How Lives Measure Up

How Lives Measure Up

Molly Gardner & Justin Weinberg

Received: 10 September 2012 /Accepted: 13 December 2012 /Published online: 26 January 2013# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract The quality of a life is typically understood as a function of the actualgoods and bads in it, that is, its actual value. Likewise, the value of a population istypically taken to be a function of the actual value of the lives in it. We introduce analternative understanding of life quality: adjusted value. A life’s adjusted value is afunction of its actual value and its ideal value (the best value it could have had). Theconcept of adjusted value is useful for at least three reasons. First, it fits our judg-ments about how well lives are going. Second, it allows us to avoid what we callFalse Equivalence, an error related to the non-identity problem. Third, when we useadjusted value as an input for calculating the value of a population, we can avoid twopuzzles that Derek Parfit calls the “Repugnant Conclusion” and the “Mere AdditionParadox.”

Keywords Quality of life . Value . Population ethics . Non-identity problem .

Repugnant conclusion . Mere addition paradox . Derek Parfit

1 Introduction

It is strange how alike Gary and Harry are. They were born with identical capacitiesand skills. They have similar desires that are satisfied to the same extent. They engagein the same kinds of activities, and with each activity, they achieve the same degree ofsuccess. Indeed, over the course of their lives they will enjoy exactly the same kinds

Acta Anal (2013) 28:31–48DOI 10.1007/s12136-012-0184-y

M. Gardner (*)Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison,600 N. Park St., Madison, WI 53706, USAe-mail: [email protected]

J. WeinbergDepartment of Philosophy, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USAe-mail: [email protected]

of benefits and suffer exactly the same kinds of harms, and their lives will be equallylong. On the basis of this information, it seems reasonable to think that Gary andHarry have equally good lives.

As it turns out, though, there is one important difference between them that wehave yet to mention: Harry is a human and Gary is a goat.1 The reason that Harry’slife is so similar to Gary’s is that Harry was born with a disability that makes himcognitively identical to a goat. This extra detail about the case may change ouropinion. We may now think that, in one sense, Gary and Harry do not have equallygood lives. Rather, Harry is in some way worse off than Gary.

Which is it? Are Gary and Harry equally well off, or is Harry worse off than Gary?Our answer is yes.

More precisely, we argue that there are at least two measures of how well anindividual’s life is going. The first measure, actual value, is determined by thebalance of actual goods and bads in the life.2 Since the balance of actual goods andbads in Harry’s life is qualitatively identical to the balance of actual goods and bads inGary’s life, both lives have the same actual value. The second measure, adjustedvalue, is determined by discounting the actual balance of goods and bads according tohow much better is the best balance of goods and bads the life could have contained.Since Harry is a human and Gary is a goat, Harry’s life could have been much better,even though Gary’s life could not have been. Thus, the adjusted value of Harry’s lifeis lower than the adjusted value of Gary’s.

Although the term “actual value” is our own, we take the concept to be whatphilosophers have in mind when they refer to an individual’s “quality of life” or theextent to which a life is “worth living.” However, as far as we know, the concept ofwhat we call “adjusted value” has received scant discussion in the literature.3 Our aimin this paper is to explain more clearly what adjusted value is, to demonstrate itsintuitive plausibility, and to show how the concept can help resolve a number ofphilosophical puzzles that arise, both when we compare the value of individuals’ livesand when we compare the values of sets of lives.

Our paper is structured as follows. In section 2, wemotivate and clarify the concept ofadjusted value. We then argue that invoking adjusted value can help avoid FalseEquivalence, which is a puzzle related to the non-identity problem. In section 3, wemove from comparing the values of lives to comparing the values of populations. Wedescribe the Actual Value View, which we take to be the wrong way of assessing thevalue of a population. We show how the Actual Value View leads to two problemsknown as the Repugnant Conclusion and the Mere Addition Paradox (Parfit 1984). Insection 4, we present the Adjusted Value View, which holds that the value of apopulation is a function, not of actual value, but of adjusted value. We then show how

1 The example of a goat comes from Greene and Augello (2011).2 By “goods” we mean states of affairs that are good for an individual, and by “bads” we mean states ofaffairs that are bad for an individual. See McMahan (2009).3 The closest mention to something like adjusted value is a concept that Jeff McMahan (1996) calls“fortune.” He uses the concept of fortune to express a relation between how well an individual’s life isgoing and some standard against which the individual’s well-being is to be assessed. However, the standardMcMahan uses for determining fortune is different from our standard of ideal value, and McMahan doesnot relate the concept of fortune to the non-identity problem, the Repugnant Conclusion, or the MereAddition Paradox.

32 M. Gardner, J. Weinberg

the Adjusted Value View avoids both the Repugnant Conclusion and the Mere AdditionParadox. Finally, in section 5, we conclude the paper with some thoughts on how theideas underlying adjusted value may be put to use in other contexts.

