Totalism without Repugnance

Abstract

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.

A dilemma for lexical and Archimedean views in population axiology

“…Non-Archimedeans choose to deny this latter claim (Parfit 1986(Parfit , 2016Griffin 1988: 340, fn. 27;Lemos 1993;Rachels 2004;Temkin 2012;Chang 2016;Nebel 2021). They claim that some contributively good lives are weakly noninferior to other contributively good lives: 11…”

“…Lexical views incur neither of these costs. By representing welfare levels with vectors, rather than scalars, they can avoid the Repugnant Conclusion while preserving Transitivity and Separability (Kitcher 2000;Thomas 2018;Nebel 2021;Carlson Forthcoming).…”

“…Unfortunately, there's a catch. As we will see, these lexical views, in conjunction with an assumption about the size of the differences between possible lives, imply that some good life is strongly noninferior to a life only slightly worse: there is some good life x such that any number of lives equally good as x is not worse than any number of lives slightly worse than x Rabinowicz 2005, 2015b;Jensen 2008;Nebel 2021). If, in addition, lexicalists claim that the 'at least as good as' relation on populations is completeso that 1 In my terminology, making this claim is sufficient for qualifying as non-Archimedean.…”

“…So, many have claimed, we should be non-Archimedean about populations (Parfit 1986(Parfit , 2016Griffin 1988: 340, fn. 27;Lemos 1993;Rachels 2004;Temkin 2012;Chang 2016;Nebel 2021). Non-Archimedeans claim that some good lives are weakly noninferior to other good lives: there is some good life x and some good life y such that a large enough number of lives equally good as x is not worse than any number of lives equally good as y.…”

“…The latest kind of non-Archimedean view promises to have wider appeal. By representing the value of a life with a vector, these lexical views can avoid the Repugnant Conclusion while preserving both Transitivity and Separability (Kitcher 2000;Thomas 2018;Nebel 2021;Carlson Forthcoming).…”