This paper focuses on the relations between population ethics and metaethics. Population ethics gives rise to well-known paradoxes, such as the paradox of mere addition. After presenting a version of this paradox, it is argued that a different way to dismantle it might be by considering it as a way to change our standard view of justification in moral theory. Two possible views are considered: a non-cognitivist approach to justification and to the explanation of (...) inconsistency in morals; Parfit's suggestion that certain paradoxes might be «quarantined» without shaking our confidence in moral theories encapsulating them. (shrink)

Population ethics is defined and presented, and some of the paradoxes it encapsulates are spelled out. It is argued that the concept of the quality of a life or of a life worth living can- not be avoided if inquiry on many relevant ethical and political topics is to be pursued in a theoretically fitting mode. In particular, the article deals with the asymmetry between rea- sons for not creating unhappy lives and reasons for creating happy lives, the well-known (...) repugnant conclusion and the paradox of mere addition. (shrink)

Duties to future persons contribute critically to many important contemporaneous ethical dilemmas, such as environmental protection, contraception, abortion, and population policy. Yet this area of ethics is mired in paradoxes. It appeared that any principle for dealing with future persons encountered Kavka's paradox of future individuals, Parfit's repugnant conclusion, or an indefensible asymmetry. In 1976, Singer proposed a utilitarian solution that seemed to avoid the above trio of obstacles, but Parfit so successfully demonstrated the unacceptability of this position (...) that Singer abandoned it. Indeed, the apparently intransitivity of Singer's solution contributed to Temkin's argument that the notion of "all things considered better than" may be intransitive. In this paper, I demonstrate that a time-extended view of Singer's solution avoids the intransitivity that allows Parfit's mere addition paradox to lead to the repugnant conclusion. However, the heart of the mere addition paradox remains: the time-extended view still yields intransitive judgments. I discuss a general theory for dealing with intransitivity that was inspired by Temkin's sports analogy, and demonstrate that such a solution is more palatable than Temkin suspected. When a pair-wise comparison also requires consideration of a small number of relevant external alternatives, we can avoid intransitivity and the mere addition paradox without infinite comparisons or rejecting the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives Principle. (shrink)

How can we resist the repugnant conclusion? James Griffin has plausibly suggested that part way through the sequence we may reach a world—let us call it “J”—in which the lives are lexically superior to those that follow. If it would be preferable to live a single life in J than through any number of lives in the next one, then it would be strange to judge K the better world. Instead, we may reasonably “suspend addition” and judge J (...) superior, as if aggregating the lives in the larger world intrapersonally. I argue that the addition of new people with separate preferences renders this inference illicit when comparing J+ and K. When one pairwise comparison suspends addition and the other does not, the result is an intransitive value judgement: J < J+ < K < J, producing the mere addition paradox. (shrink)

The multiverse theodicy proposes to reconcile the existence of God and evil by supposing that God created all and only the creation-worthy universes and that some universes like ours are, despite their evils, creation-worthy. Drawing on work in population ethics, this paper develops a novel challenge to the multiverse theodicy. Roughly, the challenge contends that the axiological underpinnings of the multiverse theodicy harbor a ‘mere addition paradox’: the assumption that creating creation-worthy universes would always make the world (...) better turns out to have morally repugnant consequences akin to those of the assumption that adding worthwhile lives to a population would always make the overall welfare of the population better. Further, the challenge leverages this difficulty into an argument against God’s having created all and only the creation-worthy universes, and hence against the multiverse theodicy. Responses to this challenge are considered but found wanting, largely because of commitments of the multiverse theodicy that have no analogs in population ethics. (shrink)

In the face of an impossibility result, some assumption must be relaxed. The Mere Addition Paradox is an impossibility result in population ethics. Here, I explore substantially weakening the decision-theoretic assumptions involved. The central finding is that the Mere Addition Paradox persists even in the general framework of choice functions when we assume Path Independence as a minimal decision-theoretic constraint. Choice functions can be thought of either as generalizing the standard axiological assumption of a binary (...) “betterness” relation, or as providing a general framework for a normative (rather than axiological) theory of population ethics. Path Independence, a weaker assumption than typically (implicitly) made in population ethics, expresses the idea that, in making a choice from a set of alternatives, the order in which options are assessed or considered is ethically arbitrary and should not affect the final choice. Since the result establishes a conflict between the relevant ethical principles and even very weak decision-theoretic principles, we have more reason to doubt the ethical principles. (shrink)