2 Contrasting Actual Value with Adjusted Value

In this section, we clarify the concept of adjusted value and demonstrate its intuitiveappeal. We start by contrasting adjusted value with actual value. As we noted above,we take actual value to be what philosophers have in mind when they refer to the“quality of life” or the “quantity of whatever it is that makes life worth living.” As weunderstand it, actual value is a function of the balance of actual goods and actual badsthat a life contains. We leave it open how, exactly, this “balance” is determined;perhaps we simply subtract the value of the bads from the value of the goods, orperhaps there is a function that assigns a numeric value to each ratio of bads to goods.Regardless, the balance of actual goods and bads will have some numeric value, andthat value is the actual value of the life. We do not offer a substantive theory of goodsand bads in this paper. Nevertheless, for an illustration of how to calculate actualvalue, suppose that happiness is the only intrinsic good and unhappiness is the onlyintrinsic bad. The actual value of a life would then be equal to balance of happinessand unhappiness in the life.

Actual value does not capture everything we consider when we evaluate our ownlives. We often take into account, not only how things are going, but also how thingscould have been. For example, we think about what would have happened, if we hadchosen a different career, pursued different relationships, or faced different obstacles.The goods and bads that would have accrued if these other conditions had beendifferent are the goods and bads our lives could have contained. Sometimes, when weswitch from thinking about how well things are actually going to thinking about howour lives could have been better, we change how we evaluate our lives on the whole.We suggest that this change is really a switch from an assessment of the actual valueof our lives to an assessment of the adjusted value of our lives.

Adjusted value can also account for some of our judgments about others’ lives.Certainly, in some cases, we can account for those judgments by referring only toactual value. To make use of a simple example, suppose that two people, Doom andGloom, have roughly similar lives, each with about the same amount of happinessand unhappiness. They seem equally well off, and indeed, that is what the measure-ment of actual value tells us. Then one day, Doom develops a painful condition thatmakes him very unhappy. Our intuition about the relative welfare of Doom andGloom is that Doom is now worse off than Gloom. Actual value tracks this, too.Whereas before Doom and Gloom had the same balance of good and bad in theirlives, now, to determine Doom’s well being, we must balance his happiness againstthe additional suffering he is experiencing. The result is that Doom has less actualvalue than Gloom, and is thus worse off.

In other contexts, though, actual value does not track all of our judgments aboutwell-being. The case of Gary and Harry illustrates this. In that case, despite Gary andHarry having lives of equal actual value, there is more to the complete story of howwell-off they are. Let’s assume that Gary is as well-off as a goat gets. Let’s also

How Lives Measure Up 33

assume that the best-off humans are capable of achieving a significantly higher levelof well-being than the best-off goats. Even though Harry is as well-off, in terms ofactual value, as the best-off goat, there is also a sense in which he is worse-off thanGary. The reason for this is that he is not doing as well as a human could be doing.Thus, one thing that matters to our assessment of someone’s well-being is the best heor she could be doing. We will call the best balance of goods and bads a life couldhave contained the ideal value of the life.4

Because Gary is living the best life he could be living, the ideal value of his life isequal to its actual value. However, because there is a better balance of goods and badsthat Harry’s life could have contained, the actual value of Harry’s life is less than itsideal value. The difference between actual value and ideal value is the shortfall of alife. Other things equal, the smaller the shortfall of a life, the higher its adjustedvalue, and the greater the shortfall, the lower its adjusted value. Gary’s shortfall iszero: he is doing relatively well in terms of adjusted value. But Harry’s shortfall isenormous, so the adjusted value of his life is lower.

The Gary and Harry case is one in which the compared lives contain equal actualvalue. In that kind of case, the life with the greatest shortfall is going to be the lifewith the lower adjusted value. But not all comparisons between lives are betweenlives of equal actual value. Some will involve lives of different actual value. In thesecomparisons, the life with the greater shortfall may not end up being the life with thelower adjusted value. For example, let us consider, alongside Harry and Gary, acricket named Cary. We assume that even the best-off crickets are capable ofachieving an actual value that is only a tiny fraction of the actual value capable ofthe best-off humans. Cary is a lucky cricket, as well-off as a cricket can be. Still,because of the differences between humans and crickets, his life does not contain asmuch actual value as Harry’s does, even given Harry’s unusual condition. Were we totry to determine the adjusted values of these lives merely by looking at their short-falls, we would have to conclude that, since Cary’s shortfall is zero and Harry’s isquite large, the adjusted value of Harry’s life is worse than that of Cary’s. But it seemsimplausible that there is any sense in which Harry’s life is worse than Cary’s.Fortunately we are not led to endorse that implausible result.

Adjusted value takes shortfall into account, but does not do so by neglecting actualvalue. Devising a way to correctly process the interplay of different types of value isnot an easy task. There are literally countless ways to combine actual value and idealvalue, the two inputs to the adjusted value function. We aim to be mindful of theworry that too much precision or simplicity in our assessments of adjusted value maycome off as naïve. Yet we also do not want to endorse a vague view that provides noguidance for determining adjusted value apart from “use your judgment.”We need, ifnot a principle, at least a heuristic that helps apply our view to cases. With thesecaveats in mind, we propose a simple method to determine a life’s adjusted value:subtract its shortfall from its actual value.5

4 The sense of “could have” used in this idea will be explained later.5 There are many possible alternative heuristics. For example: subtract two times the life’s shortfall fromthree times its actual value. It may be that such an alternative better captures our intuitions about variouscases, despite its added complexity. We leave the exploration of such alternatives aside in this paper,sticking with the simplest formulation, but are open to its improvement or replacement.


