Perfectionism and the Repugnant Conclusion

Perfectionism neither provides a full explanation of the repugnance of, nor a sufficient means

of avoiding, the Repugnant Conclusion. This is because even lives at very low welfare levels

may contain significant quantities of the perfectionist goods, such as the best things in life.

Perfectionism can explain or avoid the Repugnant Conclusion only in combination with other

views. One such hybrid view combines perfectionism with an asymmetrical view about the

value of bad things, such as suffering and frustration. This combination can both explain and

avoid the Repugnant Conclusion. I argue that such an asymmetrical view is justified on the

grounds that not all of the badness of bad things is reflected in their effect upon a person’s

welfare level. Derik Parfit has objected to an asymmetrical view about the value of bad things

on the grounds that it implies what he dubs the 'Ridiculous Conclusion'. However, this

objection tells equally against Parfit’s own perfectionism and begs the question against both

views. Finally, I show how the kind of hybrid theory I propose in this paper not only constitutes

a sufficient response to the Repugnant Conclusion, but also allows us to escape a number of

paradoxes in population axiology.

According to:

the Repugnant Conclusion: Compared with the existence of very many people—

say, ten billion—all of whom have a very high quality of life, there must be some

much larger number of people whose existence, if other things are equal, would

be better, even though these people would have lives that are barely worth living

(Parfit 1986: 10)

This is illustrated below, where A is the population with a very high quality of life and

Z is the population with lives that are barely worth living:

Figure 1: The Repugnant Conclusion

Many people find this conclusion very hard to accept. However, this fact on its own

provides us with no explanation of why this conclusion is hard to accept, nor does it

indicate how to avoid it. In fact, there are many arguments suggesting that we should

accept the Repugnant Conclusion, not least of which being that it is implied by claims

that people find equally hard to reject, such as those of the ‘Mere Addition Paradox’

(Parfit 1986: 11, Arrhenius 2000: 261 Huemer 2008: 902).

One reason we might wish to deny the Repugnant Conclusion is that there are certain

goods – the best things in life – that are both especially valuable and enjoyed by

people at very high welfare levels. This would give us a reason to accept the claim

that it is better for there to be a smaller number of people who each enjoy these

goods than for there to be any number of people who do not enjoy them (Parfit 1986:

18). This claim is known as perfectionism. Whilst many people have argued against

perfectionism, it is often assumed that perfectionism would explain both why we find

the Repugnant Conclusion very hard to accept and how to avoid it (Parfit 1986,

Griffin 1986: 87, Crisp 1992: 150-151, Hurka 1993: 69-83, Rachels 2004: 177-178,

Huemer 2008: 914-915).

In this paper, I will consider whether perfectionism constitutes a sufficient answer to

the Repugnant Conclusion, i.e. whether accepting perfectionism gives us both a

reason to find this implication very hard to accept and a means of avoiding it1.

However, I will argue that perfectionism is not a sufficient answer to the Repugnant

Conclusion. Whilst perfectionism justifies giving additional value to very happy lives,

it implies nothing about the value we should give to lives that are 'barely worth

living'.

I will go on to propose a theory that combines perfectionism with a related view

about the value of bad things, such as suffering or frustration. I argue that by

implying necessary facts about both very high and low welfare lives this view does

constitute a sufficient answer to the Repugnant Conclusion. In my final section, I will

argue that this view not only explains the Repugnant Conclusion and shows us how

to avoid it, but does so in a way that allows us to avoid the kinds of impossibility

result usually associated with denial of the Repugnant Conclusion.

1. The problem with perfectionism

1 There are many technical ways to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, such as Critical Level Theories and

Variable Value Theories. However, unlike perfectionism, these theories provide no explanation for why the

Repugnant Conclusion is very hard to accept and hence no further justification for avoiding it.

Perfectionism does not deny that many things, apart from the best things in life,

determine the value of a life. These things include lesser goods such as everyday

pleasures and achievements, neutral states such as unconsciousness and bad things

that make lives worse, such as suffering and frustration. Lives can be made up of

many combinations of these things and are assigned an overall ‘welfare level’ that

indicates how good or bad this combination is for the person living that life.

Perfectionism claims that only lives that contain the best things in life can be at the

highest welfare levels and that the best things in life give lives a value that is superior

to other good things2. By superior, I mean that a sufficient quantity of the best things

in life has a value that is greater than any quantity of other goods, such as everyday

pleasures and achievements3.

These claims do not give us sufficient reason to find the Repugnant Conclusion very

hard to accept, nor do they allow us to avoid it. This is because they only tell us what

goods are required ingredients of lives at very high welfare levels. They imply nothing

about the ingredients of lives that are ‘barely worth living’.

Perfectionism implies that lives at a very high level of welfare necessarily have a

value significantly greater than lives that lack any of the best things in life. However,

it is entirely consistent with perfectionism that lives at a very low positive level of

welfare may also contain some of the best things in life.