The quality of a life is typically understood as a function of the actual goods and bads in it, that is, its actual value. Likewise, the value of a population is typically taken to be a function of the actual value of the lives in it. We introduce an alternative understanding of life quality: adjusted value. A life’s adjusted value is a function of its actual value and its ideal value (the best value it could have had). The concept (...) of adjusted value is useful for at least three reasons. First, it fits our judgments about how well lives are going. Second, it allows us to avoid what we call False Equivalence, an error related to the non-identity problem. Third, when we use adjusted value as an input for calculating the value of a population, we can avoid two puzzles that Derek Parfit calls the “Repugnant Conclusion” and the “Mere Addition Paradox.”. (shrink)

This paper argues that the Repugnant Conclusion which the Mere Addition Paradox generates is not the same as the one which a sum-aggregative view like impersonal total utilitarianism leads to, but a slightly more moderate version of it. Given a spectrum of outcomes {A, B, C, …, X, Y, Z} such that in each of them there is a population that is twice as large as the previous one and has a level of wellbeing that is (...) just barely lower than the previous one, the Mere Addition Paradox implies that while almost all the outcomes of the spectrum are better than A, the last ones, such as Y and Z, will not, lest we accept that adding lives at a negative level is positive or neutral. This affects the way the Mere Addition Paradox should be presented. (shrink)

I present a new argument for the repugnant conclusion. The core of the argument is a risky, intrapersonal analogue of the mere addition paradox. The argument is important for three reasons. First, some solutions to Parfit’s original puzzle do not obviously generalize to the intrapersonal puzzle in a plausible way. Second, it raises independently important questions about how to make decisions under uncertainty for the sake of people whose existence might depend on what we do. And, third, (...) it suggests various difficulties for leading views about the value of a person’s life compared to her nonexistence. (shrink)

Population axiology concerns how to evaluate populations in regard to their goodness, that is, how to order populations by the relations “is better than” and “is as good as”. This field has been riddled with “paradoxes” which seem to show that our considered beliefs are inconsistent in cases where the number of people and their welfare varies. Already in Derek Parfit’s seminal contribution to the topic, an informal paradox — the Mere Addition Paradox — was presented and (...) later contributions have proved similar results.1 All of these contributions, however, have one thing in common: They all involve an adequacy condition that rules out Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion: The Repugnant Conclusion: For any perfectly equal population with very high positive welfare, there is a population with very low positive welfare which is better, other things being equal.2 A number of theorists, however, have argued that we should accept the Repugnant Conclusion and hence that avoidance of this conclusion is not a convincing adequacy condition for a population axiology. Torbjörn Tännsjö, for example, argues that the Repugnant Conclusion is not at all repugnant but rather “an unsought, but acceptable, consequence of hedonistic utilitarianism”:3.. (shrink)

One of Derek Parfit’s greatest legacies was the search for Theory X, a theory of population ethics that avoided all the implausible conclusions and paradoxes that have dogged the field since its inception: the Absurd Conclusion, the Repugnant Conclusion, the Non-Identity Problem, and the Mere Addition Paradox. In recent years, it has been argued that this search is doomed to failure and no satisfactory population axiology is possible. This chapter reviews Parfit’s life’s work in the (...) field and argues that he provided all the necessary components necessary for a Theory X. It then shows how these components can be combined together and applied to the global challenges Parfit argued matter most: preventing human extinction, managing catastrophic risks, and eradicating global poverty and suffering. Finally, it identifies a number of challenges facing his theory and suggests how these may be overcome. (shrink)

A set of arguments shows that either the Repugnant Conclusion and its variants are true or the better-than relation isn't transitive. Which is it? This is the most important question in population ethics. The answer will point the way to Parfit's elusive Theory X.

