In Repugnant Intuitions, I took a look at Derek Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion through the lens of behavioral science. The Repugnant Conclusion states that:
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 previous post examines how the repugnancy may be a product of our limited ability to grasp the large numbers of lives involved; rather than comparing ten billion high quality lives to ten trillion low quality lives, our approach may more closely resemble a comparison between a single high quality life and a single low quality one. I still see this phenomenon as a core part of the issue, but I also think there’s another key piece I skipped over before.
In the scenario Parfit lays out, no detail is provided as to the contents of a high quality or low quality life, with the reader left to their own devices to craft the prototypical examples. I think it’s likely that the imagined high quality lives all share similar characteristics, each featuring flourishing, happy individuals with all their needs and many of their wants fulfilled. For a life barely worth living, however, it seems possible for different people to come up with significantly different scenarios. One might define food, water, and shelter to be the only requirements for life to be worth living, while another might view a minimum quantity of relationships to be the deciding factor, and a third might see life as worth living even if none of these criteria are met.
At least from a utilitarian perspective (which is the perspective Parfit is writing from), defining the character of a life barely worth living involves two steps. The first is to define the utility function by laying out the amounts attributed to different aspects of life (e.g., how much food and water does it take to offset shelter?), and the second involves determining the minimum amount of utility required for a life to be worth living.
This approach leaves plenty of space for differing opinions, but more importantly saps the individuals in the imagined population of their own views of their life’s worth. Rather than being viewed as individuals (albeit imagined) who can make their own determinations on the worth of their lives, they’re instead evaluated based on the abstract formulation of an outside observer. The poor man living in the streets may not meet a philosopher’s criteria for a life worth living, but as long as he appreciates his life, it feels unjust to devalue it.
Put differently, it seems the only fair metric with which to assess the worth of lives is the degree to which the individual wants to keep living it. Viewed from this perspective, it’s the opposite of Parfit’s conclusion which feels repugnant:
For any possible population of at least ten trillion people, all with lives they feel to be worth living, there must be some much smaller imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better due to its members having lives that they far more strongly feel are worth living.