It is common when thinking about ethical questions to use thought experiments. So, for example, you have no doubt heard various “trolley problems”: people are tied to the tracks of a trolley car (i.e., a tram or train) and you have the chance to pull a lever to decide where the trolley will go and who will get killed. Or perhaps you have to push a fat man to his doom in order to derail the trolley and save others, or ... well, you know the sort of thing. Bernard Williams’ “Jim and the Indians” is in a similar category, as are all those questions that involve things like concealing Jews from Nazis by lying, or torturing terrorists to extract the code to defuse a bomb.
Obviously there is something artificial about these kinds of example, but I think we all understand the purpose of them. The “facts” in these cases are stylised but nonetheless recognisable versions of the kinds of human psychology and normal causation with which we are familiar. It seems perfectly plausible that there might be value in thinking about these kinds of example, perhaps honing our moral intuitions and even simply trying to work out what we really believe. I wouldn’t say that they are without difficulties, but it is not silly to believe that real moral choices people might have to make resemble these kinds of thought experiment in relevant respects.
Obviously there is something artificial about these kinds of example, but I think we all understand the purpose of them. The “facts” in these cases are stylised but nonetheless recognisable versions of the kinds of human psychology and normal causation with which we are familiar. It seems perfectly plausible that there might be value in thinking about these kinds of example, perhaps honing our moral intuitions and even simply trying to work out what we really believe. I wouldn’t say that they are without difficulties, but it is not silly to believe that real moral choices people might have to make resemble these kinds of thought experiment in relevant respects.
All of which brings me onto the Repugnant Conclusion. If you are familiar with the Repugnant Conclusion then please skip ahead. If not, and if you really want to know much more about it, then the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is your friend, here as on so many occasions. I'll give you enough for present purposes below.
The Repugnant Conclusion argument was thought up by the late, great Derek Parfit as he was kickstarting modern population ethics. In essence, the idea is that you compare different populations of people, some of whom have really great lives full of all the things that make life worth living, some less so and some whose lives are just barely better than not existing at all. By a whole series of arguments you will find that you either have to reject premises that appear perfectly sensible – and which can themselves be supported by strong arguments – or else you have to accept the Repugnant Conclusion. That is to say, it’s one of those arguments: you’re forced to consider re-evaluating your sensible premises, finding a flaw in the chain of reasoning or else embracing an odd conclusion; plenty of people have taken one of those three options.
The Repugnant Conclusion argument was thought up by the late, great Derek Parfit as he was kickstarting modern population ethics. In essence, the idea is that you compare different populations of people, some of whom have really great lives full of all the things that make life worth living, some less so and some whose lives are just barely better than not existing at all. By a whole series of arguments you will find that you either have to reject premises that appear perfectly sensible – and which can themselves be supported by strong arguments – or else you have to accept the Repugnant Conclusion. That is to say, it’s one of those arguments: you’re forced to consider re-evaluating your sensible premises, finding a flaw in the chain of reasoning or else embracing an odd conclusion; plenty of people have taken one of those three options.
So what is this Repugnant Conclusion? It goes like this. There is a possible population of people whose lives are barely worth living (let’s call it Repugnantville) which is, all things considered, a better world than a smaller population of people who lives are truly excellent (let’s call it Brilliantland), even though Repugnantville looks like a pretty awful place and Brilliantland is the kind of awesome place that everyone would live in if only they could afford it. The trick to the argument is that the population of Repugnantville is really very large.
Parfit called it the Repugnant Conclusion because Repugnantville is a rather depressing place and it seems rather depressing that we have to conclude that it is better than Brilliantland merely because we have added a sufficiently large number of drab and uninspiring inhabitants to the picture.