James Griffin has considered a form of superiority in value that is weaker than lexical priority as a possible remedy to the Repugnant Conclusion. In this article, I demonstrate that, in a context where value is additive, this weaker form collapses into the stronger form of superiority. And in a context where value is non-additive, weak superiority does not amount to a radical value difference at all. These results are applied on one of Larry Temkin's cases against transitivity. I (...) demonstrate that Temkin appeals to two conflicting notions of aggregation. I then spell out the consequences of these results for different interpretations of Griffin's suggestion regarding population ethics. None of them comes out very successful, but perhaps they nevertheless retain some interest. (shrink)

A principal aim of the branch of ethics called ‘population theory’ or ‘population ethics’ is to find a plausible welfarist axiology, capable of comparing total outcomes with respect to value. This has proved an exceedingly difficult task. In this paper I shall state and discuss two ‘trilemmas’, or choices between three unappealing alternatives, which the population ethicist must face. The first trilemma is not new. It originates with Derek Parfit's well-known ‘Mere Addition Paradox’, and was (...) first explicitly stated by Yew-Kwang Ng. I shall argue that one horn of this trilemma is less unattractive than Parfit and others have claimed. The second trilemma, which is a kind of mirror image of the first, appears hitherto to have gone unnoticed. Apart from attempting to resolve the two trilemmas, I shall suggest certain features which I believe a plausible welfarist axiology should possess. The details of this projected axiology will, however, be left open. (shrink)

Population axiology concerns how to evaluate populations in regard to their goodness, that is, how to order populations by the relations “is better than” and “is as good as”. This field has been riddled with impossibility results which seem to show that our considered beliefs are inconsistent in cases where the number of people and their welfare varies.1 All of these results have one thing in common, however. They all involve an adequacy condition that rules out Derek Parfit’s (...) class='Hi'>Repugnant Conclusion: The Repugnant Conclusion: For any perfectly equal population with very high positive welfare, there is a population with very low positive welfare which is better, other things being equal.2 1 The informal Mere Addition Paradox in Parfit (1984), pp. 419ff is the locus classicus. For an informal proof of a similar result with stronger assumptions, see Ng (1989), p. 240. A formal proof with slightly stronger assumptions than Ng’s can be found in Blackorby and Donaldson (1991). For theorems with much weaker assumptions, see my (1999), (2000b), and especially (2000a), (2001), and (2009). 2 See Parfit (1984), p. 388. My formulation is more general than Parfit’s apart from that he doesn’t demand that the people with very high welfare are equally well off. Expressions such as “a population with very high positive welfare”, “a population with very low positive welfare”, etc., are elliptical for the more cumbersome phrases “a population consisting only of lives with.. (shrink)

Two objects of valuation are said to be incommensurable if neither is better than the other, nor are they equally good. This negative, coarse-grained characterization fails to capture the nuanced structure of incommensurability. We argue that our evaluative resources are far richer than orthodoxy recognizes. We model value comparisons with the corresponding class of permissible preference orderings. Then, making use of our model, we introduce a potentially infinite set of degrees of approximation to better, worse, and equally good, which we (...) interpret as degrees of commensurability.One payoff is the solution our approach provides to a paradox in population ethics, generated by Parfit's “Continuum Argument”. Parfit imagines a sequence of populations, starting with one consisting of excellent lives and, by a sequence of apparent improvements, reaching a much larger population of lives barely worth living. What he dubs “the Repugnant Conclusion” is that the final population is better than the first. Developing Parfit's response, we argue that some of the populations in the sequence are merely almost better than their immediate predecessors. Almost better is not transitive (unlike better). We offer analogies to other ‘spectrum arguments’, Condorcet's paradox, and to developments in formal epistemology. (shrink)

Variable-Value axiologies avoid Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion while satisfying some weak instances of the Mere Addition principle. We apply calibration methods to two leading members of the family of Variable-Value views conditional upon: first, a very weak instance of Mere Addition and, second, some plausible empirical assumptions about the size and welfare of the intertemporal world population. We find that such facts calibrate these two Variable-Value views to be nearly totalist, and therefore imply conclusions that (...) should seem repugnant to anyone who opposes Total Utilitarianism only due to the Repugnant Conclusion. (shrink)