For instance, even lives at very low welfare levels can contain the best things in life if

they only contain a few of the best things in life and only to a limited extent, and

these lives are otherwise dull or short and contain some bad things. All of these

factors would reduce their welfare level so that it could easily be very low and

correspond to a life that was barely worth living.

2 By the value of a life, I mean the contributory value of a life to a population that contains it, leaving aside all

distributional considerations, such as whether that life makes a population more or less equal or raises of

lowers its average welfare level. By the value of a population I mean the value of its lives, taking into account

such distributional considerations where apropriate.

3 This claim is similar to that made by Mill regarding purely hedonistic goods - that we need consider both

their quantity and their quality and that ‘we are justified in ascribing to [certain pleasures] a superiority in

quality, so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison, of small account’ (Mill 1998: 56).

Because each of these low-level lives contains some of the best things in life, a

sufficient number of them would contain a greater total quantity of the best things in

life than a very large number of lives at a very high welfare level. If we value the sum

total of the best things in life in a population, then we should be willing to accept that

these lives, though barely worth living, would be better than a very large number of

lives at a very high welfare level. Parfit appears to share this view. He concludes that,

in a similar case, it would be ‘less repugnant’ for a moral theory to imply that a

population consisting of a sufficient number of low welfare lives that included some

of the best things in life was better than a population consisting of a large number of

high welfare lives (Parfit 1986: 19).

This implies that perfectionists should be willing to accept the Repugnant

Conclusion, at least in certain cases, and that perfectionism on its own cannot avoid

this implication. It follows that if perfectionism values the sum total of the best

things in life in a population, then it does not provide a sufficient answer to the

Repugnant Conclusion (see also Ryberg 2004: 251).

2. The first perfectionist response

One response to this argument is that it depends on a particular way of aggregating

the value of ‘the best things in life’: namely, that we value the sum total. However,

perfectionism is compatible with other ways of aggregating this value across lives.

Thomas Hurka has argued that a commitment to perfectionism gives us special

reason to value the average, rather than the total, quantity of these goods across

lives.4 He points out that many of us feel that when a life, or a career, has been

intensely good, then prolonging it for the sake of a few more perfectionist goods at

the cost of reducing its overall quality makes it worse. He advocates extending this

attitude ‘to human lives and then to all human history’ – an extension he believes

may be ‘appealing in itself’ (Hurka 1993: 71). Hurka is appealing to the idea that the

mere addition of perfectionist goods may make a situation worse, even though the

mere addition of most kinds of goods makes a situation better. If this claim were

4 Hurka’s concept of perfectionist goods is broader than Parfit’s. Parfit is interested only in those goods that

constitute ‘the best things in life’, whilst Hurka considers the wider set of all ‘goods of excellence, such as

knowledge and achievement’ (Hurka 1993: 71).

true, it would imply that we value something other than the total quantity of the best

things in life5.

However, this is a claim about how we should aggregate perfectionist goods, and it

does not imply that we should aggregate welfare in the same way. Lives at very low

welfare levels may contain more of the best things in life than those at a very high

welfare level. This would be the case if they contained many of the best things in life,

but also a great many bad things, such as suffering or frustration. It seems to me that

no matter how much a particular person enjoyed the best things in life, their life

might still be considered ‘barely worth living’ if they also suffered from enough bad

things.

To suggest otherwise would be to imply that even very bad things might matter very

little since, if combined with some of the best things in life, they could not reduce the

welfare of a life, and hence its effect on the value of a population, beyond a certain

level. For instance, it would imply that it might be better if many people who enjoyed

some of the best things in life were to suffer from many bad things than if a person

who did not enjoy the best things in life suffered from only a few bad things. In this

case, the great suffering of the people who enjoyed some of the best things in life

would reduce their welfare level to a much lesser degree, if at all, than the minor

suffering of the person who did not enjoy any of the best things in life.

I find this implication unacceptable and therefore conclude that it is indeed possible

for a person who enjoys many of the best things in life to have a life that is barely

worth living, so long as their life also contains a sufficient quantity of bad things.

However, if this were so then we can imagine a version of the Repugnant Conclusion

where each the people with very happy lives in population A nevertheless enjoys

fewer of the best things in life than any of the people with lives that are barely worth

living in population Z. Therefore, no matter how we aggregate the value of

perfectionist goods across these lives it remains the case that perfectionism implies

5 Hurka proposes other alternatives to valuing the sum total of perfectionist goods. These include the less

extreme claim that we value both the average and the sum total of these goods and the more extreme claim

that we value the maximum quantity of these goods in any single life or in any moment in time. However, all

of these aggregation methods are equally vulnerable to the response I propose here.

the Repugnant Conclusion6. We must conclude that perfectionism on its own is not a

sufficient answer to the Repugnant Conclusion.

