TL;DR

In population ethics, the total view entails the repugnant conclusion. Some people argue that, since the repugnant conclusion is obviously false, the total view is incorrect. I sum up two objections by Michael Huemer to the claim that the repugnant conclusion is obviously false.

First, its repugnance may be explained not by its falsehood, but by our biases and cognitive limitations.

Instead of asking ourselves if A is better than Z, we tend to ask which of the two worlds we would personally ‌prefer to live in.
Scope insensitivity and our difficulty in compounding tiny quantities make the repugnant conclusion unintuitive.
We tend to underestimate the quality of a barely worth living life.

Second, the repugnant conclusion necessarily follows from highly plausible moral principles. It is impossible to avoid it without accepting at least one of the following:

Cyclical preferences.
Equality in the distribution of utility is intrinsically bad.
A situation that Pareto dominates another one is not preferable to the Pareto dominated one.

Why I wrote this post

I’m a facilitator for the EAVP Intro Program. When I discuss longtermism with participants, population ethics usually comes up. On a few occasions, the repugnant conclusion has been brought up as an objection to the total view.

A few months ago, I wrote a paper for university arguing against this objection. Making a post out of it is a quick task, and it seems useful to have a resource on the forum to share with Intro Program participants (or anyone who might be interested) when they bring up this argument. So here it is!

What is the repugnant conclusion?

The repugnant conclusion was originally stated by Derek Parfit (1984, p.388):

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.

This clearly follows from the total view, according to which the value of a world X is represented by the function

$V a l u e_{X} = N_{X} W_{X}$

Where N_X is the number of people who live in X and W_X is their average well-being level.

Consider two hypothetical worlds, A and Z, to which we assign some arbitrary well-being levels measured on a cardinal scale. Positive numbers represent lives worth living, while negative ones represent lives not w...

Scope neglect

Further reading