There are all sorts of terribly interesting things that one can say about the Repugnant Conclusion and the arguments that lead to it. As I say, some endorse the conclusion, some challenge the premises, some talk about incommensurability and so on. My concern is a little different. It’s this: while the discussion of the Repugnant Conclusion looks like the kind of thought experiment we get in ‘trolleyology’ and so on – while it sucks us in with plausible scenarios – it is in fact so far removed from normal human psychology and understandings of causation that it cannot possibly assist us in making moral decisions.
Let me try to explain what I mean.
The Stanford Encyclopedia article I linked to above starts its discussion of Parfit with this thought experiment.
1. A pregnant mother suffers from an illness which, unless she undergoes a simple treatment, will cause her child to suffer a permanent handicap. If she receives the treatment and is cured her child will be perfectly normal.
2. A woman suffers from an illness which means that, if she gets pregnant now, her child will suffer from a permanent handicap. If she postpones her pregnancy a few months until she has recovered, her child will be perfectly normal.
The philosophical interest of the thought experiment lies in the difference between the two cases: there are two different children involved. But its interest for my purposes is that the thought experiment as a whole makes sense. This one is just like the trolley problems: we understand how pregnancy happens and how to postpone it, what it means for a child to have a permanent disability, what a “simple treatment” is and so on. The details are a bit vague, but it is not hard to imagine a woman being faced with a decision of this kind, just as we can at least imagine pulling a lever to send a tram to run over prostrate prisoners.
But very quickly in the discussion of the Repugnant Conclusion we are considering populations of billions of people who are living mediocre lives. How could we ever get from here to there? I understand how to pull levers and make babies: but how do I create drab universes of mediocrities?
Parfit fleshes out what life in Repugnantville looks like as follows: “the first step from A to B involves the loss of Mozart’s music; in the move from B to C Haydn’s music is lost; in the move to D Venice is destroyed; and so on down the alphabet. All that is left in the final move to Z is “muzak and potatoes””. The phrase “muzak and potatoes” has become famous as a result.
But just pause for a moment and try to imagine what is going on. Why can’t people sculpt the potatoes into chess pieces and play amazing games of chess? Or kick them around and play something like football (which brings joy to millions or even billions)? Why do they listen to muzak – why not sing songs, maybe set up a choir and sing choral classics? More generally, are we to assume that we have got to a situation in which people can no longer see the sunset or a rainbow, or fall in love, or hold a new-born child? All of these things – things which give joy and meaningful lives to people – would be available in the case of anything recognisable to us as human life on earth. Equally, so would the disasters of illness, heartbreak, depression and so on that materially impact the lives of even those blessed with resources galore, and cause some who live in the midst of plenty to think their lives are not worth living.
And precisely how did we end up losing Mozart and destroying Venice? What are these ‘steps’ or ‘moves’ that Parfit mentions?
There are all sorts of terribly interesting things that one can say about the Repugnant Conclusion and the arguments that lead to it. As I say, some endorse the conclusion, some challenge the premises, some talk about incommensurability and so on. My concern is a little different. It’s this: while the discussion of the Repugnant Conclusion looks like the kind of thought experiment we get in ‘trolleyology’ and so on – while it sucks us in with plausible scenarios – it is in fact so far removed from normal human psychology and understandings of causation that it cannot possibly assist us in making moral decisions.
Let me try to explain what I mean.
The Stanford Encyclopedia article I linked to above starts its discussion of Parfit with this thought experiment.
1. A pregnant mother suffers from an illness which, unless she undergoes a simple treatment, will cause her child to suffer a permanent handicap. If she receives the treatment and is cured her child will be perfectly normal.
2. A woman suffers from an illness which means that, if she gets pregnant now, her child will suffer from a permanent handicap. If she postpones her pregnancy a few months until she has recovered, her child will be perfectly normal.
The philosophical interest of the thought experiment lies in the difference between the two cases: there are two different children involved. But its interest for my purposes is that the thought experiment as a whole makes sense. This one is just like the trolley problems: we understand how pregnancy happens and how to postpone it, what it means for a child to have a permanent disability, what a “simple treatment” is and so on. The details are a bit vague, but it is not hard to imagine a woman being faced with a decision of this kind, just as we can at least imagine pulling a lever to send a tram to run over prostrate prisoners.