3. The second perfectionist response

So far, I have presented two ways in which lives that are at a very low welfare level,

and only barely worth living, might nevertheless contain the best things in life. I have

used these cases to illustrate that there is no necessary connection between a person

living at a low welfare level and their enjoyment of the best things in life.

In both of these cases, it has been necessary to claim that the lives at very low

positive welfare levels contain bad things, such as suffering and frustration. This

suggests that if a life contains some of the best things in life and is below a certain

welfare level then it must contain some bad things7. To put this another way, it seems

reasonable to assume that no life that contains some of the best things in life and no

bad things can fall below a certain welfare level.

There is another reason to believe that a life that is barely worth living and that

contains some of the best things in life may need to contain some bad things as well.

The best things in life, as commonly conceived, are something more than momentary

experiences or capacities that anyone might have. They are the results of a fulfilling

and fulfilled life. It would therefore be impossible for a life to contain any of the best

things in life without also containing many other good things. A person who enjoys

any of the best things in life, even to a minimal extent, and suffers from no bad things

6 Note that in this respect perfectionism performs worse then Utilitarianism. Since the quantity of welfare in a

life is the same as its welfare level, we can avoid the Repugnant Conclusion by selecting an appropriate

aggregation mechanism for the value of welfare. However, since the quantity of perfectionist goods is

independent of a life’s welfare level this means of avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion is no longer possible.

7 In Parfit’s own example where people live very low welfare lives whilst enjoying some of the best things in life

there are no bad things. Instead, in this case “The people in Z do each, one in their lives, have or engage in

one of the best experiences or activities. But all of the rest is Muzak and Potatoes” (Parfit 1986: 19). For

reasons I will set out shortly I do not find this example credible. However, I also conclude that Parfit is not

convinced by it either. As I point out, if we accept, as he does, that in this case the Repugnant Conclusion is

not very hard to accept, then it undermines perfectionism as a sufficient response to the Repugnant

Conclusion. However, this is what Parfit maintains. This would seem to imply that Parfit believes such a case

is impossible.

must be at a significantly positive welfare level and could not fall below this level

unless their life also contained bad things, such as suffering or frustration8.

If it were the case that no life below a certain welfare level could contain both any of

the best things in life and no bad things, then this may affect our evaluation of

populations. This would be the case if we believed that the badness of bad things is

morally asymmetrical with the goodness of good things. To illustrate this view let us

imagine the combination of one good thing (reading a nice book) and one bad thing

(a mild headache). These things might be such that the combination of the two has

no net effect upon the welfare level of a life, i.e. it makes that life neither better nor

worse for the person who lives it. However, according to this view, it may be better,

all things considered, to cure an individual of the headache rather than providing

them with the book because one involves removing a bad thing and the other

providing a good thing. This view is commonly known as an ‘asymmetrical view’

(Mayerfeld 1999: 130-33).

If we hold an asymmetrical view about the value of bad things then we can begin to

formulate a sufficient answer to the Repugnant Conclusion. However, this will only

be the case if we also believe that the badness of suffering is analogous in the

following respect to the goodness of the best things in life. In the same way that the

best things in life are ‘especially good’ and give lives a value that is superior to that of

other good things, bad things are ‘especially bad’ and give lives a negative value that

can cancel out this 'superiority'.

This view can explain the repugnance of the Repugnant Conclusion in all the cases I

have mentioned so far and allow us to avoid them. This is because in all these cases, a

population of people who all have a very high quality of life will necessarily contain

many of the best things in life whilst a population where everyone has a life that is

only barely worth living will either contain none of the best things in life or will

contain many bad things. It is of course possible that people who have a very high

quality of life will also suffer some bad things as well. However, they will necessarily

8 This view would clearly undermine Parfit’s example of an individual living a dull and boring life and yet

engaging in one of the best experiences or activities for a short time. I defend these claims and discuss the

nature of perfectionism in chapter 6.

enjoy many more of the best things in life, so that even the superior badness of these

bad things will be cancelled out.

Even though perfectionism on its own is not a sufficient answer to the Repugnant

Conclusion, a hybrid view, incorporating both perfectionism and an asymmetrical

value for bad things, may be so. The fact that we find the Repugnant Conclusion very

hard to accept may therefore give us reason to accept such a view.

4. Justifying the asymmetrical view

The fact that an asymmetrical view about the value of bad things might help us to

explain and avoid the Repugnant Conclusion does not mean that is necessarily a view

we should accept. In this section, I will offer a novel defence of such a view.