Incommensurability is the impossibility to determine how two options relate to each other in terms of conventional comparative relations. This book features new research on incommensurability from philosophers who have shaped the field into what it is today, including John Broome, Ruth Chang and Wlodek Rabinowicz. The book covers four aspects relating to incommensurability. In the first part, the contributors synthesize research on the competing views of how to best explain incommensurability. Part II illustrates how incommensurability can help us deal (...) with seemingly insurmountable problems in ethical theory and population ethics. The contributors address the Repugnant Conclusion, the Mere Addition Paradox and so-called Spectrum Arguments. The chapters in Part III outline and summarize problems caused by incommensurability for decision theory. Finally, Part IV tackles topics related to risk, uncertainty and incommensurability. Value Incommensurability: Ethics, Risk, and Decision-Making will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in ethical theory, decision theory, action theory, and philosophy of economics. (shrink)

As the title of this paper indicates, I’m going to discuss what we ought to do in situations where our actions affect future generations. More specifically, I shall focus on the moral problems raised by cases where our actions affect who’s going to live, their number and their well being. I’ll start, however, with population axiology. Most discussion in population ethics has concentrated on how to evaluate populations in regard to their goodness, that is, how to order populations (...) by the relations “is better than” and “is as good as”. This field has been riddled with “paradoxes” which purport to show that our considered beliefs are inconsistent in cases where the number of people and their welfare varies. Derek Parfit’s Mere Addition Paradox is a case in point. The main question of my paper concerns the implication of such axiological paradoxes for normative theories. Do the axiological paradoxes translate into paradoxes for normative theories or will they, as some believe, disappear if we switch to a normative framework? (shrink)

This article examines several families of population principles in the light of a set of axioms. In addition to the critical-level utilitarian, number-sensitive critical-level utilitarian, and number-dampened utilitarian families and their generalized counterparts, we consider the restricted number-dampened family and introduce two new ones: the restricted critical-level and restricted number-dependent critical-level families. Subsets of the restricted families have non-negative critical levels, avoid the `repugnant conclusion' and satisfy the axiom priority for lives worth living, but violate an important (...) independence condition. (shrink)

The anti‐natalist philosopher David Benatar defends a position asserting that all life is harmful, and that it is, therefore, wrong to have children. In this paper, I critique Benatar's less‐discussed claim that his anti‐natalism provides solutions to population ethics problems, such as the Non‐Identity Problem, the Repugnant Conclusion, and the Mere Addition Problem, all of which are presented in Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons. Since the publication of his Better Never to Have Been, Benatar has continued (...) to claim that its provision of such solutions strengthens his defense of anti‐natalism. Although Benatar's view has received much criticism, this argument has not been discussed at length. I undertake a thorough examination of the argument and identify reasons to reject it. The central point of my critique is that the implications of Benatar's views in determining ranges of wrong and not‐wrong cases of procreation are extensionally inadequate when applied to the problems of population ethics. (shrink)

Nebel argues for the Repugnant Conclusion via the “Intrapersonal Repugnant Conclusion,” on which certainty of a mediocre life is better for individuals than a sufficiently small chance of an excellent life. In this article, I deny that acceptance of the Intrapersonal Repugnant Conclusion leads us to the Repugnant Conclusion. I point out that on many views which avoid the Repugnant Conclusion we should discount very small probabilities down to zero. If we do, then Nebel’s crucial (...) premise of Ex Ante Pareto fails, because discounting at the individual level can fail to match up with discounting at the population level. (shrink)

Population axiology includes two major arguments. The first is the repugnant conclusion, which was originally formulated by Derek Parfit to criticize total utilitarianism. The second is the sadistic conclusion. In this study, I demonstrate that no additively separable principle can avoid both repugnant and sadistic conclusions if individual moral values have no upper bound. This impossibility holds not only for utilitarian principles but also for any population principles that guarantee the separability of people’s well-being. I emphasize (...) the importance of examining non-separable principles in population ethics. (shrink)

