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A New Argument Against Critical-Level Utilitarianism
Abstract
One prominent welfarist axiology, critical-level utilitarianism, says that individual lives must surpass a specified ‘critical level’ in order to make a positive contribution to the comparative status of a given population. In this article I develop a new dilemma for critical-level utilitarians. When comparatively evaluating populations composed of different species, critical-level utilitarians must decide whether the critical level is a universal threshold or whether the critical level is a species-relative threshold. I argue that both thresholds lead to a range of axiological puzzles and objections as yet undiscussed within the literature, and therefore conclude that critical-level utilitarianism should not be taken as a morally plausible welfarist axiology. I show that certain competitive formulations of critical range utilitarianism are subject to the argument too, and that further attempts to relativise critical levels to a particular group or category of welfare bearer (in particular, individual-relative critical levels) are unsustainable.
... This does not mean that we should necessarily endorse Critical Level or Critical Range Asymptotic Prioritarianism in population ethics, as they combine their problems, too. Critical Level or Critical Range Views have problems with low welfare level lives, which remain in Critical Level Asymptotic Prioritarianism (for the problems of Critical Level theories, see (Arrhenius, 2000, p. 73;Williamson, 2021). For the problems of Critical Range Theories, see (Broome, 2004(Broome, , p. 148-170, 2009). ...
This paper introduces the Monstrous Conclusion, according to which, for any population, there is a better population consisting of just one individual (the Monster). The Monstrous Conclusion is deeply counterintuitive. I defend a version of Prioritarianism as a particularly promising population axiology that does not imply the Monstrous Conclusion. According to this version of Prioritarianism, which I call Asymptotic Prioritarianism, there is diminishing marginal moral importance of individual welfare that can get close to, but never quite reach, some upper limit. I argue that Asymptotic Prioritarianism faces a theoretical cost, that I call the Absolute Priority Principle. However, the Absolute Priority Principle is an extreme version of what I call the Trade-off Condition, an already noteworthy problem facing other (more widely endorsed) versions of Prioritarianism. I conclude that it is better for a theory to imply the Absolute Priority Principle and avoid the Monstrous Conclusion than to imply the Monstrous Conclusion and the Trade-off Condition. The potential for Asymptotic Prioritarianism is substantial.
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 what I call ‘undistinguishedness’, a fourth category of absolute value in addition to goodness, badness, and neutrality.
Arrhenius, G. 2000: Future Generations: A Challenge for Moral Theory. viii+234#? pp. Uppsala. For the last thirty years or so, there has been a search underway for a theory that can accommodate our intuitions in regard to moral duties to future generations. The object of this search has proved surprisingly elusive. The classical moral theories in the literature all have perplexing implications in this area. Classical Utilitarianism, for instance, implies that it could be better to expand a population even if everyone in the resulting population would be much worse off than in the original. The main problem has been to find an adequate population theory, that is, a 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 theory is of general import for moral theory. A number of theories have been proposed in the literature that purport to avoid counter-intuitive implications such as the one mentioned above. The suggestions are diverse: introducing novel ways of aggregating welfare into a measure of value, revising the notion of a life worth living, questioning the way we can compare and measure welfare, counting people's welfare differently depending on the temporal location or the modal features of their lives, and challenging the logic of axiological and normative concepts. We investigate the concepts and assumptions involved in these theories as well as their implications for population theory. In our discussion, we propose a number of intuitively appealing and logically weak adequacy conditions for an acceptable population theory. Finally, we consider whether it is possible to find a theory that satisfies all of these conditions. We prove that no such theory exists.
This book presents an exploration of the idea of the common or social good, extended so that alternatives with different populations can be ranked. The approach is, in the main, welfarist, basing rankings on the well-being, broadly conceived, of those who are alive (or ever lived). The axiomatic method is employed, and topics investigated include: the measurement of individual well-being, social attitudes toward inequality of well-being, the main classes of population principles, principles that provide incomplete rankings, principles that rank uncertain alternatives, best choices from feasible sets, and applications. The chapters are divided, with mathematical arguments confined to the second part. The first part is intended to make the arguments accessible to a more general readership. Although the book can be read as a defense of the critical-level generalized-utilitarian class of principles, comprehensive examinations of other classes are included.