Let us assume that we should give a degree of priority to lives that are bad i.e. that

have a greater balance of negative to positive welfare components, over those that are

good (Mayerfeld (1999) 145–148). This would imply that lives that are bad should

reduce the value of a population by more than standard aggregation procedures

would imply. One reason to hold this view is that when a life is at an overall positive

welfare level then the person living that life is compensated for the bad things in

their life by the good things. We can pair each bad thing in that life with one or more

good things such that if the person who is living that life had a choice to either retain

this combination or replace it with things that were entirely neutral in value, they

would choose to retain it. This gives us a good reason not to value these bad things

any worse than the person whose life they belong to does.

However, if a person has bad things in their life for which they are not compensated,

then they would prefer no life at all, instead of the life they have. This may be thought

to generate a complaint on behalf of this person against being brought into existence

with the life that they have, and to make such a life even worse than its welfare level

implies. The effect of this person’s life on the value of a population is compounded

both by its negative welfare level and by the complaint that this generates.

Let us consider the following three lives:

Life A: 50 units of good things and 1 unit of bad things

Life B: 50 units of bad things and 1 unit of good things

Life C: 51 units of good things and 51 units of bad things

Life A is clearly very good, and life B is clearly very bad. If lives that are bad have

priority over those that are good in our evaluation of populations then this would

give us reason to believe that a population consisting of the combination of life A and

life B is, on balance, bad rather than neutral. Life C contains an equal quantity of

good and bad things and is therefore neutral in value. Whilst the good things in life A

cannot compensate for the bad things in life B, the good things in life C can

compensate for the bad things in life C. Hence, the combination of lives A and B has

a different value to the single life C.

This argument however relies upon the claim that good things and bad things can

compensate for one another at any point in a person’s life, irrespective of how the

two components are connected. We might take another view however, on which

compensation can only take place between two parts of a person’s life to the extent

that they are psychologically connected with one another (Holtug 2010: 304). If this

were the case, and if there were insufficient connections between a certain negative

welfare component and suitable positive welfare components, then even if the life as

a whole were very good, this negative welfare component would remain

uncompensated. It would then be the case that, whilst a person might view their life

on the whole as being better than nothing, there are parts of that person, defined by

their greater degree of connectedness, that do not share this perspective. In this way

the situation of our component parts becomes more like that of separate people who

have a greater balance of negative to positive welfare components. Why then should

we not have the same attitude towards negative welfare components from these

perspectives that we do towards lives at negative welfare levels?

Consider that in the previous case the three lives were composed as follows. In life A,

there are many strong psychological connections between the parts of that life that

are good and the part that is bad. Similarly, in life B, there are many strong

connections between the parts that are bad and the part that is good. Life C is formed

by psychologically connecting two life sections, one identical to life A and the other to

life B, with the minimum of psychological connection required to form a whole

person9.

In this case, life C should not have a neutral value, all things considered, even though

this is its value to the person who lives it. Instead, it should have a value somewhat

between the combination of lives A and B and a version of life C in which we imagine

that there are equally strong connections between all of the good and bad parts.

Whilst there is a psychologically continuous person who lives this life as a whole, and

for whom the good things can compensate for the bad, there are also parts of that

person, consisting of a far greater degree of psychological connectedness, for which

no such compensation is possible. Furthermore, these parts are not in a position to

compensate one another.

The preceding example represents an extreme case designed to persuade a sceptic,

but might the same kind of considerations lead us to accept an asymmetrical view for

more ordinary kinds of case? I think so. Jamie Mayerfeld for instance considers the

example of anaesthetics used to remove the pain and much of the discomfort

associated with surgery. Mayerfeld points out that we might instead give surgery

patients some great benefit designed to provide them with a degree of pleasure and

satisfaction that is in every way as good as the surgery is bad10. However, he suggests

that even if these two options were equally good in other respects we would

intuitively feel we had more reason to provide the anaesthetic than the benefit

(Mayerfeld 1999: 133). Mayerfeld offers no further explanation for this intuition.

However, it seems to me that one reason for preferring the anaesthetic to the benefit

is that whilst the benefit will compensate a person for the suffering of surgery, it will

not compensate that part of them that suffers the bad effects of the surgery and has a

legitimate complaint against this suffering. Anaesthetic on the other hand not only

removes most of the badness of the surgery from our lives as a whole, but also from

the points in our lives when we undergo the surgery.

9 Since life A and life B already contain good and bad things that are psychologically connected to teach other

the union of A and B can be changed without changing the nature of the two parts. We can simply rearrange

the connections between the good and bad parts of the two halves of the life so that the degree of connection

between any good and bad parts is not changed in any way, only the identity of the good and bad parts that

are being connected.

10 let us assume however that this does not involve providing them with any of the best things in life

Of course, benefits can sometimes compensate us at the point of our suffering, but

they do so by making these experiences easier for us to bear and hence less bad for us

at the time. If I anticipate a future benefit whilst undergoing a painful experience, I

may suffer less as a result. However, if my level of suffering remains the same then

the future benefit does nothing to compensate me for this bad thing.

