I blurted out loud "Worse!" when that second world was proposed just to hear Julia say obviously its not worse a few seconds later... I don't see this as a paradox as I disagree with its assumptions. How it is not worse? The overall amount of suck being experienced has gone up. way up. That's worse! Its hard for me to believe its the same or better.
you are both wrong. The "happiness" and "population size" variables are not linearly correlated. They are constrained by living space and resource cycling efficiency. The progress of technology has expanded both over our history as a species which has increased our population capacity and 'happiness' capacity. The solution isn't to reduce the population to get more happiness, the solution is to get more living space and resource cycling efficiency by expanding our frontiers spacewards. Mass construction of island and continent sized habitats capable of sustaining ecosystems. This is the solution to the "paradox". The paradox only exists if you limit humanity to earth and it's resources which is a suicide pact in the long run.
That was pretty much my reaction, as well. I even mapped it out on a spreadsheet to verify my intuition. As you add more happy people (at varying levels of happiness), the total happiness goes up, but the *average* happiness goes down. Since the average is trending downwards, I can't agree with the supposition that world b or world c are better than world a, and thus, I don't see a paradox here. The premise is flawed, therefore the conclusion is flawed.
The solution is simply to ask yourself which world you would rather live in if you would be a random person in it. You'd always choose World A over World B because it'd give you the better chance to have maximum happiness.
The ontological point is that it fails to define things. What is "happy"? And what are these "things" (sic!) that get better or worse? And who is the judge who decides that these things change in whatever direction? Or whether a life is "worth living"? How do you measure "happiness"? It's just a muddled mess of badly defined premises, which utterly lack any real argumentation I can put up deductions like that too: (a) Parties make people happy; (b) "Orgy" is just another name for "a bigger, better and wilder party"; (c) We need more happiness in this world. Conclusion: what this world needs is more orgies.. Now THAT'S a "Repugnant Conclusion"!
My view is that human happiness is narcotic in nature. Free smack, what could go wrong?! What goes wrong is that we're unable to see ugly truths about ourselves, hence we can't correct them, hence they get worse. Pathological optimism is deadly.
I take objection to every single "common sense" principle at 4:00 1. ignores the decline in resources as the population increases 2. can't be sustained without assuming nothing is wrong with premise 1 and total happiness cannot be increased by the average unless it's below average 3. any number of very happy people is preferable to the same amount of unhappy people and adding unhappy people always lowers happiness.
The "better than" operator is defined differently in each step. In the second step you care about *average* happiness, and in the first step you have to disregard it. If you explicitly state that average happiness counts, then adding less-happy people makes the first step invalid; and if you state that average happiness doesn't matter, then the second step doesn't follow.
@@nigeltaylor72 I’m just gonna reply to you instead of OP since they commented 3 years ago and you just replied lol This criticism is flawed. On both transitions it’s total utility that’s being preferred, not median or average utility. The first transition obviously takes the side of total utility, I needn’t explain that. But for the second step I can see why it might seem like it’s now valuing the average. It appears as though it’s taking two groups at differing levels, balancing them out, and calling that an improvement. Well, first of all, the average isn’t actually increasing if you just do what I described, so that would more accurately just be a meaningless transition, or perhaps an argument for justice, which is distinct from utility entirely. But more importantly, look closer at what’s happened here. Scenario C is not a bar of height halfway between the two bars in Scenario B. No, it’s higher than that. The total area of Scenario C’s bar is bigger than the combined areas of the two bars in Scenario B. Why is this? It’s because giving to those in need makes more of a difference than those that are already satisfied. It’s an idea taken from economics, as with most of Utilitarianism: Decreasing Marginal Utility. If you’re giving away a free TV, it’s gonna make a bigger difference if you give it to the person who only owns a radio than to the person that already owns two TVs. So taking 15% of the taller bar’s utility and giving it to the shorter bar results in the smaller bar gaining 35% utility in this example, raising the total utility by doing so
@@jaybee27D what you say is solid, with a minor quibble. You can’t do interpersonal utility comparisons. So you can say that, it would matter more to a person if they only had a radio than if they already had two TVs, and you can say person x is willing to give up more stuff for it, but you can’t say it matters more to person x than person y.
@@relativisticvel I get that in reality it’s almost impossible to definitively compare utility in an objective sense between people. But in the abstract, surely we all agree that there is some objective difference in value between how two people view something, whether we can accurately measure it or not. And while an individual with two TVs could quite possibly personally value a third TV more than the individual with the radio would, it’s when you look at huge swaths of the population that abnormalities like that average out, and it becomes reasonable to say that a policy that gives TVs to people with only radios would increase the total utility more than a policy that gives TVs to people with two already.
This is the only response that resonates with me in these comments. Because the premise for calling C better than B is that AVERAGE happiness has gone up. So for this to be true, we must accept that average happiness is what counts. But if average happiness is what counts, then it went significantly down from A to B. Since the average in A is A / 1 = A While the average in B is (A + 0,5*A)/2 = (1,5*A)/2 = 0,75*A
To address some common points in the comments so far: 1. Some people said, "But aren't unhappy people *negative* value?" No, most people who have unhappy lives still prefer existence to non-existence. Most people would have to get very, very unhappy (like in chronic, extreme pain) before they'd think it was better to not exist. 2. Someone pointed out that the move from A->B involves a decrease in average happiness. That's true! One way to resolve the paradox is to say that it's bad to add additional people who are slightly less happy than the average existing person. Most of us find it implausible, though, to say that adding an additional happy person to the world is bad. 3. Some people are just saying the argument is obviously wrong because the conclusion is wrong. That's not how you resolve a paradox, though -- you have to explain what's wrong with the argument.
Julia Galef "Most of us find it implausible, though, to say that adding an additional happy person to the world is bad." I'm sympathetic with this intuition when stated like that, but perhaps it's because it comes across as cruel to speak of the world as being better off without certain people in it, but this isn't really what we're comparing. When asking if one world is better than another, we need to ask "For whom?", but world A and world B come with different sets of agents making those judgments. It makes no sense to speak of world A being worse for the people who don't exist in it. On what basis can we judge which world is better except by appealing to the individual judgements of the people living in them? Then what do we do if the people living in them are not the same?
