Many economists and philosophers assume that status quo bias is necessarily irrational. I argue that, in some cases, status quo bias is fully rational. I discuss the rationality of status quo bias on both subjective and objective theories of the rationality of preferences. I argue that subjective theories cannot plausibly condemn this bias as irrational. I then discuss one kind of objective theory, which holds that a conservative bias toward existing things of value is rational. This account can fruitfully explain some compelling aspects of common sense morality, and it may justify status quo bias. * I am greatly indebted to Derek Parfit and Larry Temkin, each of whose work inspired much of my thinking here, and whose generous comments were extremely helpful. I am also grateful for comments from Boris Kment, Michael Otsuka, Bastian Stern, Trevor Teitel, and the reviewers and editors at Ethics. I owe special thanks to Thomas Kelly for encouragement and invaluable feedback on several drafts.
The Rachels-Temkin spectrum arguments against the transitivity of better than involve good or bad experiences, lives, or outcomes that vary along multiple dimensions-e.g., duration and intensity of pleasure or pain. This paper presents variations on these arguments involving combinations of good and bad experiences, which have even more radical implications than the violation of transitivity. These variations force opponents of transitivity to conclude that something good is worse than something that isn't good, on pain of rejecting the good altogether. That is impossible, so we must reject the spectrum arguments. According toThe Transitivity of Better Than: For any bearers of value A, B, and C, if A is better than B, all things considered, and B is better than C, all things considered, then A is better than C, all things considered.
Totalism is the view that one distribution of well-being is better than another just in case the one contains a greater sum of well-being than the other. Many philosophers, following Parfit, reject totalism on the grounds that it entails the repugnant conclusion that, for any number of excellent lives, there is some number of lives that are barely worth living whose existence would be better. This chapter develops a theory of welfare aggregation—the lexical-threshold view—that allows totalism to avoid the repugnant conclusion, as well as its analogues involving suffering populations and the lengths of individual lives. The theory is grounded in some independently plausible views about the structure of well-being, identifies a new source of incommensurability in population ethics, and avoids some of the implausibly extreme consequences of other lexical views, without violating the intuitive separability of lives.
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