This argument is supported by Scanlon’s views about priority to the worst off.

Scanlon argues that we have a duty of rescue to assist those who are suffering from

bad things (their lives are threatened, they are in great pain or living at a level of bare

subsistence) independently of how good their lives are as a whole (Scanlon 2000:

226-227). If such a duty reflects the value of our assistance then it would imply that it

is clearly better to provide an anaesthetic, which would satisfy this duty of rescue,

then to provide some great benefit, which would not rescue the person from the

badness of their surgery but would merely make their life better on the whole. Hence,

it seems that the badness of these bad things is greater than the extent to which they

lower a person's welfare level, and hence to goodness of an equivalent benefit.

How should we take account of this value? One approach would be to hold that any

bad thing in a life has two values. Firstly, it has a negative value as a contributor to

the welfare level of the person living that life; this can be compensated for by the

value of good things in their life. Secondly, it has a negative value for the part of the

individual who suffers this bad thing, because of the complaint it generates; this

cannot be compensated for. Hence, the value of such bad things goes beyond their

effect on individual welfare levels to reduce the value of a population containing lives

with these welfare components. As the degree to which bad things are psychologically

connected to good things increases this additional badness will diminish. However, I

do not think it will ever disappear, so long as the two things remain distinct aspects

of a person’s life.

In this way, even a life that is worth living may have a negative value, all things

considered, because the small positive value of its welfare is negated by a larger

negative value of the bad things in that life. This is most likely to be the case when a

life is at a low welfare level because it has many negative welfare components, but a

slightly larger total quantity of positive welfare components.

An asymmetrical view can also be a sufficient answer to the 'Reverse Repugnant

Conclusion'. This is the implication that a sufficiently large number of lives at a

barely negative welfare level and that are almost worth living might nevertheless be

worse than a very large number of truly terrible lives (Rachels 2004: 166). Since

perfectionism on its own only considers the value of the best things in life, it implies

nothing about lives that are bad and that include none of these things.

The asymmetrical view that I have set out here however can explain our sense of

repugnance at such a case, and help us to avoid it. Such a view provides us with

several reasons to attach an additional disvalue to the ‘worst things in life’, things

that make bad lives particularly bad such as chronic pain, depression or torture. The

theory I have sketched thus far would imply that there is the special badness of

groups of bad things is increased when they are more closely connected with each

other than any good things. The more one bad thing is connected with other negative

welfare components, the more the possibility of ‘compensation’ becomes a fiction.

These clusters resemble whole lives to an increasing degree, and thus their special

disvalue may be multiplied. The second way in which we might understand this

special badness of these worst things in life is that they weaken or sever the

psychological connections that make a person whole. That is, great suffering and

frustration has the power to alienate us from our past and future selves and to rob us

of the things we hold most dear (Temkin 2012: 25).

5. Should we accept the asymmetrical view?

Parfit has suggested another reason we may have to accept an asymmetrical view

about the value of bad things. He argues that perfectionism, on its own, may have

implications that are unacceptably elitist and show a disregard for those who are

worst off. For instance, if we do not give bad things a disvalue that is comparable

with the superior goodness of the best things in life we may face the very unattractive

view that ‘the prevention of great suffering can be ranked wholly below the

preservation of creation of the best things in life’ (Parfit 1986: 20). Let us call this

'The Elitist Conclusion'.

On the other hand, Parfit has also identified a key objection to this kind of view,

which he terms the ‘Ridiculous Conclusion’. This is the implication that lives at a

higher welfare level may have a value that is less than that of lives at a lower welfare

level, because they could contain more bad things11 (Parfit 1984: 407). Consider the

following two cases:

Population P: n people at welfare level 100, consisting of 120 units of good things

(including some of the best things in life) and 20 units of bad things.

Population Q: n people at welfare level 99, consisting of 99 units of good things,

and no bad things.

The 'special badness' of the bad things that the people in population P suffer may

imply that it would be better if population Q existed instead of population P, even

though everyone in Q is at a lower welfare level than everyone in P. However, it is

sometimes claimed to be a fundamental principle of population ethics that a perfectly

equal population at a higher welfare level is better than a perfectly equal population

of the same size at a lower welfare level (Arrhenius 2000: 257).

Although this implication is disturbing, it must be set against the other advantages of

holding an asymmetrical view. Personally, I do not find this view objectionable in the

same way as the Repugnant Conclusion. Population Q is clearly much better than P

in respect of the quantity of bad things it contains and only slightly worse in respect

of the total quantity of welfare as a whole. Therefore, I suggest that in this case it is

our principles that may be at fault. After all, these principles take as their chief

argument the assumption that, distributional concerns aside, nothing but an

individual’s welfare level determines the value of their life in a population. This

simply begs the question against the asymmetrical view.

