A repugnant conclusion

Dilemmas are not only playthings for philosophers. Many can be found back in real life, like the moral dilemma I presented last week. Actually I wanted to describe here one that looks a bit like the moral dilemma last week and which has been developed by Derek Parfit: The “repugnant conclusion”. It is also known ad the “mere addition paradox”. However, it’s too complicated for a blog of thousand words, but it’s easy to find on the Internet. Therefore, I have developed a simple variant of my own, with the help of Stijn Bruers’s Morele Illusies (pp. 129 ff.; see Sources last week). Its relevance is in the field of population ethics, especially what to do (if anything) if a population grows.

Say a country (or a continent or the earth or what you like) has a population of 100 inhabitants. You can multiply this 100 with thousand, or one hundred thousand or a billion in order to make the example more realistic, but in a blog 100 is easier to handle. A further assumption is that each inhabitant of this country has a welfare level of 100 on a scale from 0-120. So their welfare is very high. As most populations in the world, also the population of this country gradually grows and after an x number of years it has doubled. But, as everybody should know these days, the resources of the earth are not inexhaustible and also the resources of this country aren’t. Despite efforts to keep the welfare in this country stable, the statistics show that the 100 people of the old generation or their oldest heirs succeed to keep their welfare at the level of 100 per person, but the youngsters succeed to get only a level of 80 each, although they work very hard. The government thinks that this is unfair, and decides to redistribute the welfare, so that each inhabitant will have a level of 90. It’s not unlikely that you think that the situation after the redistribution is better than the original situation, for 90 is still very high and moreover the total welfare of the country has increased from 10,000 to 18,000 unities. Anyway, the 200 people of this country are satisfied with the new situation and the population of the country stays growing. And so it happens that after a y number of years the population of this country has doubled again. The “old people” still have a welfare of 90, but for the youngsters it is 70. So the government decides again to redistribute the welfare with the result that then everybody has a welfare of 80. But in the meantime the total welfare of the country has risen to 32,000! And since 80 is still quite high and certainly more than worth to live, it seems that altogether everybody is better off. Or don’t you think so? Anyway, the 400 people of this country are satisfied with the new situation and the population stays growing. And doubling. And growing. And doubling .... If it goes on in the same way as just described, after the seventh doubling the country will have a population of 128,000 with a level of welfare of 30 per person after the welfare redistribution and a total welfare of 384,000.

Of course, at a certain moment the welfare per person will level off and/or maybe the population will stop growing, but then this country will have a very big population and the level of welfare will be as low as about 1. This per capita welfare is still positive, indeed, and the total welfare will be bigger than ever before in the country’s history. If we look back on each step in the population growth and compare this situation with the preceding step, each time we can judge that the country is better off. Anyway, we thought that the second situation was better than the situation we started with (a still very high level of welfare per person and a higher total level). And altogether the third situation was also still very good, if not better, than the second situation. Etc. But if we compare the situation we got at the end with the situation we started with, is this final situation then still good? If not, where should we stop then and why just there? Isn’t it so that the series of apparent improvements in the long run leads to a miserable situation, certainly in view of the situation we started with? A step forward is not always an improvement. It can place you in a moral dilemma, for example when resources are depleting.

P.S. Maybe you might want to reread my blog “Global warming and the Prisoner’s Dilemma” now:

http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2018/10/global-warming-and-prisonners-dilemma.html