In Derek Parfit's original formulation the Repugnant Conclusion is characterized as follows: “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” (Parfit 1984). The Repugnant Conclusion highlights a problem in an area of ethics which has become known as (...) population ethics . The last three decades have witnessed an increasing philosophical interest in questions such as “Is it possible to make the world a better place by creating additional happy creatures?” and “Is there a moral obligation to have children?” The main problem has been to find an adequate theory about the moral value of states of affairs where the number of people, the quality of their lives, and their identities may vary. Since, arguably, any reasonable moral theory has to take these aspects of possible states of affairs into account when determining the normative status of actions, the study of population ethics is of general import for moral theory. As the name indicates, Parfit finds the Repugnant Conclusion unacceptable and many philosophers agree. However, it has been surprisingly difficult to find a theory that avoids the Repugnant Conclusion without implying other equally counterintuitive conclusions. Thus, the question as to how the Repugnant Conclusion should be dealt with and, more generally, what it shows about the nature of ethics has turned the conclusion into one of the cardinal challenges of modern ethics. (shrink)

In Reasons and Persons, Parfit (1984) posed a challenge: provide a satisfying normative account that solves the Non-Identity Problem, avoids the Repugnant and Absurd Conclusions, and solves the Mere-Addition Paradox. In response, some have suggested that we look toward person-affecting views of morality for a solution. But the person-affecting views that have been offered so far have been unable to satisfy Parfit's four requirements, and these views have been subject to a number of independent complaints. This paper (...) describes a person-affecting account which meets Parfit's challenge. The account satisfies Parfit's four requirements, and avoids many of the criticisms that have been raised against person-affecting views. (shrink)

In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit cannot find a theory of well-being that solves the Non-Identity Problem, the Repugnant Conclusion, the Absurd Conclusion, and all forms of the Mere Addition Paradox. I describe a “Quasi-Maximizing” theory that solves them. This theory includes (i) the denial that being better than is transitive and (ii) the “Conflation Principle,” according to which alternative B is hedonically better than alternative C if it would be better for someone to have all the (...) B-experiences. (i) entails that Quasi-Maximization is not a maximizing theory, but (ii) ensures that its evaluations will often coincide with such theories. (shrink)

The spectre of the repugnant conclusion and the search for a population axiology that avoids it has endured as a focus of population ethics. This is in part because the repugnant conclusion is often interpreted as a defining problem for totalism, while the implications of averagism and related views are taken to illustrate the theoretical cost of avoiding the repugnant conclusion. However, we show that this interpretation cannot be sustained unless one focuses only on a (...) special case of the repugnant conclusion: namely, the subset of instances of the repugnant conclusion where there is no portion of the population unaffected by the choice between population outcomes (as in Derek Parfit’s original illustration). To avoid an inappropriate focus on only this proper subset of instances of the repugnant conclusion, we formulate a general characterization of the repugnant conclusion. We then prove formally that all leading welfarist axiologies imply this conclusion, including averagism and Ng’s Theory X0 , including probabilistic and ‘very repugnant’ variants that involve the addition of negative lives. We then prove that the full range of axiologies considered by population ethics each imply an extended version of the repugnant conclusion, including axiologies that are incomplete, intransitive, rank-dependent, person-affecting, and/or pluralist. The upshot is that the repugnant conclusion does not ultimately tell against any approach to axiology, and the methodological requirement to avoid the repugnant conclusion should be dropped from population axiology. (shrink)

Recently, in his Rolf Schock Prize Lecture, Derek Parfit has suggested a novel way of avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion by introducing what he calls “imprecision” in value comparisons. He suggests that in a range of important cases, populations of different sizes are only imprecisely comparable. Parfit suggests that this feature of value comparisons opens up a way of avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion without implying other counterintuitive conclusions, and thus solves one of the major challenges in ethics. In this (...) article, I try to clarify Parfit's proposal and evaluate whether it will help us with the paradoxes in population ethics. (shrink)