Furthermore, perfectionism, of the kind advocated by Parfit, also implies the

Ridiculous Conclusion. As we have already noted, it is possible for a life at a very low

welfare level to contain the best things in life at least as much as a life at a very high

welfare level. If we do not take into account the special badness of suffering we may

therefore face the following equally ‘ridiculous’ conclusion

11 Strictly speaking, Parfit’s version of the Ridiculous Conclusion is that the addition of lives at a higher welfare

level may make a population worse. However, this is a reflection of the view is considering at the time. The

ridiculous aspect of this conclusion is meant to flow entirely from the fact that lives that are better for the

individual living them might nevertheless be worse for the population containing them; this aspect is

preserved in the presentation I offer here.

Population R: n people at welfare level 100, consisting of 100 units of good things.

Population S: n people at welfare level 99, consisting of 120 units of good things

(including some of the best things in life) and 21 units of bad things.

Parfit’s perfectionism, on its own, would seem to give us at least some reason to

believe that population S was better than population R. This is so even though

everyone in population R is living a higher quality of life and everybody in population

S suffers from some bad things.

The combination of perfectionism and the asymmetrical view also implies the

Ridiculous Conclusion, but it can avoid it in more cases, including those where we

have most reason to find such implications hard to accept. The potential to imply

truly ridiculous conclusions is reduced by the countervailing pressure of the two

principles. For instance, in the two cases I have presented in this section, the hybrid

view can avoid the Ridiculous Conclusion. Populations S and Q may be no better

than populations R and P once we have considered the special value of both the best

things in life and the bad things in each population, and the ability of these two

values to cancel each other out. This hybrid view therefore turns out to be less

'ridiculous' than either perfectionism or an asymmetrical view on their own.

6. Does perfectionism really imply the Ridiculous Conclusion?

A perfectionist may wish to deny that their view implies the Ridiculous Conclusion.

However, Parfit has claimed that, in order to help explain or avoid the Repugnant

Conclusion, perfectionism must imply that a loss of any of the best things in life

involves ‘a change for the worse’, even if it brings a ‘great net benefit’ (Parfit 1986:

19), any reasonable view that implies this will also imply the Ridiculous Conclusion.

The Ridiculous Conclusion is unavoidable if the loss of one of the best things in life

can be a change for the worse even if it brings a great net benefit to the same person

who lost this thing. Assume two populations, one consisting of people who enjoy one

of the best things in life and the other of people who do not enjoy any of these things,

but who all have some great net benefit that raises their lives to a higher welfare

level. If we accept the perfectionist’s claim, then the first population will be better,

even though the people in the second population are at a higher welfare level. This

implies the Ridiculous Conclusion.

A perfectionist might try to avoid this argument in one of two ways. They might claim

that the loss of one of the best things in life could never be part of a great net benefit

to the same person who lost it. Alternatively, they might claim that the loss of one of

the best things in life is a change for the worse if it only brings a great net benefit to

others, but not if it is part of a great net benefit for the person who lost it.

To deny that a loss of one of the best things in life could ever be part of a great net

benefit to a person would imply that the welfare level of that person could never be

higher without one of the best things in life than it is with it. This would in turn imply

that being at a certain welfare level is a direct consequence of enjoying one of the best

things in life and that living at a lower welfare level involves not enjoying this thing,

or enjoying it to a lesser extent.

However, I have already considered and rejected such a view since it implies that

very bad things might have an insufficiently negative effect on the value of a

population12. This would be the case if they formed part of a life that included one of

the best things in life. The effect of these bad things would then be very small because

they could not reduce the welfare level of this life below a certain level whilst it

retains any of the best things in life.

On the other hand, the perfectionist might deny that a loss of one of the best things

in life that formed part of a great net benefit to the person who lost it was a change

for the worse. However, they might add that if their loss were combined with a great

net benefit for others only then it would be a change for the worse.

Such a move will not save the perfectionist however. To see this consider a

population of a thousand people, each of whom live at a moderate welfare level, but

enjoy some of the best things in life. Compare this to a population in which one of

these people no longer enjoys the best things in life, but everyone else has received

some great net benefit. The perfectionist would claim that this would constitute a

12 Since the purpose of this argument is to save us from the Ridiculous Conclusion, it would be no use to invoke

an asymmetrical view about the value of suffering in order to defeat this claim.

change for the worse. However, such a change might be repeated a thousand times,

with a different person losing one of the best things in life at each stage. At the end of

all of these changes, everyone will be living at a higher welfare level, but nobody will

enjoy any of the best things in life. If each change in this set were a change for the

worse then the perfectionist would seem committed to the view that the whole

sequence constitutes a change for the worse13. However, everyone is now at a higher

welfare level. This too implies the Ridiculous Conclusion

It therefore seems that if perfectionism is to play any role in helping to explain or

avoid the Repugnant Conclusion then it will imply the Ridiculous Conclusion. Does

this tell against such a perfectionist view? I think not. I have already provided a

justification for an asymmetrical view about the value of bad things in this paper,

which would inevitably imply the ridiculous conclusion. I think a similar justification

can be provided for perfectionist value of the best things in life as well.