This method matches our intuitions in the comparison between Harry and Cary.Though Harry’s shortfall is much greater than Cary’s, when we subtract it from theactual value of Harry’s life, the remaining value is greater than the result we get whenwe subtract Cary’s shortfall (of zero) from the actual value of Cary’s life, which isquite small. Thus, both the adjusted value and the actual value of Harry’s life arehigher than the adjusted and actual value of Cary’s.

Besides being intuitively appealing, the concept of adjusted value can helpus resolve a philosophical puzzle that arises when we compare the values oflives. Consider three possible children, C, D, and E, of a genetically blindcouple.6

C is born permanently blind, unavoidably inheriting the blindness from hisparents.

D is, luckily, born sighted, but shortly afterwards a nurse mistakenly gives himan overdose of a medicine that causes him to be permanently blind.

E is like D in that he somehow did not inherit the blindness from his parents, buthe also did not receive any overdose, so he is not blind.

Even if we assume that C, D, and E all have lives that are worth living, mostpeople think that E is the most well off; he can see, whereas both C and D are blind.We can assume that the other relevant aspects of C’s and D’s lives are roughly similar;they have equal amounts of whatever it is that makes life worth living. But let’s ask afurther question: while C and D may both be worse off than E, are they equally worseoff than E?

Here is one thing to consider: in the context of the example, C could not have beensighted. He was born that way. While his parents could have created a sighted child,that child would have been the product of a different sperm meeting a (likely)different egg, resulting in someone different from C (a “sibling” to a non-existentC). But D could have been sighted. Had the nurse not given him that overdose, hewould have been able to see, and would, we can assume, have had a better life.

To help get at the difference, suppose we were in a position to choose which childwould come into existence. We can then ask about the differences between thechoices we face. What if we were to choose C over E? Most people would thinkthat is a bad choice, since E, sighted, is likely going to be better off than C, who isblind. Now consider the choice of D, who will be born sighted but made blind by thenurse, over E. Most people would think that this is not merely a bad choice, but amonstrous choice.7 People tend to think that it is much worse to choose D over E thanit is to choose C over E. This is true even though, as we said earlier, C and D haveequal amounts of whatever it is that makes life worth living.

The concept of actual value cannot make sense of our judgment about thedifference between C and D. This is because their actual value, we have stipulated,is equivalent. But our intuitions about this and similar cases suggest that we don’t

6 This example and the ensuing argument against Parfit’s “no-difference view” is based on the deafnesscases from Weinberg, “Non-Identity Matters, Sometimes” (unpublished manuscript).7 This judgment is based on various conversations and presentations in which this kind of example wasdiscussed.


believe C and D to be equivalent. Thus, comparing only the actual values of the livesleads to a problem we call False Equivalence.8

However, if we compare the adjusted values of the lives, we can see why there is ameasure by which D’s life is worse than C’s. To make things easy, we will resort tonumbers. Suppose that being sighted makes a person better off. Assume, then, that Ehas 70 units of whatever it is that makes life worth living, and that C and D each have40. Since C could never have been sighted, the best he could do is 40, so his shortfallis 0, and 40 – 0 = an adjusted value of 40. D is different; he could have been sightedjust like E, but for the mistake of the nurse. The relevant comparison for him is thevalue of E’s life, or 70. 70 – 40 = a shortfall of 30. 40 – 30 = an adjusted value of 10.D’s 10 is less than C’s 40. A comparison of adjusted value thus provides a way ofunderstanding our intuitions that in at least one way, D is worse off than C, and that iswhy it is worse to choose D over E than it is to choose C over E.

Adjusted value is a useful concept. It helps make sense of how we evaluate ourown lives, and it also tracks some of the judgments we make when we compare otherindividuals’ lives. Comparing one life with another, of course, is the limiting case ofcomparing sets of lives. Just as our comparisons of individual lives can sometimes gowrong when our standard of comparison is actual value rather than adjusted value, soour comparisons of populations can go wrong when we compare them in terms ofeither total or average actual value rather than total adjusted value. In the next section,we will discuss two well-known problems that arise when comparisons of popula-tions are made in terms of actual value. The problems are known as the “RepugnantConclusion” and the “Mere Addition Paradox.”

3 The Actual Value View, the Repugnant Conclusion, and the Mere AdditionParadox

Suppose that, instead of comparing Harry with Gary, we were comparing a largepopulation of individuals like Harry with a smaller population of individuals likeGary. Which population would be better? Most philosophers who write about suchquestions subscribe to a view we call “The Actual Value View,” which consists of thefollowing claim:

The Actual Value View: The value of a population is determined by a functionthat takes only two inputs, namely, population size and the actual value of thelife of each member.

In the statement of the Actual Value View, “the value of a population” can beunderstood in either an absolute or a comparative sense. If it is understood in anabsolute sense, then the Actual Value View tells us that the absolute value of apopulation depends only on how large it is and on what the actual value of the life ofeach member is. If “the value of a population” is understood in comparative terms,then the Actual Value View tells us that to determine which out of any set ofpopulations is the best, which is the second best, and so on, we need consider only

8 False Equivalence is a problem for what Derek Parfit calls the “no-difference view,” that is, the view thatthe non-identity problem never makes a difference to our evaluative judgments (Parfit 1984, p. 367).


two factors: the size of each population and the actual values of all the lives in eachpopulation.