But very quickly in the discussion of the Repugnant Conclusion we are considering populations of billions of people who are living mediocre lives. How could we ever get from here to there? I understand how to pull levers and make babies: but how do I create drab universes of mediocrities?
Parfit fleshes out what life in Repugnantville looks like as follows: “the first step from A to B involves the loss of Mozart’s music; in the move from B to C Haydn’s music is lost; in the move to D Venice is destroyed; and so on down the alphabet. All that is left in the final move to Z is “muzak and potatoes””. The phrase “muzak and potatoes” has become famous as a result.
But just pause for a moment and try to imagine what is going on. Why can’t people sculpt the potatoes into chess pieces and play amazing games of chess? Or kick them around and play something like football (which brings joy to millions or even billions)? Why do they listen to muzak – why not sing songs, maybe set up a choir and sing choral classics? More generally, are we to assume that we have got to a situation in which people can no longer see the sunset or a rainbow, or fall in love, or hold a new-born child? All of these things – things which give joy and meaningful lives to people – would be available in the case of anything recognisable to us as human life on earth. Equally, so would the disasters of illness, heartbreak, depression and so on that materially impact the lives of even those blessed with resources galore, and cause some who live in the midst of plenty to think their lives are not worth living.
And precisely how did we end up losing Mozart and destroying Venice? What are these ‘steps’ or ‘moves’ that Parfit mentions?
These are not silly questions, I am sure, because we need to be able to connect the thought experiment involved in contemplating Repugnantville to some particular choice that someone might make in order for the whole exercise to be at all helpful to us. To be clear, one can readily imagine policies that bring more people into existence (e.g. subsidising birth rates) or fewer (e.g. a one child policy), and one can even imagine destroying Venice. But in order for the Repugnant Conclusion argument to make sense as a moral exercise, doesn’t one need to imagine something along the lines of an all-powerful Evil Genius – or rather, not an evil one (given that his trades effect net increases in total happiness), but instead a Mildly Beneficent But Particular and Annoying Genius – who offers us (you? me? Mankind?) the choice of bringing billions of moderately happy people into existence in exchange for expunging all knowledge of Mozart from the universe? But why should consider what such an oddly constructed genius might get up to? I can’t see what we get from that kind of thinking.
Let us imagine instead a Repugnant Party Conclusion. Instead of Brilliantland, let us suppose that our Mildly Beneficent Genius offers us a series of steps by which the number of people in the world and our interactions with those people increase. From A to B we lose the very wildest and most remote parts of the Earth. From B to C we lose national parks. Eventually, at Z, we are in Partyland: we have lost the slightest chance of a moment’s quiet at any point in the day or night, being forever surrounded by a chattering horde of other humans gyrating, shouting to make themselves heard and thrusting drinks into one’s hand. But at each stage from A to Z we are given a sufficiently large number of positive interactions with our fellow humans to outweigh the loss of peace and quiet. A universe entirely devoid of quiet contemplation, occupied by jostling humanity perpetually joshing and chaffing each other amiably? It sounds pretty hellish to the ordinarily anti-social introvert (or English person), but the Mildly Beneficent Genius can get you there on pain of inconsistency.
But are you interested in the Repugnant Party Conclusion? Do you feel that it has any purchase on your moral reasoning? Or does it just seem as if Mildly Beneficent But Really Annoying Geniuses can play irritating tricks with large numbers and persuade you to trade off some good things for other good things in an irksome way?
I’ve tried to be charitable to the Repugnant Conclusion and think up a story in which we might have to consider a moral choice of that kind. Here’s my best example; I’d be interested to know if someone has a better one.