The kinds of goods that are often included amongst the best things in life by

perfectionists such as Parfit and Hurka – such as poetry, athletic prowess and

musical appreciation – are marked out by their level of sophistication. It is necessary

to develop skills and capacities in order to appreciate these in the correct way. They

may also be characterised by the ways in which they come to define a life, such as

fulfilling a life’s ambition, pursuing a religious calling or sharing a strong friendship.

To claim that some of these goods are of a special value without offering a further

justification can seem subjective and elitist. However, one thing that all of these

goods share is that the benefits they produce are not momentary, as those of goods

typically seen as the antithesis of perfection are, such as the ‘base pleasures’ of a

contented pig or the benefits of satisfying ones addictive cravings. Instead,

perfectionist goods are enjoyed across a series of strongly interconnected life stages.

Each of these states may not even be valuable on its own, but only as part of a wider

whole. For instance, experiences of training to perform a certain feat can be very

unpleasant but gain their value through their connections with the experience of

actually achieving that feat. It is plausible to maintain that the unpleasant

13 I am here assuming that being a change for the worse is a transitive relation, something that not everyone

accepts.

experiences of training tends to make a life, on the whole, worse and that it is only

from the perspective of the achiever, which is focussed on a particular part of one's

life rather than the life as a whole, that training becomes valuable. What these

connections define are the parts of lives in which certain activities and experiences

take on a special value. It is perfectly plausible that this would not be reflected in the

evaluation of these things by a person considering their life as a whole. In this way,

such things may tend to make a life more valuable, independently of their effect upon

its overall welfare level.

On the other hand, the value of some of these stages cannot be realised out of

context. An opera lover who experiences a sublime performance will value that

experience far more than somebody who does not love opera. The connection

between the psychological states associated with being a lover of opera, such as the

knowledge and experience required to appreciate the music or the intention to

engage with the music in a productive way, gives these states a far greater value than

they would otherwise have. Such a value, however, reflects our temporary

judgements about a certain experience or activity; they are not the evaluations a

person would have about their life as a whole. Furthermore, the temporal nature of

this value does not reflect some mere change in a person’s whims or preferences, but

a complex interaction between psychological states that can only be understood in

context. It is reasonable, I believe, that such a value would come in two parts. The

value these experiences have in improving a person’s welfare level, on the whole, and

the special additional value it has for the person at the time. This is the special value

that belongs only to the ‘best things in life’.

7. The hybrid theory and population axiology

Accepting a hybrid theory that would imply the Ridiculous Conclusion in certain

cases is, I have argued, a sufficient response to the Repugnant Conclusion. However,

it also allows us to avoid some of the paradoxes of population axiology that have been

proposed in recent years. Furthermore, it allows us to avoid these paradoxes without

implying any incoherence to our value judgements, as several other proposals have. I

will illustrate this point for two cases. First I will show how it is possible to avoid the

‘Mere Addition Paradox’ using such a theory, and then I will show how it is possible

to avoid the many other paradoxes suggest by Gustaf Arrhenius.

First, let us consider the Mere Addition Paradox. The paradox states that, for the

following three populations, A+ is at least as good as A and Z is at least as good as

A+, but Z is not at least as good as A:

Population A – a very large number of people with lives at welfare level 100

Population A+ – the same number of people with lives at level 100 and a much larger

number of people with lives at welfare level 5, a life that is ‘barely worth living’

Population Z – the same number of people as in population A+, all of whom have

lives at welfare level 10, a life that is also only barely worth living, such that this

population has more welfare overall than A+

This is illustrated below:

Figure 2: The Mere Addition Paradox

Let us assume that population A and population Z are related such that to claim that

Z was better than A would imply the Repugnant Conclusion. In this paper I have

argued that the best explanation for this fact is that, whilst the lives in A (and hence

the best off lives in A+) contain many of the best things in life, the lives in Z (and

hence the worst off lives in A+) contain either none of the best things in life or a

significant quantity of bad things.

It is claimed that A+ must be at least as good as A, since A+ can be formed from A by

a process of Mere Addition. This is the addition of “extra people 1) who have lives

worth living, 2) who affect no one else, and 3) whose existence does not involve social

injustice” (Parfit 1986: 420). However, I have already argued that mere addition can

make a population worse if the lives that are added contain a significant quantity of

bad things, such as suffering or frustration. This is because, if we accept an

asymmetrical view about the value of such things then whilst these lives might be

good for the people living them, they may nevertheless be bad all things considered.

