The Not-So-Repugnant Conclusion

In Reasons and Persons, Parfit describes the repugnant conclusion (Universe Z). This is when some theory commits us to claiming that a monstrously enormous population with a barely positive quality of life is an improvement on a smaller population with a relatively high quality of life. The repugnant conclusion sets the scence for much of part 4 of the book. I'm not so sure the repugnant conclusion is repugnant. Why?

I confess that it's hard to provide positive justification for its desirability. However, it's noteworthy that one person with many interests served and many fewer problems is desirable. The repugnant differs from this only in terms of the location of those served interests and problems. And why would we think that that is relevant?

But another thing I can do is remove some of the justification for thinking that the repugnant conclusion is undesirable. By removing the arguments against it, I hope to level the ground somewhat, so we can truly judge its merits. Let's look at some quotes from Parfit.

"my [example] is [not] something that we cannot imagine. We can imagine what it would be for someone's life to be barely worth living. And we can imagine what it would be for there to be many people with such lives. In order to imagine Z, we merely have to imagine that there would be very many" (p389, emphasis in original)

I've always thought it pretty obvious that people are terrible with large numbers. I can imagine 10 people adequately, but even 100 and I find personal illustrations hard to imagine. Once we get to 1000, 100,000, or "10 billion" for A (p388) - Parfit's example of a small population - it becomes far from clear that we're capable of imagining Z. That gives some small reason to think that our intuitive judgements on the badness of universe Z might be off.

The above remark focus on the description of the quantity of the lives in the repugnant concusion, or Z. But there are greater problems with how we understand the quality of lives in Z. Again, here's Parfit:

"[...] Z might be best. Z is some enormous population whose members have lives that are not much above the level where life ceases to be worth living. A life could be like this either because it has enough ecstasies to make its agonies seem just worth enduring, or because it is uniformly of poor quality. Let us imagine the lives in Z to be of this second drabber kind" (Reasons and Persons, p388)

I don't think Parfit is being fair to the inhabitants of universe Z here. The inhabitants of Z, by hypothesis, have a positive quality of life. A life of uniformly poor quality does not seem to meet this condition. A fairer phrase would be a life of uniformly acceptable quality - and that sounds far more desirable to have many instances of.

A further illustration of this same point comes later. He considers Kafka's view, which is that only lives above "The Bad Level" in value are worth creating from an impartial point of view. The Bad Level is some level in quality of life above the level at which lives are worth living for their owner. Parfit seems to imagine that this only forestalls the problem:

"Lives that are not much above the Bad Level cannot be well worth living, or close to being well worth living. [...] [lives just above the bad level] though worth living, are gravely deprived, crimped and mean" (p436)

But again, this seems like an unfair description. If lives just worth living are described as "poor", then lives above the bad level should be better than this, even by Parfit's own standards. But "deprived, crimped and mean" doesn't sound like a life better than "poor", let alone better than a life I'd minimally want to lead.

More generally, I wonder if Parfit is getting misled by the everyday use of terms like "life worth living". In practice, we're reluctant to apply this term to anything but the very worst of lives. But this is for all sorts of practical reasons that simply don't apply at this theoretical level - telling someone their life isn't worth living is offensive, unproductive, and overconfident. But at the theoretical level, these considerations are not relevant; "lives worth living" should apply to lives best describable as at least "acceptable"; and certainly should not be applied to lives described as "poor", "deprived" and so on.

The repugnant conclusion consists of an unimaginably high number of people living lives they feel positive about. Is that really so bad?