Julia Galef Human beings have a survival drive that is not dependent on an individual's experience of happiness. The problem comes from associating drive to live with happiness as if they are directly correlated. Merely because a group of people do not want to be dead does not imply that their misery can add up to "happiness" in any any quantity at all much less that it could add up to even one instance of "blissful ecstasy". This seems more like an exercise in the misunderstanding of variables, their relationships, and their ability to be quantified.
Julia Galef I don't agree with the implicit assumption you're making that the utilitarian value of a population is simply the sum of the individual utilitarian values. Other schemes give better results. For example, if instead you have a minimum individual target utilitarian value 't' which you subtract from the value of each of the individuals, then sum those, then you get much better results which are much less affected by population size.
Julia Galef The idea of "adding happy people" being morally good doesn't hold up very well. Pleasure is only good because it is the alternative to pain. There's an asymmetry here: adding unhappy people is bad, but _not_ adding happy people is neutral (or even good, considering the happy person would likely be prone to bad experiences at some point or another). We have a moral obligation to avoid adding unhappy people. We have no such obligation to add more happy ones. Of course a lot of philosophers wouldn't like this, because they want their ethical theories to be nice and tidy and symmetrical. But you can't have your cake and eat it too.
Julia Galef Hi Julia - great videos by the way! Just a clarification actually: When you start talking about preferences, are you assuming a very tight connection between happiness and the preference to go on living? Something like: one would only (rationally) have the preference to go on living if they possessed some minimal level of happiness (which necessarily adds value to the possible world in which they exist)? I'm just wondering what, if anything, turns on this...
*Short comment*: Define "better". *Long comment*: From the persoective of an alien observer, this paradox comes from the fact that the notion of "better" is not a rational value but a partially emotional heuristic, a simplification of a multidimensional vector of sometimes conflicting "values". In this case it unites two distinct "values": The number of specimen (kind regards from the genetic imperative), and the average emotional state of the population. The first one represents the interests of the species as a whole, the second one the interests of the individuals. If you try to combine both values, the conclusion depends on how you combine them. To simplify, the few-happy-earthlings situation is better with "average happyness" metrics, the second one is better with "total happyness" metrics. (If you follow the step-by-step argumentation, you'll see that the total happyness increases with each step). Besides this, there is one point that is neglected in this paradox: Time. In other words, the possibility to improve the situation. 1) If we assume that the many-many-unhappy-earthlings situation is necessarily perpetual, then it would be rational to neglect the unhappiness, as unhappyness is an emothion, par of the eartlings' goal-setting mechanism with the purpose of making things better. So, if things can't possibly be made better, then unhappyness, as unpleasant it might be for you earthlings, is utterly irrelevant. In this case, the many-many-unhappy-earthlings situation is indeed better, measured by the genetic imperative, (No, I'm not cynical, I'm only an alien.) 2) If, on the other side, things are not doomed, if there is a real possibility to make things better, then the unhappyness is not even a bad thing, as it is provides the urge to improve the situation of the population. So, someone like me who has faith in the capacity of earthlingkind to improve their situation might come to the conclusion that the many-many-unhappy-earthlings is "better", as it might lead to a many-many-happy-earthlings situation. So, in both cases, one might come come to the conclusion that the many-many-unhappy-earthlings situation is actually "better". Which leads to the question whether the "repugnancy" of this solution is actually a rational conclusion by system 2 or rather an emotional reaction - in other words, a heuristic shortcut created by system 1? (As your system 1 is famously bad with big numbers and functions by creating prototypes, my guess is that it evaluates the many-many-unhappy-earthlings situation by imagining a small number of suffering earthlings, which evokes a strong negative emotional response (pity) and leads to the heuristic judgement "That's repugnant", which is then sent to system 2 and initially accepted by most earthlings without questioning. Am I right ?)
Personally, as a divine angel crafted from the chaos at universe creation, and the trifling of you odd biological machines is transient in the greater story of the cosmos, I will say You have articulated yourself well “alien” and I am pleased in that your articulation has convinced me.
Ah, but there is a third option when you consider time: 3) Things can become "better", but only through the allocation of scarce resources which becomes more difficult the more people there are competing for them. If an increase of people degrades their environmental and social sustainability, making it harder for them to survive and thrive, then an alien observer could very well conclude that a system with only a few happy people is better.
@@Hypernefelos Though true in the short term, I disagree given the number of humans vs scale of things. Though It might be true that resources are at one point finite. The improvement in efficacy of usage and quality of usage, along with the sheer scale of the available resources once the small minded bipeds start exploiting the cosmos - infers that the ability for humanity to begin running into a TRUE finite resource paradox may or may not approach the heat death of the universe. Therefore more humans = More problem solving power. Even assuming their selfish biological imperatives keep them constrained to personal improvement. That which 1 human invents to improve his own life can usually improve other's as well.
@@fencserx9423 All that is true conditionally; history shows us that at some times such optimism is well founded but at other times it is not. Whenever the population rises uncontrollably in a pre-modern country only to be suddenly hit by an unusually dry season what usually results is mass starvation, not someone coming up with a new solution to the problem. The conditions for technological progress are not simply related to population size; there's a host of other necessary conditions, some of which may in fact be impeded by the social and practical effects of overpopulation. To give one example, the emergence of a culture of independent thinking and efficient decentralized funding of new ideas can be correlated with historical conditions arising from labour shortage and the transferring of economic power from aristocratic gentry to city councils. In societies where life is cheap there's less impetus to invest too much in any single one, unless they belong to some kind of aristocracy - and then we have all sorts of carry-on effects on which ideas become fashionable to have and for whose benefit. The repugnant conclusion makes no assumptions about these conditions, focusing only on a general theory of morality. As for our current state, we can certainly hope that we'll continue fixing our old problems faster than we create new ones, but there's no strict rationality behind such a hypothesis; it's just an assumption that things will carry on as they always have, when it comes to science and technology. That could well be true but humanity has screwed up so many times in the past that I wouldn't bet all my money on it. We're not out in space yet, and I wouldn't assign a zero probability to us somehow inadvertently causing a Venusian-like runaway greenhouse effect, sterilizing everything in the process. Small yes, I'd like to think we're not that stupid and the system is not near enough such a tipping point. But not zero.