Of course, the Actual Value View does not tell us exactly how to calculate absoluteor relative value from the requested inputs. Species of the Actual Value View differaccording to how they manipulate the starting inputs. Despite their variety, species ofthe Actual Value View face problems that Derek Parfit and other philosophers haveidentified. To illustrate one of those problems, let us consider the following species ofthe Actual Value View:

The Impersonal Total Principle [“Totalism”]: If other things are equal, the bestoutcome is the one in which there would be the greatest quantity of whatevermakes life worth living (Parfit 1984, p. 387).

We earlier remarked that the quantity of whatever makes life worth living is equalto the balance of actual goods and bads in the life. If we take populations to be“outcomes,” Totalism tells us that to determine which population in a set of popula-tions has the highest comparative value, we must, for each respective population, sumup the actual values of the lives of each individual in the population. The populationwith the largest sum of actual values is the best.

According to Parfit, the problem for Totalism is that it implies:

The Repugnant Conclusion: For any possible population of at least ten billionpeople, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much largerimaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would bebetter, even though its members have lives that are barely worth living (Parfit1984, p. 388).

The reason that Totalism generates the Repugnant Conclusion is that it holdsthat, just as a large enough pile of pennies can be worth more than a singletwenty-dollar bill, so an increase in quantity of lives can compensate for a dropin actual value of each life. As long as the addition of a marginally-worth-living life makes a positive net contribution, a large enough number ofmarginally-worth-living lives always can be added to a state of affairs so asto offset any decrease (up until to the zero level) in the average quality of life.Figure 1 depicts the kind of comparison that leads to the Repugnant Conclusion(Parfit 1984, p. 388).

Fig. 1 The Repugnant Conclusion


A, B, and Z depict three different populations. The width of the box for eachpopulation represents the number of people in the population, and the height of eachbox represents the actual value of each life in the population. The fine dotted line thatruns horizontally across the figure at the bottom of the boxes marks an actual value ofzero. The dashed lines in the depiction of world Z are meant to indicate that a scaledrawing of Z would have to be much, much wider. Totalism suggests not only thatworld B is better than A, but also that world Z is. We agree with Parfit that thisconclusion is intuitively repugnant; it seems to imply that no matter how bad theworld gets, we can always make things better by having more children whose livesare barely worth living.

One way to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion is to abandon Totalism in favor ofanother species of the Actual Value View:

The Impersonal Average Principle [“Averagism”]: If other things are equal, thebest outcome is the one in which people’s lives go, on average, best (Parfit1984, p. 386).

Averagism holds that the value of a set of lives is equal to the average quality oflife. Applied to a comparison of the worlds in Fig. 1, Averagism holds that A is thebest of them.

Nevertheless, there are problems with Averagism. One problem, as Parfit pointsout, is that it implies that a population of only two individuals with extremely highlevels of welfare is better than a population of a million people who are such that eachperson has a level of welfare just slightly lower than the welfare of each of the twoindividuals (Parfit 1984, p. 402). This implication seems so implausible that weshould reject Averagism.

Are there variants of the Actual Value View that will escape the sorts of problemsfaced by Totalism and Averagism? Parfit presents a puzzle that appears to suggest thatany attempt to assess the comparative values of population will yield implausibleimplications. We think that the puzzle shows merely that all variants of the ActualValue View go wrong. The puzzle is known as the “Mere Addition Paradox.” Tounderstand the paradox, consider the following case involving the comparison ofthree different worlds, depicted in Fig. 2.9

A is a population of people who are very well-off. A+ is a world in which A’, apopulation qualitatively identical to A, exists together with another group, the“+ people”, who are well off, but not as well off as those in A’. B is a populationtwice the size of Awith a lower average welfare than A but a higher average welfarethan A+. Parfit suggests that any plausible attempt to compare the three populationswill run into the following inconsistent set of claims:

(M1) A+ is not worse than A.(M2) B is better than A+.(M3) If B is better than A+ and A+ is not worse than A, then B is better than A.(M4) B is not better than A.

9 This is a simplified version of Parfit’s Mere Addition Paradox. In the original version, Parfit includes afourth world, Divided B, that has the same number of people and average well-being as B. See Parfit 1984,p. 419.


These four claims cannot all be true, yet we seem led to this conundrum byreasoning that seems quite plausible.

The reasoning behind M1 is that the only difference between A and A+ is that in A+,there are a few people, the “+ people”, with lives that are well worth living. Adding onewell off population to another cannot decrease value unless Averagism is true, and wehave already seen why we should reject Averagism. The reasoning behindM2 is that thedecrease in quality of life for the same number of people as is contained in theA’ part of A+ seems to be more than made up for by the increase in the qualityof life for the same number of people as the + people in A+. M3 is simply astatement of the transitivity of the “better than” and “not worse than” relations.Finally, the reasoning behind M4 is that if we allow an increase in populationsize to compensate for a decrease in the quality of life, then we invite theRepugnant Conclusion. Thus, in order to block the problematic implications ofAveragism and Totalism, we seem compelled to accept M1 and M4, respec-tively. But M2 and M3 seem plausible by any lights. Since M1 through M4 areinconsistent, our attempt to compare the value of the three populations seemsdoomed to failure.

