Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Do you think that calling the repugnant conclusion the repugnant conclusion, kind of begged the question, and in fact, it’s maybe not as repugnant as people think? I don’t think Parfit, in naming it the repugnant conclusion, was himself begging the question. He was trying to draw people’s attention to it with a vivid word. I think he fully well understood it might not be repugnant. But if you think about a life in the repugnant conclusion, well, you’re alive for a few minutes, someone feeds you a potato, you hear some Muzak, and you pass away. Well, isn’t that better than nothing? In my view, those are not human lives as we understand the terms, even if they look like humanoid beings. So it’s getting back to the question of comparing a billion bees to one person having a migraine headache, and I just don’t think we can do it. That moral realism can’t handle utility comparisons across very different kinds of beings. 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.…

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