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I totally agree. I would also add that even if you could quantify happiness this way, people's subjective experiences can't be summed. Whether there are 1 million or 10 billion happy people in the world, each person only experiences the happiness of one person; they don't somehow amalgamate into a mega-person who experiences the happiness of the whole.
@@jugbrewer I don’t quite get what your point is. Should we only consider what we know our personal happiness is? Surely not, we all agree the moral and therefore preferable action is whenever you help others to feel happy. Unless you’re going to tell me that the only reason you ever help others at a given time is because you think it would make you happier than serving yourself. So shouldn’t we try to calculate what would make as many people as happy as they can be?
@@jaybee27D Yeah from your response it looks like there was a misunderstanding. My point wasn't at all that we shouldn't care about others' happiness, my point was that there is no such thing as "total happiness" as described in this video because people each only experience their single subjective consciousness. I care about the happiness of other people, but I don't care whether there are 10 billion happy people or 10 billion and one happy people in the world necessarily; the number is arbitrary. When I help someone solve a problem for example, I do it because it will make them happier, not because it will increase the "total happiness" of the world in an abstract sense. Hope that clears up my point.
@@jugbrewer which people do you want to make happy though? Just someone you know or if you’re asked whether you want any random person you don’t know to be happy will you say yes? In that sense, you want every person to be happier. You want to raise the happiness of the total number of people, so what’s wrong with saying you want to raise the total happiness?
@@jaybee27D Again I think you've misunderstood my point. Not your fault of course, youtube comments lend themselves to misunderstanding. This video wasn't about "should we try to make people happy," and neither was my comment. The point the video was making was that this paradox suggests that it's better to have a large number of people whose lives are barely worth living, compared to a small number of perfectly happy people. My argument against that is that you can't actually assert that there's such a thing as "total happiness," because each person only has the subjective experience of one person. Subjective experiences, in my view, don't amalgamate into an overarching sum total. So the world with fewer but happier people would actually be the better world to live in, from the point of view of each of the people in that world. Your comments are approaching my replies as if I was saying that we shouldn't try and make people happy, which is not relevant to the video or my comments.
I immediately took problem with the premise of the first transition. It's even clearer when you do it the 2nd time around. Adding more people who are less happy is worse! Even if they're still somewhat happy.
Assuming that something experiences no-loss/pure transition is a massive and purely theoretical assumption in any model. In reality, transitions of any kind are transformative. Add bricks onto a wall and eventually it will collapse under its own weight. Even if you only care about the quantity of bricks and not the wall, with enough weight they'll start to crush down into gravel. And so on. They're good playful thought experiments, but they're useless for anything more than being a kind of Koan to get people thinking about the topic in a new way.
Think about someone you know who doesn't have everything they want but still leads an okay life and does no harm. Would the world be better without him or her?
Exactly, a world where everyone is very happy is literally a utopian paradise. World B is just a really great world. World A is clearly better. The only argument for the contrary, that I can see, is if you place some sort of inherent value in life itself, regardless of quality. I don't believe in that.
My happiness has been increased by this video and the quality of the comments. Thank you for making my life better and making the world a better place.
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I think the biggest assumptions for this paradox is: 1) All forms of happiness/pleausre is good, all forms of suffering is bad 2) all resources needed for "happiness" are finite or zero sum 3) resources that causes happiness/misery are material 4) Happiness or misery should be measured multiplicatively. If two people are suffering, that's twice the suffering than if one person was suffering, and therefore adding more people necessitates multiplying the suffering according the number of people who exist and could be suffering. 5) Due to the multiplication of suffering, the paradox leads to one or two assumptive conclusions: either population control or poverty eradication, where neither can fully inform on the total essence of the human condition. 6) Why would assertion number 3 require a scenario where most people are suffering and a few are happy? Where I stand, unless those assumptions are properly addressed, the paradox is built on flawed, 1st world-centric logic.
It seems to me that you are assuming that more people is better in and of itself. I don't see why you would conclude that. Why is it better to have 1bil extra people that aren't as happy as you show in ex B and C? What is it about having a greater quantity that is "better"?
Mads Rasmussen the assumption that goes into the "more people is better" comes from the utilitarian principle to increase the overall amount of happiness. So if there is an additional person that has a happiness of >0, then the overall amount of happiness increases, and therefore the world with this person in it is "better".
STSgerman Interesting. So according to Utilitarianism adding 10 people who each spend their entire life in a tiny jail cell would make the world better because their lives could potentially be worse (fx. if they were also being tortured daily)? I don't see how that could be a convincing argument.
Mads Rasmussen The problem with the thinking is "how do we measure happiness?". Usually you add up all the happiness and subtract all the suffering. And when the suffering outweighs the happiness, the sum would be
Mads Rasmussen it's not a question of "could his life be worse?" But rather a question of "is his life a net positive or net negative experience to him?". Theres also a spectrum of how utilitarians compare joy to suffering and thus also what they'd consider net positive. On one end you'd argue that bad experiences are meaningless as long as you have some positive experiences, and in the other end of the spectra there's negative utilitarism which views suffering as extremely harmful. Some negative utilitarians go as far as to argue for antinatalism ie that it's bad or even immoral to have kids because they probably will suffer at some point in their life. But most utilitarians are somewhere between those extremes.
The fallacies in these premises are: 1. the unspoken assumption that a larger population is better than a smaller population, 2. that total happiness is a quantifiable and distrubutable over a given size of population.
4:48 I've pondered the utilitarianist implications as well, and how to tweak it to avoid the repugnant conclusion, and realized that the repugnant conclusion disappears if you account for finite resources and finite minimum consumption. If you had infinite resources, then there's no reason additional people should be less happy (as the premise of the argument assumes), so clearly finite resources are in play. I haven't looked for anyone else with this conclusion, but I'd be very surprised if I'm the first. A single human being exactly on the threshold of life worth/not worth living still consumes a finite amount of resources to maintain, with resources above that amount contributing to happiness. We also know that there are diminishing returns in happiness as resources increase. I don't know what that diminishing curve looks like, but it's sufficient for my purposes that it does exist. With these conclusions, the total happiness becomes a calculus problem. You're trying to find the maximum happiness per unit resources, and from there you can calculate the ideal population size given the resources you have available. Having more or fewer people than this results in reducing the total happiness. Fewer, and the resources aren't being converted to happiness as efficiently, more, and you're losing excess resources to that minimum maintenance cost. Below the maximum, increasing the number of people decreases individual happiness, but increases total happiness. Above the maximum, increasing the number of people decreases individual happiness, _and_ decreases total happiness. As a result, the A->B step in the original version of the problem breaks down. The "Not worse" assertion fails when you move past the maximum.