The quantitative argument against the notion of a best possible world claims that, no matter how many worthwhile lives a world contains, another world contains more and is, other things being equal, better. Parfit’s ‘ Mere Addition Paradox ’ suggests that defenders of this argument must accept his ‘ Repugnant Conclusion ’ : that outcomes containing billions upon billions of lives barely worth living are better than outcomes containing fewer lives of higher quality. Several responses to the (...) Paradox are discussed and rejected as either inadequate or unavailable in a theistic context. The quantitative argument fails if some world is such that addition to it is not possible, i.e., if it is intensively infinite, as Liebniz claimed. If the notion of such a world is incoherent, then no world is quantitatively best and the quantitative argument succeeds, but only at the cost of embracing the Repugnant Conclusion. (shrink)

Recently, in his Rolf Schock Prize Lecture, Derek Parfit has suggested a novel way of avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion by introducing what he calls “imprecision” in value comparisons. He suggests that in a range of important cases, populations of different sizes are only imprecisely comparable. Parfit suggests that this feature of value comparisons opens up a way of avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion without implying other counterintuitive conclusions, and thus solves one of the major challenges in ethics. In this (...) article, I try to clarify Parfit’s proposal and evaluate whether it will help us with the paradoxes in population ethics. (shrink)

In “An Intrapersonal Addition Paradox,” Jacob Nebel provides a novel intrapersonal argument for the Repugnant Conclusion. The most controversial premise of Nebel’s argument is the “Probable Addition Principle,” on which it is better for individuals to receive additional chances of existence with a life worth living. I provide an alternative intrapersonal argument for the Repugnant Conclusion which does not assume the Probable Addition Principle. I also show that Pareto principles alone, when conjoined with very minimal (...) principles of prudence, imply a version of the Repugnant Conclusion. (shrink)

Values are incommensurable when they cannot be measured on a single cardinal scale. Many philosophers suggest that incommensurability can help us solve the problems of population ethics. I agree. But some philosophers claim that populations bear incommensurable values merely because they contain different numbers of people, perhaps within some range. I argue that mere differences in how many people exist, even within some range, do not suffice for incommensurability. I argue that the intuitive neutrality of creating happy people (...) is better captured by a version of average utilitarianism. But this view is problematic. So I suggest a version of total utilitarianism that avoids the repugnant conclusion by appealing to incommensurable dimensions of wellbeing. (shrink)

Recently, Derek Parfit has offered a novel solution to the “Repugnant Conclusion” that compared with the existence of many people whose quality of life would be very high, there is some much larger number of people whose existence would be better but whose lives would be barely worth living. On this solution, qualitative differences between two populations will often entail that the populations are merely “imprecisely” comparable. According to Parfit, this fact allows us to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion (...) without violating the transitivity of better than. In this paper, I argue that Parfit’s view nevertheless implies two objectionable conclusions. The first is an alternative version of the Repugnant Conclusion that, Parfit suggests, may not be all that repugnant. The second is a revised version of the first that is nearly identical to the Repugnant Conclusion. I conclude that Parfit’s view offers no escape from repugnance. (shrink)

The repugnant conclusion is acceptable from the point of view of total utilitarianism. Total utilitarians do not seem to be bothered with it. They feel that it is in no way repugnant. To me, a hard-nosed total utilitarian, this settles the case. However, if, sometimes, I doubt that total utilitarianism has the final say in ethics, and tend to think that there may be something to some objection to it or another, it is the objection to it brought (...) forward from egalitarian thought that first comes to mind. But if my argument in this article is correct, then it is clear that the repugnant conclusion should be equally acceptable to egalitarians of various different bents as it is to total utilitarians. (shrink)

Separability is roughly the principle that, in comparing the value of two outcomes, one can ignore any people whose existence and welfare are unaffected. Separability is both antecedently plausible, at least as a principle of beneficence, and surprisingly powerful; it is the key to some of the best positive arguments in population ethics. This chapter surveys the motivations for and consequences of separability. In particular, it presents an ‘additivity theorem’ which explains how separability leads to total utilitarianism and closely (...) related axiological views. It then examines systematically how this family of views can avoid the Repugnant Conclusion by incorporating lexicality, a critical level, or a neutral range. (shrink)