4 The Adjusted Value View

As we stated above, we think that problems like the Repugnant Conclusion and theMere Addition Paradox are a consequence, not of population ethics in general, but ofthe Actual Value View, in particular. In this section, we argue that what we call “TheAdjusted Value View” can escape the problems raised by both the Mere AdditionParadox and the Repugnant Conclusion.

We first lay out the Adjusted Value View more systematically, operationalizing itso that it can be applied to the kinds of cases and thought experiments Parfit andothers discuss (while cautiously aware of the limitations of such operationalization).10

The Adjusted Value View consists of the following six claims:

Fig. 2 A version of the Mere Addition Paradox

10 Recall the caveats expressed in Section 2 of the paper, especially fn. 5.


(Ad1) The actual value of a life, a, is the balance of actual goods over actual badsin the life.(Ad2) The ideal value of a life, i, is the best balance of goods over bads that thelife could have contained.(Ad3) The shortcoming of a life, s, is equivalent to i – a; that is, it is the idealvalue of the life minus the actual value of the life.(Ad4) The adjusted value of a life, d, is a – s; that is, it is the actual value of thelife minus the shortcoming of the life.(Ad5) The actual value of a life is a measure of the quantity of whatever it is thatmakes a life worth living. Any life with an actual value above zero is worthliving, and any life with an actual value of zero or lower is not worth living.(Ad6) The value of a population is equal to the sum of the adjusted values ofeach life in the population.11

Notice that according to the Adjusted Value View, it is possible for a life withpositive actual value to have negative adjusted value. This possibility of positiveactual value and negative adjusted value is what enables the Adjusted Value View toescape the Repugnant Conclusion and the Mere Addition Paradox. Indeed, if the waywe operationalized the Adjusted Value View needs to be modified—if, for example, itturns out that adjusted value should be a – (0.70)s, or some other function—wesuspect that any modification of the view will retain the Adjusted Value View’soriginal virtues as long as the modification allows for positive actual value andnegative adjusted value.

Before we demonstrate how the Adjusted Value View avoids the RepugnantConclusion and the Mere Addition Paradox, we will discuss one more distinguishing

11 Before proceeding, it might be useful to contrast our distinction between actual and adjusted value withsome other distinctions in the literature. One widely recognized distinction is that which is drawn betweenpersonal value and impersonal value. Personal value is commonly taken to be value that makes a person’slife go better, whereas impersonal value is that which is good or bad without being good or bad for anyone(see, for example, McMahan 2009). Such a distinction does not correspond to our distinction betweenactual value and adjusted value; on our view, both actual value and adjusted value are kinds of personalvalue. If you cause someone pain, you make her life go worse, so a decrease in actual value is a decrease inpersonal value. Likewise, if you deprive someone of pleasure, you are making her life go worse (even ifyou are not making it less worth living), so a decrease in adjusted value is also a decrease in personal value.Nevertheless, we think that the way of valuing a life that is relevant to calculating the value of a state ofaffairs is adjusted value, not actual value. That is, the impersonal value of a life—the amount that a lifecontributes to the value of a state of affairs—is equal to the adjusted value of the life.

Another distinction that is related to our view is David Benatar’s distinction between a life worthstarting and a life worth continuing (Benatar 2006). It is not clear to us whether all and only the lives ofnegative adjusted value are those that are not worth starting, so we leave it as an open question whetherBenatar’s distinction tracks the distinction that can be made on our view between a life of positive adjustedvalue and a life of positive actual value.

A third distinction is one that Melinda Roberts draws between how things would have been for anindividual, had an agent behaved differently; and how things could have been for the same individual,given all the agent’s alternatives (see Roberts 2003). Roberts argues that the notion that is relevant towhether an agent wrongs an individual is the latter one. Since claims about what would have been aboundin the non-identity literature, we want to stress the importance of Roberts’s distinction. Although ourconcern is with the value of a life, rather than with whether an individual has been wronged, we agree withRoberts that how an individual could have been is the most appropriate notion, in both non-identity casesand in population ethics, for moral comparison.


feature of the Adjusted Value View. Ad2 holds that the ideal value of a life, i,is the best balance of goods over bads that the life could have contained. Ad2thus makes reference to the notion of what could have been or can be thecase. There are multiple ways of understanding claims about what could havebeen or can be the case, but we suggest a contextualist understanding of theverb, “can.” On a contextualist account, the truth of a claim to the effect that xcan or could be the case will depend upon the context in which the claim isuttered.12 To operationalize our particular brand of contextualism, we suggestthe following as one of the guidelines for determining what is the best balanceof goods over bads an individual’s life could have contained:

Guideline 1: For contexts in which a comparison is made, either between two ormore individuals, or between two or more populations of individuals, and inwhich nothing is specified about the individuals except the actual values of theirlives, and in which there is some individual, A, the actual value of whose life isequal to or higher than the actual value of any other life involved in thecomparison, the best balance of goods over bads that A’s life could havecontained is equal to the actual value of A’s life, and for any other individual,B, the best balance of goods over bads that B’s life could have contained is equal tothe actual value of A’s life.

