On the Possibility of a Satisfactory Population Ethics

2011

Population axiology concerns how to evaluate populations in regard to their goodness, that is, how to order populations by the relations "is better than" and "is as good as". This field has been riddled with paradoxes and impossibility results which seem to show that our considered beliefs are inconsistent in cases where the number of people and their welfare varies. All of these results have one thing in common, however. They all involve an adequacy condition that rules out Derek Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion. Moreover, some theorists have argued that we should accept the Repugnant Conclusion and hence that avoidance of this conclusion is not a convincing adequacy condition for a population axiology. As I shall show in this chapter, however, one can replace avoidance of the Repugnant Conclusion with a logically weaker and intuitively more convincing condition. The resulting theorem involves, to the best of my knowledge, logically weaker and intuitively more compelling conditions than the other theorems presented in the literature. As such, it challenges the very existence of a satisfactory population ethics.

Philosophical studies, 1996

Value Incommensurability, 2021

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 2003

The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance, 2022

Nearly all large policy decisions influence not only the quality of life for existing individuals but also the number-and even identities-of yet-to-exist individuals. Accounting for these effects in a policy evaluation framework requires taking difficult stances on concepts such as the value of existence. These issues are at the heart of a literature that sits between welfare economics and philosophical population ethics. Despite the inherent challenges of these questions, this literature has produced theoretical insights and subsequent progress on variable-population welfare criteria. A surprisingly bounded set of coherent alternatives exists for practitioners once a set of uncontroversial axioms is adopted from the better-studied welfare criteria for cases where populations are assumed to be fixed. Although consensus has not yet been reached among these remaining alternatives, their recommendations often agree. The space has been sufficiently restricted and well explored that applications of the theoretical insights are possible and underway in earnest.

The Oxford Handbook of Population Ethics

When evaluating well‐being streams in an anonymous manner, one faces a dilemma between, on the one hand, assigning dictatorship to a single worst‐off individual and thus succumbing to a tyranny of non‐aggregation and, on the other hand, assigning dictatorship to (unboundedly) many better‐off individuals and thus succumbing to a tyranny of aggregation. This can be shown to correspond to a population‐ethical dilemma in the variable population setting between, on the one hand, a reverse repugnant conclusion by preferring a very small population with high well‐being and, on the other hand, a repugnant or very sadistic conclusion. The repugnant conclusion is to prefer a sufficiently large population with lives barely worth living to a population with good lives. The very sadistic conclusion is not to prefer a sufficiently large population with lives worth living to a population with terrible lives. The dilemma can be resolved by relaxing replication invariance and thus allowing that eval...

Ekonomia - Wroclaw Economic Review, 2015

This paper attempts to build upon the "marginalist" solutions to various puzzles in the area of population ethics, including the so-called Repugnant Conclusion (seen as a major obstacle to the viability of the Total Utility Principle), the Ecstatic Psychopath Scenario (seen as a major obstacle to the viability of the Average Utility Principle) and the Negative Repugnant Conclusion. After rejecting the suggestion that the above puzzles should be resolved by abandoning the axiom of transitivity, I argue that the solution lies in the principle of diminishing marginal utility, whose effects apply not only to every individual added to any given population, but, even more importantly, also to the already existing members of that population.

1997

This note investigates the extension of Roberts' price-independent welfare prescriptions to alternatives in which population size and composition can vary. We show that ethically unsatisfactory orderings result. Suppose that a single person is to be added to a population that is unaffected in utility terms. Either all such additions must be regarded as bad or some expansions in which the added person's life is not worth living must be ranked as social improvements.

2023