The only issue is that happiness is experienced on a personal level, not collectively. True, collective experiences can lend towards happiness or unhappiness in each person, but ultimately, it will be experienced individually inside of each person. So, there is really only one question that we need to answer: Is there a moral imperative to have more populated earth as opposed to a less populated one? I can’t see why there would be. I have no moral obligation to bring as many people into the world as I can. Therefore, if we take a “quality over quantity” approach, we’ll end up with a world of highly happy people without compromising. Furthermore, if we did go with a large number of people who live mostly miserable lives, I would argue that we are doing more harm than good, since we have chosen to produce significant pain for them. And for what? Simply so there can be more people? This doesn’t seem to make much sense to me…
I find this quote from CS Lewis’s ‘The Problem of Pain’ interesting in the context of this paradox. I don’t agree with him about the highest individual experience of pain being the sum total of all pain in the universe, but I think it’s a good point that pain doesn’t heap on other pain but sits alongside it: “We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the “unimaginable sum of human misery”. Suppose that i have a toothache of intensity x: and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also begin to have a toothache of intensity x. you may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2x. but you must remember that no one is suffering 2x: search all time and all space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone’s consciousness. there is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe. the addition of a million fellow-sufferers adds no more pain.”
Well, it's annoying to confirm that someone got there before me (and 80 years ago), but I came to this very same conclusion. In my example, I offer imagining a universe in which only one person exists and they are suffering. Then, imagine another person is added to this universe and they are also suffering. Is there more suffering in the universe? Yes. But does this matter in a meaningful sense in the way we care about suffering? What we care about with suffering is that someone experiences it, and at what amount. You cannot add the suffering of these two distinct beings together, because what matters about suffering is the experience that is had. Person A cannot experience the suffering of Person B, and vice versa, so no one is having the sum of both of their experiences. I called them Suffering Units (SU); Person A has 9SU and Person B has 7SU, so there is 16SU in the universe. But no one is experiencing 16SU. So, this suffering calculus is incoherent. I came to this position in debate with vegans who claim rhetorical force through their assertions about the number of animals killed for consumption (as though the sheer number makes it more morally significant). I refer to this as incoherent suffering calculus, but I suppose I won't need a name for it now, as it already has one. I figured someone else had thought of it already, I just hadn't found that person...until today. Thanks to you. 🙏
Regardless of this magical sum of suffering, this does not conveniently dispel the fact each individual experiences pain/unhappiness, which is the entire point of ethics and morality.
@@vermin5367 Sure, individuals can experience suffering. I don't see that this is intended to "dispel" this fact. I'm not sure I understand your point.
It makes me happy that there are people like Julia who make videos like this, and that there are other people who watch them. Gives me a tiny sliver of hope for humanity
The paradox might rise from the "measurement of better or not is not clearly defined". The "common sense" and the "deduced conclusion" is seemingly implying: "The larger the population becomes, the happiness value becomes greater(the measurement of happiness is not consistent)." Like it's saying "it's easy to main happiness in small population, but it's hard in gazillion; Hence we need to balance out for the latter." It helps more if you can assign the scores on happiness, if it's done objectively. So let's say "extremely happy" is assigned to 10; "comfortably happy" is 8; "moderate happy" is 5 . Then let's follow first example of the 3 worlds in the video. So world A is a place consists of people who feels 10 of the happiness; World B is a place consists of half of the people who feel 10 and the other half feel 5; World C is where everyone feels 8. Now, suppose you are the outsider of the three worlds, and you get to ask one person in all three worlds, randomly. If it's world A, you then have 100% of the chance to hear the person say "10"; If it's world B, you then have 50% of the chance to hear"10", and the other 50% to hear "5"; If it's world C, you then have 100% of the chance to hear "8". So if it's measured this way, anyone would agree A > C > B The measurement of "better" or not, is not measured by "chance of being happy" or "which of the three would one prefer to live in". Instead it's measured by something else, which is undefined.
You said the addition of more, less happy people is “clearly not worse” but I think it’s more accurate to say that adding more less happy people is not clearly better, and possibly worse.
What if the universe already has a group of beings who are much happier than us, and we are that group of people who are less happy--does that make our existence in the universe a bad thing?
@@alexmallen5765 , yes, if the other group is sustainable in the way it is. That sustainability is always at question though. On Earth, there is a population at which, adding more people clearly makes all of our existence less sustainable. So, at some point in the real world, outside of a question like this, adding more people however happy they are temporarily, is less sustainable; so, the question can not be asked at some point in the not distant future. I think with regard to the real world, that kind of issue is very relevant. So, this question that she posed is not really applicable to the real world by itself as stated. Or, to be asked, one would have to know much more.
Also, I realize my explanation of why B->C is "better" might be confusing. A different way it's stated sometimes is that B->C involves both more overall happiness and greater *equality,* which is a point I didn't make in the video.
Julia Galef it doesn't make any sense to me why would C be better than B. At best, as you pointed out on A->B transition, C doesn't make things worse off than they were in B, although even that'd be a hard sell in my perspective.
+Julia Galef I sincerely hope that no supporters of this supposed "paradox" ever become politically empowered in any way. How you could fail to tear apart this argument is beyond me, and a case to be made for bad philosophy being the method by which a nation can justifiably enslave the masses. Horribly narrow reasoning.
I think Rawls gets the solution, and this bit of explanation keys into that. Using the veil of ignorance, it's pretty clear that if you don't know who you're going to be in one of these worlds, A is preferable to C, which is itself preferable to B. Happiness fails as a singular fundamental value. B *is* worse than A, because it introduces injustice.