For example, suppose that we are comparing two populations, A and Z. A consistsof people whose lives have an actual value of 10. Z consists of people whose liveshave an actual value of 1. Let Jones be an individual in A and let Smith be anindividual in Z. Then the best balance of goods over bads that Jones’s life could havecontained is 10, and the best balance of goods over bads that Smith’s life could havecontained is 10.

Guideline 1 captures the spirit of two contextualist ideas. First, it cohereswell with the idea that “could claims” are grounded in compossibility. Whennothing is specified about Jones and Smith except the actual value of theirlives, nothing is specified about any constraints upon the values their livescould have had. A lack of constraints upon how valuable a life could havebeen is compossible with that life’s having almost any value. The second ideais that, although compossibility establishes a number of values an individual’slife could have had, salience establishes which of those values is the highestvalue. Since the context specifies only two values, and since Jones’s value ishigher than Smith’s, Jones’s value is the highest compossible value that is

12 David Lewis offers the following example:

To say that something can happen means that its happening is compossible with certain facts. Whichfacts? That is determined, but sometimes not determined well enough, by context. An ape can’tspeak a human language—say, Finnish—but I can. Facts about the anatomy and operation of theape’s larynx and nervous system are not compossible with his speaking Finnish. The correspondingfacts about my larynx and nervous system are compossible with my speaking Finnish. But don’ttake me along to Helsinki as your interpreter: I can’t speak Finnish. My speaking Finnish iscompossible with the facts considered so far, but not with further facts about my lack of training(Lewis 1976, p. 77).


salient. Thus, given that it is not ruled out by any specific constraints (it iscompossible with all the information that is specified about Jones and Smith),and given that it is made salient by the context, the actual value of Jones’s lifeis the best balance of goods over bads that both Jones’s life and Smith’s lifecould have contained.

Before we discuss the second guideline, we will consider and respond tosome objections to Guideline 1. First, one might object that Smith could nothave had a life as valuable as Jones’s life, for Smith lives in a world in whichno one’s life is as valuable as Jones’s life. We think that there may be twoways of interpreting this first objection, but both of them are wrongheaded.First, the objector may be claiming that the best balance of goods over badsthat Smith’s life could have contained is equal to the actual balance of goodsover bads in his life. This claim appears to rely on an unusual account of whata “could have” claim expresses. According to the account, to say, “P couldhave been true” is to say, “P is true”; if you live a sad life and you claim thatyour life could have been happy, your claim is necessarily false. We think thisis implausible; claims about what could have been true are not necessarilyequivalent to claims about what is true.

Second, the objection might be that the highest value Smith’s life could havehad is equal to the highest value of all the lives that exist in the world in whichSmith exists. Since Smith lives in a world where no one has a life more valuablethan 1, the highest value Smith’s life could have had is 1. We think this is alsowrongheaded. Smith happens to live in the Z world, but he could have existed insome other world. Even if the Z world is essentially a world in which peoplelive lives of value 1, this does not mean that it is essential to Smith’s identitythat he lives in the Z world, or that his life has a value of 1. More generally,when we evaluate “could have” claims, we use comparisons across possibleworlds, not comparisons within worlds. If you claim that your dinner could havebeen hotter, we do not, in evaluating your claim, ascertain whether other dinnersin the actual world were hotter. Rather, we determine whether there is anotherpossible world in which your dinner was hotter. Likewise, when we considerhow Smith could have fared, we consider whether, removed from the Z world,Smith could have enjoyed a better balance of goods over bads.

We have also encountered a second objection to Guideline 1. The objectionis that Smith’s life could not have had a higher value, for if the value hadbeen higher, Smith would not have existed. We think that this objection isinspired by the non-identity problem. In a typical non-identity case, a childwhose life prospects are constrained by the very action that brought about herexistence would not have existed, if the action that brought her into existencehad not been taken. (Thus, she would not have existed had the action notconstrained her life prospects.) In a context where the non-identity problem issalient, this means that she could not have existed with better life prospects.That is why, in our discussion of C, D, and E, we claimed that C could nothave existed without being blind. Nevertheless, when the context does notinvolve a non-identity case, there is no salient condition on which an individ-ual’s existence depends, and so there is no basis for claiming that the indi-vidual could not have existed with better life prospects.


In summary, if there is a true claim about what is the best balance ofgoods over bads that Smith’s life could have contained, we think that thetruth of that claim is established by the context in which the claim is made;the context makes certain values salient, and it determines whether there areany specifics about Smith that would constrain how his life could havegone. If there are no specifics given about Smith or the conditions of hisbirth, then the highest salient value is the highest value Smith’s life couldhave had.

In some contexts, however, more specifics are provided about the individualswhose lives we are comparing. This brings us to Guideline 2:

Guideline 2: For contexts in which a comparison is made, either between two ormore individuals, or between two or more populations of individuals, and inwhich certain specifics are given about the individuals, then for any suchindividual A, the highest value that A’s life could have had is equal to thehighest salient value that is compossible with what is specified about A, and ifthere is no such salient value, the highest value of A’s life is not fully determinedby the context.

For example, suppose that A is a population of humans whose lives have anactual value of 100, and Z is a population of clams whose lives have an actualvalue of 1. In this case, the highest value that a life in Z could have had ismuch less than 100 because the lives in Z are clam lives, not human lives.Nevertheless, the context underdetermines what the ideal value for an individualin Z is. The best we can do is guess; an ideal value of 4 might be a goodguess.

