Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. I feel like a weakness of the repugnant conclusion kind of thought experiment is that it ties together multiple issues. One thing that people don’t like about it is the blandness of it, the stability of the welfare that people have in that world. If you imagine where we could be in a repugnant-conclusion kind of world, where humans — we have ups and downs. On net though, our lives may be only weakly positive, but people don’t say it’s terrible that there’s more people that have lives of the kind that we do or not desirable for civilization to continue just because our lives could be much better in principle. We could imagine beings that have 100 times the welfare that we do over their lives. By comparison to them, this world is kind of the repugnant conclusion, basically. That’s right. We have intuitions across a lot of different features of the utility distribution, and some of them, I suspect, are implanted in us in a false way and not really valid for moral theory. I suspect another problem there is that people worry whenever their welfare is too close to zero because they feel that it’s going to go negative, and negative experiences weigh very heavily on people’s minds. If they were certain that it would be positive, maybe people’s intuitions would go a bit differently.…

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