I don't buy into the seeming assumption that a life which is at least more happy than sad can add to the total value of a world. There seems to be a shrouded conflation of quantitative and qualitative values. The measure of the worlds is a qualitative one in essence; we're trying to establish which world is 'best'. Giving 'happiness' an arbitrary numerical value is a fallacy as it presupposes the idea that quantitative value can supplement qualitative in this type of scenario. What this seeming paradox is then, is a refutation of that very notion
Genuine question: A->B is decreasing the average happiness, how is that not worse? I disagree with the premiss that more people (no matter how not-unhappy) = better.
In fact, average maximizing views have been proposed as a solution to the repugnant conclusion, the mere addition paradox, and other problems of population ethics (see mainly Parfit 1984). The problem with this video is that it is highly oversimplified (population ethics is a really complicated field and explaining every matter in that field in 6 minutes seems... rather complicated to say the least). But let us put that aside and focus on your question. I assume you don't believe average happiness is all that matters but for simplicity I'll assume this is correct. In other words, a situation A in which the average happines is higher is better (or at least not worse) than a situation B in which the average happiness is lower, other things being equal and all things considered. If this is so, then a population C in which many billions of individuals with lives well worth living exist is much worse than a population D in which just a few of them with a slightly better quality of life exist. Many believe (myself included) that this is really hard to accept. This issue is pretty problematic, but it might not be fatal for average maximizing views. After all, as you have claimed it seems evident that D (or A in your case) is at least better than C (or B in your case) in one important respect and this supports average maximizing views. However, if you believe that decreasing average happines is bad, your view entails what Arrhenius called the sadistic conclusion (see Arrhenius 2000). Imagine two stable populations with a fixed level of happines E and F. You can either (1) add individuals with net-negative lives to such populations or (2) add individuals with net-positive lives to such populations. According to average maximizing views, it is better if you do (1) instead (2). This is untenable. There is no way adding lives not worth living makes a population better than adding lives worth living, but average views imply this (if you don't see this, as long as you add less individuals with net-negative lives you reduce the average less than if you add more individuals with net-positive lives). Average maximizing views have other very perplexing implications but this should partially answer your question. Population ethics is terribly complicated so don't expect much from a 6 minute video or from my explanation. If you are really interested, I recommend you read my references. Parfit is particularly accesible to people with no ethical background! P.S. Sorry for the bad english and the somewhat lame and messy explanation. I'm pretty tired today already (from reading and writing about population ethics btw!) and didn't recheck really well what I've written. Hope that helped a bit :)
@@TheJunkerOne I had the same question, and this almost makes sense, but you lost me on the "as long as you add less individuals with net-negative lives you reduce the average less than if you add more individuals with net-positive lives", doesn't adding more net-positive live always increase the average, and adding net-negative lives always decrease the average?
@@claranoggle No, that's incorrect. This one is a little tricky so allow me to explain it for you with a highly oversimplified example. Imagine this two populations (also assume that the neutral level in which a life is neither positive nor negative = 0): A: x = 20, y = 5, z = 4, w = 3, p = 2 (20+5+4+3+2/5 = average 6.8) B: k = 20, r = -5 (20-5/2 = average 7.5) In sum, to calculate the average wellbeing of a population you aggregate first the wellbeing of every individual belonging to the population (that is, x, y, z... and such in my oversimplified example) and then you divide the resulting total amount of wellbeing by the number of individuals in that population. Since in population B there are less individuals, you divide by a shorter number and because of that the average is higher in B and, thus, B would be better than A according to Average Maximizing Views. I know this seems terribly counterintuitive but that's how averaging works. This method is applied widely in economics and other areas of social sciencies and, fortunately, such a method is very intuitive in many other cases. It just happens that, when applied to population ethics and many aspects of equality/inequality (see Temkin 1993) it works terribly bad, and this is one of thoses cases. Hope that explains this issue, have a good day :)
Lemme say it better, sorry for the double post. At the step where you create World C as being comparably better to world B, the metrics you use are the total happiness (the sum of all measures of happiness of people) and average happiness are now higher. Yet this was not applied to the first step of creating world B from world A. A's total happiness < B's total happiness, but A's average happiness > B's average happiness. Leaving aside the fact that happiness would be a near-impossible thing to quantify, if you could how would these two measurements actually help you in any argument when the two dials swing wildly different directions like this?
reishvedaur I agree. The only time when an increase in total happiness is preferable is when it corresponds to an increase in average happiness, when the population remains constant and total happiness increases as in B to C for example. I think this point becomes more obvious when you ask whether two worlds would be equally good if they have the same total happiness but different population sizes. My intuition would be that the world in which the happiness was shared more thinly among a greater number of people would be less desirable than a world in which the same amount of happiness was shared among fewer people. Exchange happiness for food or any other resource and you would get the same intuition.
reishvedaur cavalrycome This matches my intuition as well. The problem seems to be with the assumption A -> B is 'not worse'. *However*, if you take the converse view (that adding more people whose lives are not as good makes the world *worse*), then you must conclude that the best possible world is one with one extremely-super-mega-ultra-happy person, or maybe a small group of such people. This is not quite as "morally repugnant" but still seems slightly odd. (Remembering that by "happiness" I mean not just pleasure or even emotional happiness, but a satisfaction of values that we don't yet quite know how to define but still want to speak about).
No, the assumption is that you have two possible metrics to score things by: total happiness, and average happiness. If there is a world where there is only one person and that person is at maximum happiness, then the measurement of total happiness and average happiness are both x. If you then add one more person who is equally happy to that world, then total happiness is 2x and average is x. The only way to then measure which of these two worlds is better is to say that total happiness is the metric by which you should measure things. But if you instead added one person whose life is abject misery to that world, the total happiness would STILL increase while the average would decrease. But how can this world be said to be better? It could easily be said, then, that total happiness is not the metric you should use. Which then means that the repugnant conclusion, that a world of people who are almost miserable but where there are a lot of them is better than a world where everyone is amazingly happy but there's only a small number of them, falls apart, because the only way you could say that the miserable world is better is by using an invalid metric.
Dude, you put this far more eloquently than I was able to. I was tempted to just go with "What are you on about? This makes absolutely f*** all sense!".