The bad news is that humans have lost the ability to reproduce naturally. The good news is that scientists have come up with a machine that can do the job instead. The bad news (you knew there would be a catch) is that there are only two settings for the machine.
In the first setting, a small number of extremely healthy babies will be born. So far as science can tell us, they will be free of genetic diseases, strong of limb and noble of brow; their intellects will be vast and their morals impeccable. Moreover, as there will only be a few of them, we can lavish on their upbringings every kind of advantage known to advanced civilisation. They will eat nothing but organic food, drink Fiji water, learn all the best pronouns and get better A levels than Einstein.
In the second setting, however, the machine will generate vast numbers of slightly second-rate babies. They will look like Baldrick and be prone to glue ears and fallen arches. There will be so many that we won’t be able to bring them up properly: as a result they mostly watch TikTok videos in childhood and they will all speak with unpleasant accents in adulthood. Moreover, for complicated reasons to do with the machine, we will have to keep them warm by burning the greatest works of music and literature ever made, and replace Venice with a multi-storey car park, leaving them with nothing but the Crazy Frog song to listen to. In almost our last act before expiring, we plant a large crop of potatoes for them. We finally die, despairing, just after hearing someone say, “they so need to touch base with you and I”.
The bad news is that humans have lost the ability to reproduce naturally. The good news is that scientists have come up with a machine that can do the job instead. The bad news (you knew there would be a catch) is that there are only two settings for the machine.
In the first setting, a small number of extremely healthy babies will be born. So far as science can tell us, they will be free of genetic diseases, strong of limb and noble of brow; their intellects will be vast and their morals impeccable. Moreover, as there will only be a few of them, we can lavish on their upbringings every kind of advantage known to advanced civilisation. They will eat nothing but organic food, drink Fiji water, learn all the best pronouns and get better A levels than Einstein.
In the second setting, however, the machine will generate vast numbers of slightly second-rate babies. They will look like Baldrick and be prone to glue ears and fallen arches. There will be so many that we won’t be able to bring them up properly: as a result they mostly watch TikTok videos in childhood and they will all speak with unpleasant accents in adulthood. Moreover, for complicated reasons to do with the machine, we will have to keep them warm by burning the greatest works of music and literature ever made, and replace Venice with a multi-storey car park, leaving them with nothing but the Crazy Frog song to listen to. In almost our last act before expiring, we plant a large crop of potatoes for them. We finally die, despairing, just after hearing someone say, “they so need to touch base with you and I”.
Which setting do you choose for the machine? Parfit tells us that there is a large enough number that, if the second setting can generate that many people, we have to choose it.
Leaving aside my facetious flourishes, it seems to me that even in this closely controlled kind of example the realities of human life start to crowd in and complicate the picture. Are the small number of extremely good-looking children in the first setting going to be genuinely happy? Or are they going to be smug and self-satisfied? Are they at risk of being wiped out entirely by the next passing asteroid? Do we have to suppose that the children of the second setting will not be able to recreate art, culture and the higher joys of life anew? The machine is, surely, creating humans, not sub-humans. Or perhaps it’s a much easier question: perhaps the life we could create for the first setting children, cossetted and beloved by the last generations of the Earth’s great civilisations, their every whim indulged and every advantage granted them, is so immensely worthwhile that the number of second setting children necessary for tipping the scales of the utility comparison is beyond the ability of this planet to support?
At any rate, it seems to me that as soon as something similar to the Repugnant Conclusion gains flesh and substance, we find that we have to abandon the crude comparisons between populations that made the Repugnant Conclusion appear plausible. While there are more or less plausible ways of ‘stipulating out’ the complications of the likes of trolley problems, Nazis searching for hidden Jewish families or terrorists with ticking bombs, so long as we have the full uncertainty of humanity to consider, the idea of ‘stipulating out’ the complications of billions of human lives doesn’t make much sense.
