John Gray: preference

Transcript context

…If you did, in fact, have the means to direct a billion dollars to any cause, what cause would it be? It’s a very good question. I guess it would be animal conservation, conservation of environments, or at least of species that are rapidly disappearing now because I did say earlier on that a lot of my value judgments are aesthetic. I think a world which was denuded of, let’s say, of 10 billion human beings — it’s a Parfitian question. You recognize this, though it’s not a thought experiment which he ever did as far as I know. I read his works, and I knew him slightly, but I don’t think he ever did this experiment. Would a world in which a very large number of human beings not only existed but had very high levels of well-being . . . In other words, I’m not talking about the famous repugnant conclusion, whereby if you have a vast world, and everybody’s lives are barely worth living, and you add up the utility, it could be better than a smaller world with many fewer human beings whose lives were much higher. I’m not talking about that at all. I’m thinking of a different thought experiment that he never did, to my knowledge. Never involved himself in, which is, between two worlds, one in which you have an enormous number of people, let’s say human beings, 100 billion, and all their lives are, in most respects at least, very worth living, but in which there are no other species; and a different world in which there’s a much smaller human population but a thriving biosphere around it . . . Now, I’m not trying to judge this because I’m not a utilitarian in terms of desire, satisfaction, or some other utilitarian theory of value. But the second world, the world in which there are fewer human beings living well, but in what John Stuart Mill — by the way, who tried to be a consistent utilitarian but never was — he said without what he called flowery wastes — this is in his 1848 Principles of Political Economy — he said the world would be barren and, he thought, almost not worth living in, and I share that view. Would you be biased toward conserving the lives of intelligent mammals and maybe octopuses or not?…

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