To me it seems like the goalposts have shifted. The first world is one where happiness is the ideal. The subsequent worlds are ones where existence is the highest ideal. The conclusion then becomes that existence with an average happiness is better on average than a world with uneven happiness. For it to become more obvious, substitute the example of people and happiness with food and decay. The logic would have you believe that it's better to have a basket full of rotten apples than one good apple, as long as the rotten apples didn't outright kill you after eating them.
I was with you until the apples thing. Literally worse than comparing apples with oranges. If you're really really hungry and the apples won't kill you, then more is better even if they're bad apples. The people's happiness is not a measure of whether they're any use to anyone else.
This is assuming quantity of quality is better than quality of quantity. Which is a pretty wobbly assumption. It's much fairer to go by percentages. 100% of happy people in world A is better than 90% of happy people and 10% of unhappy people in world B, even if B has a high enough population to exceed world A in overall "pleasure units".
average utilitarianism leads to the opposite kind of problem: it entails that it is better for one person to be very happy than for a million people to be just happy
The premise seems to be "unhappy people who already exist prefer to continue existing THEREFORE creating new people is a net good even if they'll be unhappy". And, um, no. "worth living" is a VERY low bar and NOT a sufficient threshold to morally justify bringing that life into existence in the first place. It's an elegant argument, with an arguable conclusion, but it's built on an entirely erroneous foundation, IMO.
Well these are our intuitions regarding the last world in the series sure. I think the argument can be made more inuitive by changing the first world: suppose it only had 10 people in it to start off with but each world increased the about by a billion. Surely you'd accept that a billion happy and 10 maximally happy people is better than the world with just ten people? If you do you're force marched to the conclusion.
Think more the Hardest way as *•Back to Basics:* which simply means a return to previously held values of decency Vs Think more the Hardest way as *•Backroom boy:* which denotes one who works in anonymity in an organisation while others take on more public roles.
I think you could solve the paradox simply by assigning values to the emotional states in the same way we refer to them linguistically: i.e., happy = positive, unhappy = negative, neither happy nor unhappy (the straight mouth smiley) = zero. It seems to me that being so miserably unhappy as to want to be dead is not simply a low level of happiness that approaches but never reaches zero; it is actually unhappiness which can be quantified with negative numbers.
Big agree. Defining a life as “being worth living” and “miserable” is not only unintuitive, but contradictory. We don’t use “miserable” to refer to people who can be content with their lives due to a ratio of pleasure and suffering that is barely tipped over to the side of suffering. Misery describes a feeling marked by the presence of suffering, not the lack of pleasure.
This is just a lack of clarity in the language used by the presenter. All those people mentioned are having positive experiences, just not all to the same level of positivity.
Recently, David Benatar has written two books, "Better Never to Have Been" and "The Human Predicament", dealing with the question of whether any lives at all are ever worth starting.
I don't know that no one is happy but I would agree even so (with no sentience, really). I don't think you can really add people's happiness together; their individual happiness is separate-- they're separate people. And some people are miserable, my personal happiness doesn't help them. I don't think it's at all incumbent on me to bring a life into the world, so if I ever wanted children, I'd adopt; if not able to adopt, I wouldn't have children. No offense intended toward anyone. Peace.
This reminds me of what seems to be a paradox in Peter Singer's argument about our obligations to alleviate World Hunger. Through a series of Utilitarian arguments and counter arguments against potential objections, he contends that we in wealthier nations have a moral obligation to save people who are starving to death abroad. Further for every life we could have saved, but didn't, that's morally equal to murder. He argues that you should give up as much as your income as you can until, were you to give up anymore, there would be sufficient damage done you yourself or your dependents that it would offset the benefits of your donation. He gives some concrete numbers (in 1978 dollars). The poverty level for a family of 4 is $33k a year and a life can be saved by donating $500, so one has killed as many people as his income minus $33k divided by $500. Figure there's a paradox in that his conclusions follow from his premises which are commonly accepted. He basically argues that if you aren't poor, you are a serial killer which I think few people accept. Somewhat putting words in his mouth, if you aren't making decisions optimizing your ability to save lives, like taking a job you don't like that can put you in a better position to do that, again you're a serial killer. Having a family probably reduces ones ability to donate, so I'd think that's a no go, too. He gives allowances for spending for your dependents, but seems to argue that creating dependents in the first place is problematic. I think the paradox is resolvable if one rejects the equivalence between murdering and letting die. Further, his argument is a bit materialistic, not really offering guidance on how ones preferences for a certain job or having a family should be weighed into the analysis. This might be most easily resolved by positing a right to such things, which I think he does in later writing, an Evolution Caveat on Preference Utilitarianism. With rights restricting applications of utilitarianism and denying the equivalence, what is left of utilitarianism? Singer: www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/videos-books-and-essays/famine-affluence-and-morality-peter-singer
@@vuvuzelaelaela Let's kill some people that are not happy enough in order to make the world better ! It's not just math : what are the moral implication if you are right ?
@@vuvuzelaelaela And you want to deny the right to exist for 1 billion people ? Just because the average hapiness is less ? You can "bite the bullet", but it's far from an "obvious" solution, and it would be great to have some arguments for this statement.
Yes, definitely. I really don't think any normal person would consider it "biting a bullet". If you polled people and any significant amount of non-rationalists chose to create world B I would be extremely surprised. Julia's right that it's hard to see how it's worse, but everyone can see that it is. Some nerds just can't accept an answer if they can't show their work.
