 0.01111 happiness each are, collectively, even happier. Etc, etc. The ‘repugnant conclusion’ is that this sequence never ends. You can argue for ever higher populations based on total happiness even though individual happiness approaches zero. It’s obvious nonsense.
- philipov 6y ago
  But this only makes any sense if you accept that, if you could somehow quantify happiness, that it is a quantity on which the operation of summation has meaning. But happiness is not even a quantity, it is a direction. It is not a destination, it is a journey. Those who arrive at a destination where they think they will find happiness, without having a new destination to seek, inevitably become stagnant and miserable. You can't define a linear sum on such a phenomenon.
  - _rpd 6y ago
    Yes. There is definitely a sense in which every Polio or Malaria free person increases collective happiness, but the ‘repugnant conclusion’ is flat Earth levels of ignorance.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  So one person with 1 happiness and one person with 0 happiness combine to make two people with 0.5 happiness? Or a billion people with one happiness each are almost exactly equal to one person with a billion happiness and a billion people with 0 happiness? It's not so much repugnant as ridiculous.

Iv 6y ago

Academic philosophers will never agree on anything because modern academic philosophy lacks a method to do so, and the incentives are in standing your ground and do performative arguing instead of reaching out for truths, agreements, compromises or consensus.

a-nikolaev 6y ago
Well, as if non-academic internet? philosophers are better at agreeing or reaching any form of truth. I'm very skeptical about that.
- Iv 6y ago
  I certainly hope that the "internet-philosophers" include some academics as well. No I am more talking about people who do philosophy "accidentally" as part of their jobs: scientists or engineers mostly. And on many philosophical questions, yes, most specialists in a field will tend to reach more agreement than academic philosophers. To take an example I know, I think you will find far more agreement on things like the nature of qualia or the relevance of Searle's Chinese room amongst AI researchers than you would among academic philosophers. Nowadays, many philosophical questions benefit from a scientific background that academic philosophers just lack. Some philosophical positions are simply wrong or come from a misunderstanding solved decades ago by scientists.
  - a-nikolaev 6y ago
    Yeah, but what you are saying now is more like that academic/professional non-philosophers are easier to reach an agreement on particular philosophy-adjacent questions from their field of expertise. Yeah, this is totally possible, but I think, this is not the same as your original statement.
keiferski 6y ago
Academic philosophers have consensus on many things. That doesn’t make them correct, merely a reflection of what a societal group thinks. The notion of agreement or compromise is antithetical to philosophy, so I’m not sure how that would be relevant. That is the domain of politics.

randomsearch 6y ago

in my own amateur philosopher can't get to sleep what should i think about sort of thinking, i "solved" this by stating that when considering global outcomes you must use statistics, and that not just the sum of the distribution but also its means, variance, and (in particular) lower quartile also matters. So for me the repugnant conclusion fails because there's some point where it's unfair to the person least well off on the planet to add an additional person, as they will as a result fall below some bar for quality of life. i'm not a philosopher but i can't see the holes in this argument. it also applies to "eating meat allows cows to live so is good" -- well, no, because you have to dig into the details of what the distribution of welfare looks like for those cows.

yboris 6y ago
I think this is what is meant by "life barely worth living" in The Repugnant Conclusion: whatever the lowest quality of life permissible for life to be worth living. This is what you call "some bar for quality of life". The claim is that if everyone is above this quality of life, when the number of those living is sufficiently large enough, it is a better world than 10 billion individuals living amazing lives.

coldtea 6y ago

Had to look it up: "In Derek Parfit’s original formulation the Repugnant Conclusion is stated as follows: “For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living” (Parfit 1984)." Befine "better"? Who said that "the more the better"? More people are better than less people (in such a notion) was never a part of historically/socially derived ethics. And who said "all other things" could be "equal"? That's a 'perfectly spherical cow' level BS.

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hirundo 6y ago

So the most ethically optimal population is one in which adding new members will cause life to no longer be worth living to at least the same number of other members. The effects of each new person tends to push another person into a suicidal state. I think the problem here is in using happiness as the thing to be optimized in ethics. A better measure may be the odds of survival. A maximally large but miserable population may have lower adaptability, and thus survival potential, than a somewhat smaller but happier one. The most ethical population becomes the one that can increase its own evolutionary fitness the most efficiently, and that is not one so resource constrained that growth creates equivalent death. Optimizing for survival, we optimize for the population's potential to explore its fitness space, a kind of computation. If you design a computer cluster to make this calculation, you would choose a smaller number of highly capable computers rather than a larger number of barely functional ones. Optimizing for survival is something like optimizing the cumulative parallel computational capacity of a population rather than its cumulative happiness. The fact that it may imply greater average happiness might just be a happy side effect. It would also tend to lead to a larger population in the long run, and thus a greater cumulative happiness in the fullness of time, considering future generations ... which would make the two measures eventually equivalent.

bobmichael 6y ago
I think your reasoning is sound, but one problem I see with your suggestion to optimize for odds of survival is that it would reward societies that most would consider incredibly unethical. As a simplistic example, imagine a scenario where 10,000 of the richest, most intelligent, and most physically fit wipe out the rest of the human race and establish a high-tech self-sustaining town from which they live full happy lives and conduct research on how to face existential threats to the species. Reproduction is allowed, but every cohort of children goes through a Hunger-Games-style test when they reach a certain age to keep the population stable and select for the fittest children. Wouldn't that be a more survival-optimized society? Would it be a society you'd want to live in?
- hirundo 6y ago
  Say those 10k are elite supercomputers, Newtons and Einsteins, and the rest of us average out as five year old smart phones. If those smart phones are still effective computers, then there is negative utility to deleting them. We want both. But we want a high enough average so that the supercomputers can still reach most of their potential, and the average is not crushed by the desperate. I think that means that six orders of magnitude more of lesser computers can still contribute massively to the calculation, compared to the 10k elite. It still implies a very large population, just not a barely functioning one.

