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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32787 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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As I mentioned though, I don't think miserable people are really all that miserable at all anyways.

People have tried using this explanation already.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/

Moreover, several theorists have suggested that our intuition is misguided by a misapprehension of what it is like to lead a life in Z, i.e., a life that is barely worth living. The idea is that once we realize that such a life is not terrible but perhaps a life not much different from a normal privileged one, the conclusion loses its sting

...

However, this conclusion might not be much of a comfort since there are other impossibility results that do not rely on avoidance of the Repugnant Conclusions as one of its adequacy condition but on avoidance of the intuitively even more unacceptable Very Repugnant Conclusion

People have tried using this explanation already.

Yes, people have tried using all sorts of explanations. The existence of counterarguments doesn't automatically make the original argument wrong. This is especially true when my argument was less "in theory the repugnant conclusion is wrong" and more "In practice the repugnant conclusion seems highly unlikely to ever be relevant or useful." I feel like the Repugnant Conclusion, more than any other thought experiment, directly leads people to make conclusions about real life, and this is highly unwarranted. Whether you think it's true or not has very very little to do with whether the current population of the earth should be increased or decreased.

Still, to the extent that I must pick a repugnant conclusion, the repugnant conclusion seems far more correct than the other conclusions. See Magic9Mushroom's comment on astralcodexten:

If I can’t find any system of axioms that doesn’t do something terrible when extended to infinity,

The philosophers have gotten ahead of you on that one. Surprised you haven't already read it, actually.

https://www.iffs.se/media/2264/an-impossibility-theorem-for-welfarist-axiologies-in-ep-2000.pdf

It's a proof that any consistent system of utilitarianism must either accept the Repugnant Conclusion ("a larger population with very low but positive welfare is better than a small population with very high welfare, for sufficient values of 'larger'"), the Sadistic Conclusion ("it is better, for high-average-welfare populations, to add a small number of people with negative welfare than a larger number with low-but-positive welfare, for sufficient values of 'larger'"), the Anti-Egalitarian Conclusion ("for any population of some number of people and equal utility among all of those people, there is a population with lower average utility distributed unevenly that is better"), or the Oppression Olympics ("all improvement of people's lives is of zero moral value unless it is improvement of the worst life in existence").

If you don't endorse the repugnant conclusion, which of those do you endorse? I'd ordinarily be very sympathetic to arguments along the lines of "all of these thought experiments are just thought experiments, and real ethics in the real world must be more practical" but you're the one trying to constrain me into endorsing a highly theoretical thought experiment, so I expect you to have some kind of answer here, or a good reason why these 29 philosophers are wrong.

Here's another good article, responding to what Scott wrote on the subject. In short, utilitarian attempts to "dodge" one of these conclusions seem to lead to either obvious contradictions or to even worse repugnant conclusions.

If you don't endorse the repugnant conclusion, which of those do you endorse?

The "this is why utilitarianism sucks" conclusion.

my argument was less "in theory the repugnant conclusion is wrong" and more "In practice the repugnant conclusion seems highly unlikely to ever be relevant or useful."

Counterarguments and reductio ad absurdum don't work that way.

If I say "your reasoning implies that all left-handers should be executed", it's not a valid reply to say "well, I'll never be in a position where I have a chance to execute any left-handers". A valid principle applies even to situations that are logically consistent but can't actually happen.

The "this is why utilitarianism sucks" conclusion.

If utilitarianism has any value at all, and it does, it's important to decide what flavor of utilitarianism is most correct. The best way to do that is by taking it to extremes, deciding which extreme sounds most correct, and then extrapolating from there back to normal actually relevant morality. This is because deciding whether to create 1 happy person or increase someone's standard of living by 1% may not be intuitively clear, but imo the answer to the impossibility theorem is pretty clear, and that can inform our decisions on more proximate questions, though it shouldn't determine them.

I'm not a pure utilitarian--I'd probably be closest to being an ethical intuitionist--but I think we can hone our ethical intuitions by being knowledgeable and consistent about other theories of morality. So I don't think you should just dismiss the thought experiment entirely.

Counterarguments and reductio ad absurdum don't work that way.

If I say "your reasoning implies that all left-handers should be executed", it's not a valid reply to say "well, I'll never be in a position where I have a chance to execute any left-handers". A valid principle applies even to situations that are logically consistent but can't actually happen.

Let me be more clear:

  1. The universe is not designed such that the Repugnant Conclusion will ever matter

  2. If it were, then my moral beliefs would be different than they are.

If my reasoning implies that both left-handers should be executed, and also that left-handers don't exist, "I'll never be in a position to execute left-handers" absolutely is a valid response to any complaints against the "left-handers should be executed" conclusion. Any scenario where I'm convinced that left-handers do exist is also one where I rethink whether they should be executed. Our moral beliefs are shaped by reality, so my beliefs about reality are relevant to my moral beliefs.

If you look at what I actually said though, I never said the repugnant conclusion etc. was totally irrelevant, just that it was mostly irrelevant. I did answer your question pretty quickly. The repugnant conclusion just seems particularly nefarious to me because people take it way beyond where any thought experiment should be taken, directly porting conclusions back to reality despite the numerous differences between the hypothetical and reality.

If my reasoning implies that both left-handers should be executed, and also that left-handers don't exist,

If your reasoning implies that left-handers don't exist because the concept is logically impossible, you don't have to care whether it tells you to execute them. But there's a difference between "it's logically impossible" and "it doesn't exist in practice".

Sure. My original response did include:

If miserable people were miserable by definition then I'm not sure I'd want to tile the universe with them, but if we ever get to that point then surely we will have solutions to their problems.

So I feel I was pretty clear about my position.

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