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Notes -
The Repugnant Conclusion is a counterexample or argument against utilitarianism as an ethical philosophy. To illustrate the Repugnant Conclusion, it might be a bit helpful to phrase it in politically-charged words, even though the general principle is broader.
Let’s say that you live in a country where everyone is very happy. Because we’re operating under utilitarian ethics, this amount of happiness can be quantified by summing up the amount of happiness of each person in the society. Now, let’s say that your country imports a bunch of foreigners who aren’t nearly as happy. If the foreigners don’t make your country’s original inhabitants any less happy, then under utilitarianism, this is a clear win: the total amount of happiness in your country has increased. But crucially, even if the foreigners decrease the amount of happiness of the natives, then as long as this decrease is outweighed by the increased total happiness you get from adding new people to the country, this is still a net win under utilitarianism.
So let’s keep iterating this: naive utilitarianism would argue that it is good to keep importing unhappy foreigners, even if they make everyone else worse off, so long as these foreigners still have positive happiness (that is, are not suicidal) and so long as there are enough of them to offset the decrease in happiness in everyone else. The end result: a country of a billion people, all of whom are barely happy at all, which utilitarianism says is still superior to the original smaller country of very happy people. That is the Repugnant Conclusion.
Note that despite my framing, the Repugnant Conclusion doesn’t quite directly apply to the question of immigration in this way; I haven’t addressed the salient real-world question of whether immigrants do decrease happiness rather than increase it, etc. The more general Repugnant Conclusion applies to not a single country deciding whether to import immigrants, but to the question of whether one possible universe is better than another possible universe. The most crucial way in which my framing differs from the real world is that it assumes that the only country that matters in the world is the country being discussed, which utilitarianism rejects. But framing it in these terms hopefully makes it more understandable than saying “say that N unhappy people are born into a possible universe…”
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