This chapter argues that animals matter for climate change and that climate change matters for animals. In particular, animal agriculture will have a significant impact on the climate, and climate change will have a significant impact on wild animals. As a result, we morally ought to resist animal agriculture as part of our mitigation efforts and assist wild animals as part of our adaptation efforts. The chapter also evaluates different strategies for accomplishing these aims, and considers connections with debates about well-being, population ethics and duties to future generations, and the nature and limits of moral and political theory.
Derek Parfit has famously pointed out that ‘total’ utilitarian views, such as classical hedonistic utilitarianism, lead to the conclusion that, to each population of quite happy persons there corresponds a more extensive population with people living lives just worth living, which is (on the whole) better. In particular, 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. This world is better if the sum total of well-being is great enough, and it is great enough if only enough sentient beings inhabit it. This conclusion has been considered by Parfit and others to be ‘repugnant’.
Population axiology is the study of the conditions under which one state of affairs is better than another, when the states of affairs in question may differ over the numbers and the identities of the persons who ever live. Extant theories include totalism, averagism, variable value theories, critical level theories, and “person-affecting” theories. Each of these theories is open to objections that are at least prima facie serious. A series of impossibility theorems shows that this is no coincidence: It can be proved, for various lists of prima facie intuitively compelling desiderata, that no axiology can simultaneously satisfy all the desiderata on the list. One's choice of population axiology appears to be a choice of which intuition one is least unwilling to give up.
According to the Repugnant Conclusion: Compared with the existence of many people who would all have some very high quality of life, there is some much larger number of people whose existence would be better, even though these people would all have lives that were barely worth living. I suggest some ways in which we might be able to avoid this conclusion. I try to defend a strong form of lexical superiority.
Les etres humains different cruellement dans les dons que la nature leur fait et ces inegalites peuvent affecter leur mode de vie. Fort de cette constatation, l'A. propose une reflexion sur le lien qui unit incapacite cognitive, malchance et justice sur un plan philosophique. Il insiste sur la methodologie suivie : il distingue en effet argument comparatif et argument non comparatif. Il explique pourquoi il prefere le second au premier. Il conclut sa reflexion sur le statut moral du caractere congenital des inegalites cognitives
People are often faced with decisions that involve weighing the lives of some people against the lives of others, or weighing lives against other goods. This book aims to develop a moral theory that can help with making these practical decisions. It is a theory of value, which includes an account of how good it is to extend a person's life, and also an account of how good it is to have new lives in the world - of the value of adding a new person to the world's population. It is a theory about the aggregation of people's wellbeing: of how the wellbeing that comes to a person at different times in her life comes together to determine the overall value of her life, and of how different people's wellbeing comes together to determine the overall value of the world. The book pays particular attention to the common intuition that adding people to the population is ethically neutral, but eventually rejects it. The book's conclusion is a version of utilitarianism. The method is formal, but the presentation is as informal as possible.
A search is under way for a theory that can accommodate our intuitions in population axiology. The object of this search has proved elusive. This is not surprising since, as we shall see, any welfarist axiology that satisfies three reasonable conditions implies at least one of three counter-intuitive conclusions. I shall start by pointing out the failures in three recent attempts to construct an acceptable population axiology. I shall then present an impossibility theorem and conclude with a short discussion of how it might be extended to pluralist axiologies, that is, axiologies that take more values than welfare into account.
Many applications of economic analysis require social evaluations of alternatives involving different numbers of people. In this paper we use the tools of social-choice theory to provide an axiomatic formulation of this problem. It yields a class of social criteria called ‘critical-level generalized utilitarianism’. This class and its implications are compared with other criteria and are found to yield intuitively appealing results.
We have attempted to demonstrate the the principles in the Critical-Level Utilitarian and Critical-Level Generalized Utilitarian families perform well in providing a reasonable welfarist axiology. They avoid the difficulties of AU and HNU (with have some negative critical levels) and avoid the repugnant conclusion.
Population ethics contains several principles that avoid the repugnant conclusion. These rules rank all possible alternatives, leaving no room for moral ambiguity. Building on a suggestion of Parfit, this paper characterizes principles that provide incomplete but ethically attractive rankings of alternatives with different population sizes. All of them rank same-number alternatives with generalized utilitarianism.