Der_Einzige 6y ago

Negative utilitarianism resolves this "paradox" and is probably the only objectively harm reducing philosophical system in existence.

yboris 6y ago
Negative utilitarianism claims that it is better to not exist at all, than to live a 1,000 years of pure bliss but also experience one mildly-annoying mosquito bite. Seems very counterintuitive to me.

sgt101 6y ago

Imagine that the existence of a person now meant that another 10 people would not exist in the future. What conclusion do you come to then?

dmingod666 6y ago
That either we have reached new levels of being able to predict the future or someone is just making stuff up.

lostmsu 6y ago

The paradox is a false paradox due to assumption, that Happiness(A+B) = H(A) + H(B) for which I see no good reason.

_dps 6y ago
Indeed this is all of utilitarianism debunked in a nutshell. Even the concept of aggregate utility is incoherent, because it requires unjustifiable assumptions about intersubjective utility comparisons. It's not surprising that it leads to perverse conclusions if you dial the framework to 11, because it doesn't make much sense even in the small. The only thing aggregate utility does is put a veneer of objectivity over the subjective social preferences of the person doing the supposed aggregate utility calculation (one way you can view this is as a manifestation of Arrow's theorem).

keiferski 6y ago

The logical solution is to fund space travel. The Earth is small, while Space is essentially infinite. Having a universe, or even solar system, full of human beings seems preferable to artificially limiting their population in order to fit Earth’s constraints. I also personally think such a “positive” attitude toward human life is probably necessary in order to avoid civilizational nihilism. This is the fundamental challenge of the modern era.

DubiousPusher 6y ago
> The logical solution is to fund space travel. Why? We have the technology and resources now to house, clothe and feed most the world's population. The main reason we do not is we choose "deserving" and "undeserving" populations and individuals. As our technology improves further and the global population begins to decline this will become even more evident. Space exploration is great. But suffering is a choice we collectively make every day.
- keiferski 6y ago
  I’m not really sure how to understand your comment. I am replying to the linked article about the repugnant conclusion. Housing, clothing and food are not the only things necessary for maximizing happiness. Even if every human being had these, there would still be differences of happiness.
  - DubiousPusher 6y ago
    And space exploration solves happiness for a significant portion of the human population? If we're talking about minimizing the repugnant conclusion we're generally talking about resources and how they're distributed.
    - keiferski 6y ago
      Well, because space travel would enable more resource acquisition and more humans to then use those resources productively to be happy. If we limit ourselves to Earth, we quickly run out. Basically the old argument about expanding the size of the pie vs. fighting over the current one.

dmingod666 6y ago

A genocide with equal representation of all types of people is just as reprehensible as the other option. So if you're contemplating bumping off 50% of the population, because of reason 'x' -- but, not because of some '..ist' or '..phobe' reasons, you're still as big as a scum as that guy with the funny mustache and stupid ideas.

hoseja 6y ago

What a funny thing to be ethically concerned about. Conflict is not over (will never be), anyone taking ethically and not functionally motivated positions on demographics will simply be replaced by evolution.

e67f70028a46fba 6y ago

Utilitarians utilitarianiazing utilitarianly. It would be funny, if these folks didn’t wield so much power.

yboris 6y ago
It is very sad that many people in power are not utilitarian - they do not want "the greatest good for the greatest number" but instead want something more selfish.

bitshiftfaced 6y ago

My main problem is with the premise that as long as it meets some minimum level of happiness, then it's a life worth living. That means that you keep getting a bigger (wider) happiness area by adding those almost miserable people. But what if the threshold wasn't whether they'd rather commit suicide? What if there was no threshold? Suppose that you measured the difference from the max happiness anyone could possibly achieve with the actual happiness of the individual. Subtract the "missed out happiness" from the happiness level, and do this for each individual that has ever existed through the course of the population's history. If the average happiness is below half of whatever the max happiness is, then you add a negative value each time you add a person. This decreases the population/history net happiness. When things are good, then adding one person will have a positive effect on the population/history net happiness. Just like in real life animal populations, when things get too dense for a space and its resources, then net happiness decreases, so the optimal value lies in some middle sweet spot. Since we're calculating the value for the entire history of the population, killing unhappy people won't increase the population's net happiness value. Only adding more people will increase or decrease it.

xg15 6y ago

Maybe I misunderstood but seems to me that even if you bite and accept their assumption that happiness can be quantified, it's still nonsense. In particular, they quantified happiness, but they conveniently seemed to have forgotten to quantify unhappiness. Sure, if you add more people, the total amount of happiness grows, but it's not clear at all how much the total amount of unhappiness would grow in comparision. (And the note that each newly added life is "barely worth living" suggests each individual contributes a lot more unhappiness than happiness to the total) Alternatively, you could stick with a single number and use positive values for overall happiness and negative values for overall unhappiness. This still won't work: Let's assume N is the total number of people and h(i) is the happyness of person #i in "hedons" (don't ask me...) N is a natural number > 0 and h(i) is... some number. Than their conjecture says in effect that: lim(N -> +infinity) sum(i = 0 to N) h(i) = +Infinity. As every math student can explain to you, that's not how this works. Even if each h(i) was a real strictly > 0, the sum wouldn't necesserily grow to infinity. If elements keep having negative values - not a chance. The whole thing only works if you constrain that each h(i) must be > some positive number - or if you define h(i) as a count of descrete "hedons" of which most people have at least one. But that's picking a model to support your conclusion.

anm89 6y ago

My repugnant conclusion is that these ivory tower sophists need to get new jobs because they are outputting low quality research.