EA - Minimalist extended very repugnant conclusions are the least repugnant by Teo Ajantaival

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Minimalist extended very repugnant conclusions are the least repugnant, published by Teo Ajantaival on October 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This is part four of a series on minimalist axiologies (i.e. axiologies that essentially say “the less this, the better”). Every part of this series builds on the previous parts, but can also be read independently. Summary Population axiology matters greatly for our priorities. Recently, it has been claimed that all plausible axiological views imply certain “very repugnant conclusions” (defined below). In this response, I argue that minimalist views avoid these “very repugnant conclusions”, and that they face less repugnant conclusions than do contrasting offsetting views. 1. Are repugnant implications inevitable? In population axiology, certain offsetting views, according to which independent bads can be offset by a sufficient amount of independent goods, face the Very Repugnant Conclusion (VRC): A population of arbitrarily many lives with arbitrarily high welfare is worse than a population of arbitrarily many arbitrarily negative lives plus sufficiently many ε-lives that each have an arbitrarily small quantity of positive welfare (Figure 1). Offsetting views also allow the ε-lives in the VRC to be rollercoaster lives that all contain unbearable suffering (purportedly counterbalanced by a sufficient amount of bliss). In particular, symmetric classical utilitarianism implies interchangeability between a non-suffering ε-life and the rollercoaster life illustrated in Figure 2 (provided that the “overall welfare” of the rollercoaster life equals ε). Additionally, one may replace each non-suffering ε-life in the original VRC with an intrapersonal VRC life (Figure 3). Recently, Budolfson and Spears (2018) have argued that all plausible views in population ethics imply similarly repugnant conclusions, namely that they imply either the VRC or a closely analogous Extended VRC (XVRC), which I illustrate shortly at the beginning of Section 2. The purpose of this essay is to argue that this claim does not apply to minimalist views. In a nutshell: minimalist views avoid the VRC, can avoid repugnant XVRCs, and, at any rate, face XVRCs that are less repugnant than are the comparable conclusions faced by offsetting views. Three claims Budolfson and Spears (2018, pp. 31–32) make the following three claims: Claim 1: No leading welfarist axiology can avoid the VRC. Claim 2: No other welfarist axiology in the literature can avoid the XVRC. Claim 3: The XVRC is just as repugnant as the VRC. The authors conclude that: Repugnant implications are an inevitable feature of any plausible axiology. If repugnance cannot be avoided, then it should not be. We believe this should be among the guiding insights for the next generation of work in value theory. Claim 1 does not apply to minimalist axiologies The scope of Claim 1 (“No leading welfarist axiology can avoid the VRC”) is limited to ‘leading’ welfarist axiologies, that is to views that, according to the authors, are commonly-held in the axiological literature (p. 8). These do not cover minimalist axiologies, although axiologies that are essentially minimalist have been defended, for instance, by Schopenhauer (1818/1819, 1851), Wolf (1996, 1997, 2004), Fehige (1998), Breyer (2015), and Knutsson (2021b, “axiological claim”). To the extent that the VRC seems repugnant, it is worth noting that all minimalist axiologies do avoid the VRC, and can do so neatly without relying on arbitrary or ad hoc assumptions. Claim 2 requires that we extend the XVRC Claim 2 (“No other welfarist axiology in the literature can avoid the XVRC”) is not straightforward to evaluate, because the original XVRC, as the authors define it, applies strictly only to views that make the assumption of independently aggregable ...