I think what is motivating the thinking behind the appeal of the Repugnant Conclusion is the old idea that over-population results in reduced resources per person and therefore lower average welfare. The shock of the Repugnant Conclusion is the frisson one feels on when considering that one might have to accept, against one’s better judgment (or at least against one’s educated prejudices), the possibility of an over-crowded planet.
I’m not a fan of the very idea of over-population and so I don’t personally feel the thrill of the forbidden in entertaining the idea that more people might be a Good Thing. Indeed, I’m perfectly happy to accept instead the underlying prejudice of the premise of the Repugnant Party Conclusion, i.e. that having more people to talk to raises average welfare, but again without feeling that I am learning anything from the experiment. If there is a Repugnant Conclusion out there that truly repels me, it’s probably the Repugnant Lonely Conclusion, namely the possibility that billions of moderately happy people ought to be replaced by a few million truly ecstatic people hanging out in the likes of Capri and gorging themselves on the accumulated fruits of the Earth for evermore, while the human race never gets to see attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion or C-beams glitter near the Tannhäuser Gate: if our sybarites are happy enough then, surely, one has to accept that that is the better outcome? I find that a more repellent and depressing thought than the Repugnant Conclusion, but, again, how on earth (absent an irritating Mildly Beneficient Genius) are to we to be assured of the perpetual happiness of the chosen 10 million living in the best parts of the Mediterranean any more than we are to be assured of the perpetual mediocrity of the billions living off potatoes and muzak?
I’m not a fan of the very idea of over-population and so I don’t personally feel the thrill of the forbidden in entertaining the idea that more people might be a Good Thing. Indeed, I’m perfectly happy to accept instead the underlying prejudice of the premise of the Repugnant Party Conclusion, i.e. that having more people to talk to raises average welfare, but again without feeling that I am learning anything from the experiment. If there is a Repugnant Conclusion out there that truly repels me, it’s probably the Repugnant Lonely Conclusion, namely the possibility that billions of moderately happy people ought to be replaced by a few million truly ecstatic people hanging out in the likes of Capri and gorging themselves on the accumulated fruits of the Earth for evermore, while the human race never gets to see attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion or C-beams glitter near the Tannhäuser Gate: if our sybarites are happy enough then, surely, one has to accept that that is the better outcome? I find that a more repellent and depressing thought than the Repugnant Conclusion, but, again, how on earth (absent an irritating Mildly Beneficient Genius) are to we to be assured of the perpetual happiness of the chosen 10 million living in the best parts of the Mediterranean any more than we are to be assured of the perpetual mediocrity of the billions living off potatoes and muzak?
I would go so far as to say that, in the absence of omnipotent Mildly Beneficent Geniuses of the necessary kind, we have no real reason to think that we can make material differences to the welfare of future generations by trading off people and things in this way. The welfare (or life worth living-ness) calculations of population ethics are, I think, meant as a proxy for (or a way of smuggling in) discussing the distribution of material resources, but the link between happiness and resources is a highly tenuous one (beyond the level of fulfilling fundamental biological needs): after all, the richest and best-advised people in the world can’t guarantee happiness for even their own children.
Is there a lesson to be drawn from all this? Nothing terribly exciting, I’m afraid. If you get the chance to destroy Mozart or Venice, kids, just say no! And if someone promises you a huge number of disgruntled but broadly uncomplaining babies in exchange for control over the complete works of Haydn then ask them an awful lot of searching practical questions before you turn to moral philosophy.
Is there a lesson to be drawn from all this? Nothing terribly exciting, I’m afraid. If you get the chance to destroy Mozart or Venice, kids, just say no! And if someone promises you a huge number of disgruntled but broadly uncomplaining babies in exchange for control over the complete works of Haydn then ask them an awful lot of searching practical questions before you turn to moral philosophy.
Easter is not a bad time to be considering the moral fate of mankind. However, I suggest starting with some widely-translated writers from a couple of thousand years ago before worrying too much about Parfit.
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