Similarly, it is claimed that Z must be at least as good as A+, since Z contains more

welfare in total, a higher average welfare level and a more equal distribution of

welfare than A+ (Parfit 1986: 421). However, if we accept either perfectionism or an

asymmetrical view about the value of bad things then such considerations will only

imply that Z is at least as good as A if Z does not contain many fewer of the best

things in life or many more bad things.

It follows that either A+ will be worse than A or Z will be worse than A+. However,

which of these two will in fact be the case remains underdetermined by information

about their welfare levels. Instead, their value will depend on what sort of lives these

populations contain. There are two possibilities as follows.

If A+ were at least as good as A, then the worse off lives in A+ must not contain

significant quantities of bad things. However, Z is only at least as good as A+ if it

does not contain either many fewer of the best things in life or many more bad

things. Since the best off lives in A+, like the lives in A, are at a very high welfare

level, they must contain many of the best things in life. However, since the lives in Z

are at a low welfare level they will contain none of the best things in life unless they

also contain significant quantities of bad things. If the lives in Z do not contain any of

the best things in life then Z will be worse than A+. However, if the lives in Z contain

significant quantities of bad things then they must also be worse than the lives in A+,

since these lives must not contain significant quantities of bad things. Hence, we

would have no reason to accept that Z is at least as good as A+, despite the lives in Z

having more welfare.

On the other hand, if Z were at least as good as A+ then it must not contain many

fewer of the best things in life or many more bad things. However, if the lives in Z,

which are all at a low welfare level, are not to contain many fewer bad things than

those in A+ they must each contain a significant quantity of bad things. Hence, the

worst off lives in A+ must also contain a significant quantity of bad things, and the

addition of these lives would make a population worse. Hence, we would have no

reason to accept that A+ is at least as good as A.

It therefore follows that at least one of the steps in the mere addition paradox must

be incorrect. However, it should be noted that we have no way of knowing which step

is at fault, since we have no information about the kinds of life involved in each

population, and good reason to assume, ceteris paribus, that the principles in each

step is sound. Therefore, the sense of paradox that this case evokes is retained, whilst

the paradox itself dissolves once we appreciate how the makeup of the lives in each of

these populations can make a difference to our judgements about them.

The Mere Addition Paradox is not the only paradox in population axiology that

involves the Repugnant Conclusion. Gustaf Arrhenius has so far proven six such

impossibility results, many of which involve axioms that are much harder to reject

than those of the Mere Addition Paradox (Arrhenius Forthcoming: 311-357). All of

these results however invoke the following condition:

The Egalitarian Dominance Condition: If population A is a perfectly equal

population of the same size as population B, and every person in A has higher

welfare than every person in B, then A is better than B, other things being equal.

(Arrhenius forthcoming: 61)

Arrhenius states his conviction that this condition is “as uncontroversial as it gets in

population axiology”. However, this condition would be violated by any moral theory

that implied the Ridiculous Conclusion, since if lives at a higher welfare level could

have a value that is less than that of lives at a lower welfare level then this condition

clearly would not hold.

The hybrid theory I have proposed here supports the claim that lives at higher

welfare levels may have a value that is less than those at lower welfare levels, because

they may contain more bad things or fewer of the best things in life. Such a theory

therefore gives us reason to deny the Egalitarian Dominance Condition and so is able

to escape all of Arrhenius’ impossibility results simultaneously.

These are not the only impossibility results in population ethics (see for instance

Cowen 1996: 757-60). However, they remain a significant challenge to any

satisfactory population axiology. If a hybrid theory of the sort I have proposed here is

not only able to explain and avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, but also to avoid these

impossibility results, then this should count in its favour as well.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have considered some supposed answers to the Repugnant

Conclusion. It is often assumed that we can explain and avoid this conclusion by

appealing to the perfectionist claim that we especially value certain goods – the best

things in life – that are contained in lives whose level of welfare is very high.

However, I have shown that this could not be a sufficient response to the Repugnant

Conclusion. I have argued that we can neither explain nor avoid the Repugnant

Conclusion by appealing to perfectionism alone. Furthermore, I have argued that the

aggregation method we use for the value of the best things in life is irrelevant to this

problem. This is because it is possible that lives that are barely worth living will

nevertheless contain more of the best things in life than lives of a very high level of

welfare. Instead, I have suggested that only a hybrid theory, which incorporates both

perfectionism and an asymmetrical view, could be a sufficient answer to the

Repugnant Conclusion. I believe that such a hybrid theory is justified independently

of its ability to answer the Repugnant Conclusion, and I have defended such a theory

from the objection that it implies the so-called Ridiculous Conclusion. Finally, I have

shown how the way in which this hybrid theory answers the Repugnant Conclusion

would allow us to avoid certain paradoxes and impossibility theories in population

ethics14.

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