Think more the quickest intuitively way since the last comment, somewhere between 25200-28800 seconds ago with respect to moment I decided to do something for a day, just to make mother or father feel helpful for a week, after there's nothing have I done, right after my intuited updates. Refused to bother other siblings' businesses, seeing the early arrived maid lady, Going into the hill, closed to fenceless garden collecting the leftover pieces of tree branches firewood between 07:55 AM till 09:05 AM, drying my bright sunny wet sweating shirt, lying on the house floor to cool the sweat, connecting myself with smart phone screen as normal habit when I take rest until it turns 10:01 AM, seeing the other two hired tiny firewood ladies arrived, continuing the firewood collecting again, pickup the dried shirt under the September green bushes, separating the big pieces of firewood from small ones, shouldering/back-lifting them until the clock strikes 11:03 AM again, showing pieces of firewoods that I helped picking up from September bushes to the hired cutters, going back to the same floor again, drying my wet sweating shirt again, pour out some water over my head and shoulders again. Doing the same resting process again by attaching to smartphone screen, wasting my 50 minutes time by not doing anything except trying to grab something meaningful attention through facebook clips, WhatsApp updates, RU-vid etc. Finishing my lunch by 12:15 PM, seeing the regular weekend chicken buyer in the house compound, going back there to the hill after picking up my dried wet sweating shirt again. Continuing my work again from 12:20 PM till 01:50 PM, when parents along the three hired female workers continuing their works. Moment I don't bother what are there in my surroundings and what kind of businesses do others are doing, Relief myself for a while even if I didn't find a comfortable place to continue with my next comment of a day till 02:18 PM. Heading home back again, removing my automatically wet sweating shirt again, lying again on the floor until I fall asleep for a while, starting to write again as the afternoon sky is filled with 100% clouds with frequent roaring thunders.. Vs Think more the quickest intuitively way as wise as remaining 30840 seconds of Saturday here as well as remaining 65040 seconds of Saturday there with respect to collection of weekly self worn dirty clothes that I have to wash, which includes more than three blouses, 2 pants, 1 short pant, 2 pairs of smelly socks, mud attached shoes, 25% dirt vehicle that I have to clean etc
@@MadDog7XL Well it does apply, in the sense that it doesn't. When asked about how many triangles yellow has, the calculation to that leads to the solution that it does not exist.
@@ronnieriosstayshredded7410 You could also say that yellow has infinitely many triangles because if you take some rectangular measurement that's subset to the dimensions of a letter and continuously subdivided said subsection into smaller triangles, then you'd get the desired outcome.
This seems like too easy of an answer, but shouldn't we just be looking at the proportion of happy people to unhappy people? Or happiness per capita? If that's true then adding more people who aren't as happy as the original group would be worse.
I get what you mean, but think about it this way: if the second billion is 99.9999% as happy as the first billion, sure, the happiness per capita would be slightly smaller (almost negligible), but you'd have twice the population. In such scenario, I'm pretty confident we'd both agree world B is not worse than world A. If world B is slightly less happy than world A, you'll eventually reach the conclusion Julia said. But if this "slightly less happy" is negligible (but not quite 0), I for one would have a very hard time claiming "world B is, at least, not worse than world A."
@@DavidAguileraMoncusi I don't think this problem is specific to this issue though. Like for example if I'm prescribed 20 mg of some medication, certainly it couldn't hurt to take 20.0001 mg instead. And if 20.0001 isn't worse then certainly 20.0002 isn't worse either, and so on until I'm taking 100 mg. I think this is just one of those problems where you have to drawn a line, but no matter where you put the line it's going to have to be arbitrary because you could always say "Well if this is okay why not just barely higher/lower".
I resolve it by saying happiness should not be a goal. It is not a permanent state but a feeling that comes and goes. Happiness is a nice intermittent side effect of living your life in line with your values and desires, but not a goal.
We're actually talking about as a society. You're talking about how it applies to an individual, but people are happier in a better functioning society, so producing happy people _is a goal_ if you want a better society.
@@futurestoryteller If we want societies that produce happier people, we just need to look at the heappiness survey by societies. And copy from the happiest socities. This would be much more practical then asumptive calculations based on societies size.
@@reuvenpolonskiy2544 Sounds a little simplistic. Some societies don't have the same resources as others, for just one example, therefore one size fits all solutions aren't really feasible
@@reuvenpolonskiy2544 You've responded twice to me now, and frankly both times it seems to me like you're trying to have a conversation with someone else entirely. I take it English is a second language?
I kinda agree with the repugnant conclusion, as long as we treat "what should we do about it" as a separate problem. If those people really do find their lives worth living, then it is better that they are alive than that they are dead.
Think more the hardest way as N is for "Naukri" which means Servant in Hindi language Vs Think more the hardest way as O is for "Ohm" which means as continued chanting in Hindu tradition for meditative state of mind
A. Definitely A. The repugnant conclusion is based on a semi-repugnant premise. Let's look at it another way: If you knew you were going to be born into one of these worlds, but didn't know which sub-group you would end up in, which world would you WANT to be born into?
That is a good viewpoint. I would only add a probabilistic constraint along the lines of given the world, what is the likelihood that you would be born into it at all.
Yeah, actual question should be this. If you choose A, you gonna be born only with very small chance (population of A divided by population of B), or you are guaranteed to be born and live in word B. What you are gonna choose, most likely not gonna be born at all? Or at least guarantee yourself a life barely worth living.
We're most likely far from indifferent if we had to choose between being born with a 50% chance at all but if so, pretty happy or 100% chance of being born and slightly happy
I think it's a mistake to consider the preferences of hypothetical people who don't exist. People who were never born aren't sitting around in limbo feeling bored and frustrated, they just don't exist. If smaller population really did mean people would be happier on average (and that's a big assumption) then the smaller population world is better. Presumably there's a limit to that, if the population were so small that they risk inbreeding and genetic health problems I think people would probably be less happy.
@@morsz5980 hmm, I'm not sure that is true. There is a deeper problem with the repugnant conclusion though. Let me pose a question: is there a difference between a lot of people who are only kind of happy and a few people that are very happy? That is, is happiness an absolute (or at least frame of reference independent) feeling? Or, do we require some people to be unhappy, or everyone to be unhappy at least part of the time in order for the notion of happiness to have any meaning?
Think of this as a family: You have 2 perfectly happy children. Or you have 2 perfectly happy children and 2 children that you can not spend so much time on, so a bit less happy. What would be better? Are both equally as good?
Great proposition and question. What happens in the microcosm happens in the macrocosm. Somebody suggested "define better" - your question "equally as good" is provoking. Well done.
Assuming you spending time with the children equates to more happiness than children spending time with their siblings. A lot of assumptions about everyone being happy with exactly the same things
@@adriangodoy4610 I rethink and think it ends with a resource disaster: at a certain number, people will die due to lack of resources: water, food, etc...
@@adriangodoy4610 consider wine making: yeast population grows and converts sugar in alcohol, until alcohol reaches 15 % concentration, this kills all yeast. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeast_in_winemaking Would that not pose a limit on the hapiness of the yeast when it intoxicates it's environment causing an omnicide? Or should we consider dead species as possibly happy: we can't ask/verify so we can't know?
