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See also, Wikipedia article on the Repugnant Conclusion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_parado

• 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.