Let us now show how the Adjusted Value View, operationalized with Guidelines 1and 2, avoids both the Repugnant Conclusion and the Mere Addition Paradox. Firstrecall how Parfit formulates the Repugnant Conclusion:

For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a veryhigh quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable popula-tion whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better, eventhough its members have lives that are barely worth living (Parfit 1984,p. 388).

Let us refer, respectively, to the population of 10 billion people, the indi-viduals in that population, the much larger population, and the individuals inthat population as “the A world,” “the A people,” “the Z world,” and “the Zpeople,” as depicted in Fig. 1. Notice that Parfit claims that the Z people havelives that are barely worth living. In the terminology of the Adjusted ValueView, the lives of the Z people have an actual value that is just barely abovezero.

As we saw before, the Actual Value View implies that any life with an actual valueabove zero makes a positive contribution to a state of affairs; that is why the Z worldis supposed to be much more valuable than the Aworld. However, the Adjusted ValueView does not have this implication.

On the Adjusted Value View, the contribution that each Z person makes tothe world will depend upon the shortfall between the actual and ideal values


of her life. To determine the ideal value of a particular Z person’s life, wemust determine the best balance of goods over bads that her life could havecontained. The best balance of goods over bads that the life could havecontained is whatever better quality of life would be compossible with thefacts about the Z person that are established by the context. But in thephilosophical context in which we are comparing the A world to the Z world,we are aware of hardly any facts about the Z person’s life, except for the factthat (1) she is a person; (2) she lives a marginally worthwhile life; and (3) shehas a counterpart in the A world whose life is much richer and morerewarding. All three facts are compossible with the Z person’s life being justas rich and rewarding as the life of the A person: the fact that you do live adreary life does not mean that you must live such a life. Guideline 1 thusimplies that each individual in the Z world could have had the life of a personin the A world.13

Given that each Z person could have had the life of an A person, we can show thatthe Adjusted Value View does not generate the Repugnant Conclusion. It does notmatter which precise numbers we use, but we will assign some numbers to the case tomake our explanation clearer.

First, for the sake of the example, we will assume that the actual value of each Alife is 90, and the actual value of each Z life is 1. Since each Z person could have hadthe life of an A person, the ideal value of each Z life is 90. Thus, the shortfall of eachZ life is 89, and the adjusted value of each Z life is −88. According to Ad6, the valueof a population is equal to the sum of the adjusted values of each life in thepopulation. Thus, the value of the Z world is equal to its enormous population—wewill say 10 gazillion people—multiplied by −88.

By contrast, the context does not establish any better balance of goods overbads for the A people. In this context, they seem to be as well off as theycould be. Thus, the shortcoming of each A life is 0. The adjusted value of eachA life is therefore 90 minus 0. Given Ad6, the value of the A world is 900billion. Thus, the Adjusted Value View avoids the Repugnant Conclusion: itinstead implies that the A world is better than the Z world. Table 1 lays out the

13 Indeed, we think that the awfulness of the thought that each person in the Z world could have had a lifelike that of an A person, but does not, is partly what explains the repugnancy of the Repugnant Conclusion.Note, also, that we are not saying that all individuals in the Z world could have a life like an A person, butthat each could.

Table 1 Calculating the total values of A and Z

World Population(p)

Actual valueof a life (a)

Ideal valueof a life (i)

Shortfall (s)s = i - a

Adjusted value ofa life (d) d = a - s

Total value in world(t) t = d × p

A 10 billion 90 90 0 90 900 billion

Z 10 gazillion 1 90 89 −88 −880 gazillion


steps of these calculations. Figure 3 illustrates the value of the A and Z worldsin terms of adjusted value in a Parfit-style graph.

The Z world is not necessarily the only world with negative value. Howmany worldsend up having negative value will depend on the worlds being compared (which sets therelevant context) and the actual value of the lives of their inhabitants. Figure 4 comparesfive worlds and illustrates how the Adjusted Value View differs from the Actual ValueView. In the illustration, the encircled numbers and white boxes depict, respectively, theadjusted value of each life and the value, according to the Adjusted Value View, of eachpopulation. The grey numbers and boxes depict, respectively, the actual value of eachlife and the value, according to the Actual Value View, of each population.

What about the Mere Addition Paradox? Again, it does not matter which particularnumbers we use, but we will assign numbers to the lives in order to illustrate how the

Fig. 3 The Repugnant Conclusion populations redrawn to show adjusted value

Fig. 4 Adjusted value (white) and actual value (gray)


Adjusted Value View treats the case. Suppose that there are two A people, and each Aperson has a life with an actual value of 90. Suppose that there are four B people, andeach B person has a life with an actual value of 72. Finally, suppose that in A+, thetwo people in A’ have lives with an actual value of 90, and the two people in “+” havelives with an actual value of 50. Figure 5 illustrates.14

Given the context, Guideline 1 again implies that every individual in thethree worlds could have had a balance of goods over bads of 90. If so, then thevalue of the A world is 2 times (90 – (90 – 90)), or 180. The value of the Bworld is 4 times (72 – (90 – 72)), or 216. The value of the A+ world is (2times (90 – (90 – 90))) plus (2 times (50 – (90 – 50))), or 200. Thus, A+ isbetter than A, which is compatible M1’s claim that A+ is not worse than A.M2 remains true: B is better than A+. M3 holds, as well: B is better than A.Yet M4 is false: it is not the case that B is not better than A.

