There is nothing bad in each of these lives; but there is little happiness, and little else that is good. The people in Z never suffer; but all they have is muzak and potatoes.
- Derek Parfit, Overpopulation and the Quality of Life
The image of World Z provokes an unsettling cognitive dissonance. It forces us to confront the possibility that any degree of happiness, no matter how magnificent, can be outweighed by arbitrarily small pleasures multiplied across a sufficiently large population. Imagining this kind of mediocrity, we can hardly endorse it over a small yet ecstatic utopia.
And yet, I feel strongly that this perceived tension is due entirely to a failure of the imagination. When Parfit says “muzak and potatoes”, perhaps you conjure up the image of a medieval European peasant, covered in mud, living in squalor, only just barely getting by.
But read again more carefully: “There is nothing bad in each of these lives”.
Although it sounds mundane, I contend that this is nearly incomprehensible. Can you actually imagine what it would be like to never have anything bad happen to you? We don’t describe such a as mediocre, we describe it as “charmed” or “overwhelmingly privileged”.
After all, each of our lives are absolutely filled with bad things. Some of these are obvious (injury, illness, the loss of a loved one), but mostly they just exist as a kind of dull background pain we’ve grown to accept. The bad things are, as Simone Weil put it, the “countless horrors which lie beyond tears”.
In stark contrast, consider Parfit’s vision of World Z both seriously and literally.
These are lives with no pain, no loneliness or depression, no loss or fear, no anxiety, no aging, no disease, nor decay. Not ever a single moment of sorrow. These are lives free entirely from every minor ache and cramp, from desire, from jealousy, from greed, and from every other sin that poisons the heart. Free from the million ills that plague and poke at ordinary people.
It is thus less the world of peasants, and closer to that of subdued paradise. The closest analog we can imagine is perhaps a Buddhist sanctuary, each member so permanently, universally and profoundly enlightened that they no longer experience suffering of any kind.
And that’s not all! Parfit further tells us that their lives are net positive. And so in addition to never experiencing any unpleasantness of any degree, they also experience simple pleasures. A “little happiness”, small nearly to the point of nothingness, yet enough to tip the scales. Perhaps the warmth of basking under a beam of sun, the gentle nourishment of simple meals, or just the low-level background satisfaction of a slow Sunday morning.
Properly construed, that is the world Parfit would have us imagine. Not a mediocre world of “muzak and potatoes”, but a kind of tranquil nirvana beyond pain. And that is a world I have no problem endorsing.
I agree that scope neglect probably explains a bit here, but I don't think that's all. For instance, nobody would deny that 2 people living in bliss is a worse state than 1bi in nirvana. And even population ethicists feel uncomfortable with RC.
Besides my mentioning of uncertainty above, I also guess (very tentatively) that some other factors might mess up with our intuitions:
i) scarcity concerns: we evolved under resource scarcity, which biases us towards lower populations;
ii) social norms might bias us against RC;
iii) contractualist reasoning: if you were in something like an Original Position and had to choose which world you would prefer to live in, you’d pick the “low pop living in bliss” world, of course (from a selfish POV, at least). Similarly, we might say that living in a country with a high avg HDI (e.g., Sweden) is better than another one with lower avg HDI (e.g., Nigeria) - because avg HDI here is a good predictor for how good is the life of an individual living in that country. But I guess this just shows contractualist reasoning is unsuited for population ethics: we are interested in how good a place is all things considered, and not in "how good is this place for those who live here".
P.S.: Something that puzzles me is that RC seems to be analogous to the problem of fanaticism in Pascalian scenarios - and yet I don't see this analogy being widely explored.