The person-affecting restriction, in its slogan form, states that an outcome can be better than another only if it is better for someone. It has a strong intuitive appeal and several theorists have suggested that it avoids certain counterintuitive implications in population ethics. At the same time, the restriction has highly counterintuitive implications and yields non-transitive orderings in some nonidentity cases. Many theorists have taken this criticism to be decisive. Recently, however, there have been some reformulations of the restriction, (...) suggesting that the restriction survives this “old” criticism. This paper investigates the viability of those reformulations, which are versions of “Comparativism,” and argues that most of them either have counterintuitive implications or are extensionally equivalent with impersonal theories, but that “Soft Comparativism” seems to have an advantage over impersonal theories. (shrink)

Most people (including moral philosophers), when faced with the fact that some of their cherished moral views lead up to the Repugnant Conclusion, feel that they have to revise their moral outlook. However, it is a moot question as to how this should be done. It is not an easy thing to say how one should avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, without having to face even more serious implications from one's basic moral outlook. Several such attempts are presented in (...) this volume. This is the first volume devoted entirely to the cardinal problem of modern population ethics, known as 'The Repugnant Conclusion'. This book is a must for (moral) philosophers with an interest in population ethics. (shrink)

Derek Parfit presents his Mere Addition Paradox in order to demonstrate that it is extremely difficult to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion. And in order to avoid it, Parfit has embraced perfectionism. However, Stuart Rachels and Larry Temkin, taking their lead from Parfit, have concluded, instead, that the Repugnant Conclusion can be avoided by denying the axiom of transitivity with respect to the all-things-considered-better-than relation. But this seems to present a major challenge to how we evaluate normatively. (...) In this article I show how the Mere Addition Paradox and the Repugnant Conclusion can both be avoided without subscribing to perfectionism, and without sacrificing the axiom of transitivity. (shrink)

Most people (including moral philosophers), when faced with the fact that some of their cherished moral views lead up to the Repugnant Conclusion, feel that they have to revise their moral outlook. However, it is a moot question as to how this should be done. It is not an easy thing to say how one should avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, without having to face even more serious implications from one's basic moral outlook. Several such attempts are presented in (...) this volume. This is the first volume devoted entirely to the cardinal problem of modern population ethics, known as 'The Repugnant Conclusion'. This book is a must for (moral) philosophers with an interest in population ethics. (shrink)

In "Futurc Generations: Further Problems,"‘ and Part Four of Reasons and Persons} Derek Pariit raises many perplexing questions. Although some think his ingenious arguments little more than delightful puzzles, I believe they challenge some of our deepest beliefs. In this article, I examine some of Pariit’s arguments, focusing mainly on "The Mere Addition Paradox." If my analysis is correct, Parfit’s arguments have extremely interesting and important implications that not even Pariit rcalized. In Part I, I present ParHt’s argument (...) for the Merc Addition Paradox, and show that given Pa.rHt’s assumptions, a radical conclusion seems t0 follow; the notion of "bctter th2m"—indced, even the notion of "aH things.. (shrink)

Both utilitarian and deontological moral theories locate the source of our moral beliefs in the wrong sorts of considerations. One way this failure manifests itself, we argue, is in the ways these theories analyze the proper human relationship toward the non-human environment. Another, more notorious, manifestation of this failure is found in Derek Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion. Our goal is to explore the connection between these two failures, and to suggest that they are failures of act-centered moral theories in general. (...) As such, they cannot be fixed by simply developing a better version of such a theory. Virtue-based theories, we suggest, provide a more promising alternative. (shrink)

Many drugs used in paediatric medicine are off-label. There is a rising call for the use of adaptive clinical trial designs in responding to the need for safe and effective drugs given their potential to offer efficiency and cost-effective benefits compared with traditional clinical trials. ADs have a strong appeal in paediatric clinical trials given the small number of available participants, limited understanding of age-related variability and the desire to limit exposure to futile or unsafe interventions. Although the ethical value (...) of adaptive trials has increasingly come under scrutiny, there is a paucity of literature on the ethical dilemmas that may be associated with paediatric adaptive designs. This paper highlights some of these ethical concerns around safety, scientific/social value and caregiver/guardian comprehension of the trial design. Against this background, the paper develops a non-static conceptual lens for understanding PADs. It shows that ADs are epistemically open and reduce some of the knowledge-associated uncertainties inherent in clinical trials as well as fast-track the time to draw conclusions about the value of evaluated drugs/treatments. On this note, the authors argue that PADs are ethically justifiable given they have multiple layers of safety, exposing enrolled children to lesser potential risks, create social/scientific value generally and for paediatric populations in particular, specifically foster the flourishing of paediatric populations and can significantly improve paediatric trial efficiency when properly designed and implemented. However, because PADs are relatively new and their regulatory, ethical and logistical characteristics are yet to be clarified in some jurisdictions, the cooperation of various public and private stakeholders is required to ensure that the interests of children, their caregivers and parents/guardians are best served while exposing paediatric research subjects to the most minimal of risks when they are enrolled in paediatric trials that use ADs. Data sharing not applicable as no datasets generated and/or analysed for this study. Not applicable. (shrink)