We think these results are entirely satisfactory. First, there is no contradiction: B isbetter than A+, A+ is better than A, and B is better than A. The transitivity of “betterthan” and “not worse than” is preserved. Second, the result that B is better than A isintuitive. As we noted above, the original reason to resist such a claim was the fear that itwould start us down a slippery slope towards the Repugnant Conclusion. However, aswe have already shown, the Adjusted Value View does not imply the RepugnantConclusion. Thus, one who endorses the AdjustedValue View can claim that an increasein population size can sometimes compensate for a slight decrease in the quality of lifewithout being committed to the view that it will always do so. Third, the result that B isbetter than A+ is also satisfactory, as B has more adjusted value, contains lives with agreater actual value, and lacks potentially problematic inequalities.15

The Adjusted Value View thus avoids the paradox by delivering a consistentordering of worlds, regardless of the values assigned to the lives in the worlds.Nevertheless, because it implies neither that (1) an increase in the number ofpeople living lives above zero will always compensate for a decrease in averagequality of life, nor that (2) an increase in average quality of life will alwayscompensate for a decrease in population size, it avoids the counterintuitiveimplications of both Totalism and Averagism.

14 As in Fig. 4, the encircled numbers and white boxes depict, respectively, the adjusted value of each lifeand the value, according to the Adjusted Value View, of each population, while the grey numbers and boxesdepict, respectively, the actual value of each life and the value, according to the Actual Value View, of eachpopulation. As in Table 1, “p” stands for population size, “d” for the adjusted value of a life, and “t” for thevalue of the population.15 With different numbers, it may have turned out that A+ is better than B. But that would have beenacceptable. Sometimes, a state of affairs in which a high number of people have lives that are as good asthey can be will be better than a state of affairs in which a smaller number of people have lives that are wellworth living, but not quite as good. Some egalitarians may find this result unsatisfactory. However, theyneed not reject every component of the Adjusted Value View. They are instead invited to reject the Ad6,which holds that the value of the world is simply the sum of the contributions that each life makes to theworld. Instead, they can claim that there is a more complicated function for determining the value of theworld. That function might take as arguments (1) the contribution that each life makes to the world, and (2)the degree of inequality in the world. A function along these lines would presumably result in the B world’sbeing better than A+.


5 Conclusion

Our main contribution in this paper was to introduce the concept of adjusted value.We argued that such a concept helps capture the intuition that our lives are worsewhen we fail to achieve our potential. Such a concept can also resolve a number ofphilosophical puzzles that arise, both when we compare the value of individual livesand when we compare the values of populations. In the context of comparingindividual lives, the concept of actual value helps us avoid the problem of FalseEquivalence. When we compare populations using the Adjusted Value View, theconcept of adjusted value also helps us to see that some lives with positive actualvalue have negative adjusted value. This implication helps us avoid the RepugnantConclusion and the Mere Addition Paradox.

The distinctiveness of the Adjusted Value View comes from its considerationnot merely of quality of life, but of the value that a life could have contained.The value that could have obtained is one species of possible value. Whilefurther work needs to be done specifying the relationship between what ispossible, what could have been, and what would have been, we believe thatvarious species of possible value have the potential to account for a wide arrayof evaluative judgments. For example, what we may judge to be a goodpainting when created by a novice could be, we think, a shockingly bad oneif created by a master. Possible value could help explain this: masters can paintbetter than novices, so a painting by a master that is only as good as a novice’scould have been much better. Indeed, “it could have been much better” is afamiliar factor in our assessments of art, performances, experiences, states ofaffairs, etc., and we cannot make sense of it without the idea of possible value.And while in this paper our focus was on the best that could have been, webelieve that unrealized possibilities for badness may also be important. Unfor-tunately, space limitations make it impossible for us to say more about this,except perhaps to note that our estimation of the value of something mayincrease when we realize “it could have been much worse.”

Fig. 5 The Mere Addition Paradox in terms of adjusted value (white) and actual value (gray)


Acknowledgments An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2012 Bled PhilosophicalConference, “Ethical Issues: Theoretical and Applied.” The authors are grateful to Alastair Norcross andMatjaž Potrč for the invitation to the conference, and we thank the members of the audience there for manyuseful criticisms and suggestions.

References

Benatar, D. (2006). Better never to have been: The harm of coming into existence. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Greene, M., & Augello, S. (2011). Everworse: what’s wrong with selecting for disability? Public Affairs

Quarterly, 25(2), 131–139.Lewis, D. (1976). The paradoxes of time travel. American Philosophical Quarterly, 13, 145–152.McMahan, J. (1996). Cognitive disability, misfortune, and justice. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 25(1), 3–

35.McMahan, J. (2009). Asymmetries in the morality of causing people to exist. In M. A. Roberts & D. T.

Wasserhman (Eds.), Harming future person (pp. 49–68). New York: Springer.Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and persons. New York: Oxford University Press.Roberts, M. (2003). Is the person-affecting intuition paradoxical? Theory and Decision, 55, 1–44.


Documents

How Lives Measure Up