This question could turn into a fun parlor game. As a start, there will never be a definitive answer because the root of the problem is how you define "better". One could say a world with multiple billions of people is *always* better than one with a single billion people-even if the mutiples are living the most horrid existence, because a) they exist and b) there is always *hope* that their lot in life could improve. Then we can get into: Better for the environment? Better for the 1 billion happiest people (World A)? etc. Another point- many of the world unhappiest people have made the most significant contributions to the arts and sciences, thereby (in theory) enhancing the lives everyone.
Think more the Hardest way as how being the first batch of another newly setup college in neighbouring town on Higher Secondary section science student in 2010, Vs Think more the Hardest way as how I got promoted from Class XI to XII by scoring 48/100 in English, 33/100 in Alternative English, 71/100 in Physics, 48/100 in Chemistry, 31/100 in Biology, 30/100 in Maths
You can reject the transition from step 1 to step 2 if you are liberal by arguing that inequality is inherently bad and this badness outweighs the positive utility of the newly added people. On the other hand, if you are conservative, you can reject the transition from step 2 to step 3 by arguing that removing the positive utility from the happiest people is inherently bad. In fact, step 3 doesn't have more total utility than step 2, so the conservative position seems easier to argue because they can still hold that step 2 is no worse than step 1, but that step 3 is worse than step 2. However, a stronger version of the repugnant conclusion makes it so that there is a slight marginal gain in average utility from step 2 to step 3 such that the bottom happiness people from step 2 gain more than the top happiness people lose. In that case, the conservative is in a similar position to the liberal and would have to argue that the badness of redistribution outweighs the goodness in both total and average utility.
As a foodie I have come to realise that quality is more important than quantity. I would choose a handful of crisp, hot fries over tons of soggy, cold fries anyday.
I can understand why people can't see evident conclussions.... and after that talk about counterintuitive thinking... the real conclussion is: "Try not to create people if you can not assure an acceptable level of happinness"... No one cares about the growing population, but before growing you need to try to guarantee some level of happiness instead of saying "we solve this in some point in the future".
I think it goes off the rails when you get legitimately *un*happy people. There's a qualitative difference between happy people (whether extremely, very, somewhat happy) and unhappy (dissatisfied, upset, morose, angry, suicidal) people. The second group isn't simply "less happy"... they're "more sad"...
The assumption in this paradox doesn't rest on totality being better, it rests on "either totality or average" being better. And since both go up in the second world, you'd have to reject both meanings of "better" to avoid the paradox, not just the total order meaning. Which is something you can still do, don't get me wrong, but it's a strictly harder to defend rejection.
How can you quantify happiness ? Happiness is subjective in nature and varies from person to person. In this case, you have assumed happiness as a destination which people can reach, which by it's very nature is a flawed perspective on happiness. Therefore this paradox is inherently flawed.
@@superresistant0 The paradox is flawed by accepting the assumption that happiness is a value to be maximized. I know this springs directly out of utilitarianism (or most interpretations of it), but this is a self-imposed constraint. So this paradox is unique to a specific utilitarian view. For this reason, I don't think this paradox is particularly interesting or insightful. There are a lot of paradoxes in all kinds of moral systems. Because moral systems, and utilitarianism isn't an exception here, have weak axioms and/or are not properly extrapolated with logical conclusions.
Think more the quickest intuitively way as A is for *At The Very Beginning* again VS Think more the quickest intuitively way as A is for *As We Go Ahead* again
Everyone's "worth living" bar is at a different level on the happiness scale, and that's up to them. So IMO the 3rd premise is incorrect, since everyone in this context considers their life to be worth living. In terms of how it could inform our decisions, I think the only point that it becomes problematic is when the expected happiness of a newly created person is below the average "worth living" bar.
To bolster your argument. Escapees from North Korea claim that even though there are summary public executions, famine and oppression, the people call themselves happy. Should they be executed first because someone else thinks their lives unhappy?
This doesn't solve the paradox, though. First of all, _even oranges can't really just be added up_...some are bigger than others, some are juicier, some are sweeter...but none of that *stops us* from adding oranges up, because we have a *decent enough* way to do it. And it most certainly doesn't stop us from *posing questions* based on adding up oranges, and imagining each orange is identical to the others. So sure, adding up happiness is hard. Harder than adding up oranges. But that doesn't mean it is impossible, first of all (we may just not _yet_ have means of accurately estimating happiness), and it _certainly_ doesn't mean you can't invent a universe where happiness *is* measurable, and pose the same question.
"No, most people who have unhappy lives still prefer existence to non-existence." Even if this made sense (and it not clear that it does, given the bias). You can't only count the happiness of each person *to themselves*. Having starving children in the world makes *me* less happy. Can you say that some minimally happy person still has more happiness than the happiness they are removing from others? I doubt it.
Think more the hardest way as E is for Enough, Enjoy, Encounter, Encourage, Enthusiasm, Enslave, Enterprise, Escape, Escort, Endurance etc Vs Think more the hardest way with 10 words that starts with E
Think more the hardest way as Car factory video, that highlights about how the car is created mechanically, and how each parts of a car is fixedly binding altogether. The hardest way to rationalise how the videos are additionally showing the technical skills of car manufacturing company built Vs Think more the hardest way as wise as how I recently viewed a video of a young girl with an old beggar about the value of money
Think more the quickest intuitively way as L is for *Linear Algebra* again Vs Think more the quickest intuitively way as L is for *Landscape Drawing* again
I think it makes logical sense _if we accept the premises and narrow framing._ For example, if you ask people who currently exist if they wish they wouldn't exist, they are likely to say they rather exist - but they're saying that _because they currently exist._ While you exist, the thought of consciously deciding for non-existence (basically "dying") is typically against your survival/wellbeing instinct. Therein lies how one might justify bringing more and more lives into unhappy existence -- but _just not unhappy enough_ to say with certainty that they would choose non-existence. It's also how one might justify _any and all_ depths of animal cruelty too horrible to describe, since sentient life is hardwired to, above all, try to avoid death (ie. they as currently existing creatures who "prefer existing to nonexistence"). Therefore I still think that World A for example is better than World B.