Population axiology concerns how to evaluate populations in regard to their goodness, that is, how to order populations by the relations “is better than ” and “is as good as”. This field has been riddled with paradoxes and impossibility results which seem to show that our considered beliefs are inconsistent in cases where the number of people and their welfare varies. All of these results have one thing in common, however. They all involve an adequacy condition that rules out (...) Derek Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion. Moreover, some theorists have argued that we should accept the Repugnant Conclusion and hence that avoidance of this conclusion is not a convincing adequacy condition for a population axiology. As I shall show in this chapter, however, one can replace avoidance of the Repugnant Conclusion with a logically weaker and intuitively more convincing condition. The resulting theorem involves, to the best of my knowledge, logically weaker and intuitively more compelling conditions than the other theorems presented in the literature. As such, it. (shrink)

The Weatherall report on the use of non-human primates in research was published in 2006. Its main conclusion was that there is a strong scientific case for the use of non-human primates in some cases, but the report stressed the importance of evaluating each case in the light of the availability of alternatives. In addition to arguing for the scientific necessity of using non-human primates in research, the report also provided an ethical justification. As could be expected, the (...) report was harshly criticised by animal rights groups, but in the academic literature, only two critical replies appeared. In what follows, I will describe the ethical justification for non-human primate research as it is laid out in the Weatherall report and then consider the criticism in the academic literature. I conclude that the report’s ethical justification for the use of non-human primates in research, in particular in basic neuroscientific research, has not been convincingly challenged by its critics. Since the criticism of the report is limited and represents only a small part of the academic discussion about the use of non-human primates in research, and a still smaller part of the ethical discussion about animal research, it is important that the discussion continue both at the academic and social level. (shrink)

Economic policy evaluations require social welfare functions for variable-size populations. Two important candidates are critical-level generalized utilitarianism (CLGU) and rank-discounted critical-level generalized utilitarianism, which was recently characterized by Asheim and Zuber (2014) (AZ). AZ introduce a novel axiom, existence of egalitarian equivalence (EEE). First, we show that, under some uncontroversial criteria for a plausible social welfare relation, EEE suffices to rule out the Repugnant Conclusion of population ethics (without AZ’s other novel axioms). Second, we provide a new characterization (...) of CLGU: AZ’s set of axioms is equivalent to CLGU when EEE is replaced by the axiom same-number independence. (shrink)

Critical-Range Utilitarianism is a variant of Total Utilitarianism which can avoid both the Repugnant Conclusion and the Sadistic Conclusion in population ethics. Yet Standard Critical-Range Utilitarianism entails the Weak Sadistic Conclusion, that is, it entails that each population consisting of lives at a bad well-being level is not worse than some population consisting of lives at a good well-being level. In this paper, I defend a version of Critical-Range Utilitarianism which does not entail the Weak Sadistic (...) Conclusion. This is made possible by a fourth category of absolute value in addition to goodness, badness, and neutrality. (shrink)

Why should ‘better than’ be transitive? The leading answer in ethics is that values do not change with context. But this cannot be the entire source of transitivity, I argue, since transitivity can fail even if values never change, so long as they are complex, with multiple dimensions combined non-additively. I conclude by exploring a new hypothesis: that all alleged cases of nontransitive betterness, such as Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion, can and should be modelled as the result of complexity, not (...) context-relativity. (shrink)