[feoren]

That conclusion is not repugnant at all, it's just that its phrasing is so simplistic as to be nearly a straw-man. It's a poisoned intuition pump, because it makes you imagine a situation that doesn't follow at all from utilitarianism.

First of all, you're imagining dividing happiness among more people, but imagining them all with the same amount of suffering. You're picturing a drudging life where people work all day and have barely any source of happiness. But if you can magically divide up some total amount of happiness, why not the same with suffering? This is the entire source of the word "repugnant", because it sounds like you get infinite suffering with finite happiness. That does not follow from anything utilitarianism stipulates; you've simply created an awful world and falsely called it utilitarianism. Try to imagine all these people living a nearly completely neutral life, erring a bit on the happier side, and it suddenly doesn't sound so bad.

Secondly, you're ignoring the fact that people can create happiness for others. What fixed finite "happiness" resource are we divvying up here? Surely a world with 10 billion people has more great works of art for all to enjoy than a world with 10 people, not to mention far less loneliness. It's crazy to think the total amount of happiness to distribute is independent of the world population.

There are many more reasonable objections to even the existence of that so-called "conclusion" without even starting on the many ways of dealing with it.

[galaxyLogic]

Your post reminds me of xenophobes who lament the arrival of immigrants. The immigrants are taking their jobs they are saying. Such a viewpoint can be countered with the imaginary scenario where you live in a country with only 2 people. How well are they doing? There are no stores to buy goodies from because who would create such a store for just 2 people? Perhaps an immigrant, could open a deli!

When there are more immigrants who are allowed to work, the immigrants will make some money for themselves. What do they do with that money? They spend it, which grows the economy. Our economy, not some other country's economy.

If you were the only living person on this planet you would be in trouble. Thank God for other people being there too.

[bluefirebrand]

> What do they do with that money? They spend it, which grows the economy. Our economy, not some other country's economy.

I'm going to guess you've never spoken to anyone who is sending money back to their family in their original country with every paycheck.

Not really the point of this conversation I guess but... yeah. It does happen more than you probably think. To the point where malls in my area have kiosks for wiring money to other countries for cheap.

[Sai_]

Wouldn’t they be sending left-over money ie, money after spending locally, back to their home country?

I can’t imagine a lot of people out there who send all their money back home without spending some of it locally for self sustenance.

[eru]

> I'm going to guess you've never spoken to anyone who is sending money back to their family in their original country with every paycheck.

If that sent money ever comes back to the domestic economy, then you are back to the previous situation.

If it doesn't come back, that's even better: because then your central bank can print more money to make up for the disappearance. Essentially, you got the foreigner to perform services in return for some ink and paper.

[soorya3]

That's not true, most of the money is spent here and very little to take care of the family that's been left back home. Otherwise how can they survive here, think about immigrant kids education, housing, healthcare, retirement.

[Fripplebubby]

I agree this happens a lot, but isn't this an area of financial life that is regulated, governed, and monitored by states today? I am not familiar with the policies or regulations in play here but this seems very addressable by the institutions and regulatory bodies that exist today in most (all?) countries. A solved problem, in other words.

[Fripplebubby]

For example the income tax or other taxes already capture a portion of foreign workers' incomes that the state wants to capture without discouraging workers too much and working elsewhere, according to their economic models and policies.

I suppose different countries have different strategies on this, rich countries are trying to benefit from foreign labor and capture some taxes from them while less rich countries are trying to increase their haul by encouraging their citizens to become foreign workers (example: Philippines).

[galaxyLogic]

Right and workers are the ones who build the country. The more workers there are the bigger the gross domestic product. Now if some money enriches people in other countries that means they will buy more Coca-Cola! This planet is not a zero-sum game. When people help each other that helps everybody. The exception is of course countries which start wars.

I mean if USA had never allowed immigrants to come here where would we be economically?

[solatic]

Your logic: let's reduce immigration because immigrants send remittances to family members who are not permitted by our immigration laws to join their family members in this country, which would increase immigration numbers further while reducing capital offshoring.

[anon84873628]

It seems you completely misunderstood the parent comment. They are arguing against the existence of the repugnant conclusion, by pointing out that happiness -- like the economy -- is not actually a finite pie to divvy up.

[ThinkBeat]

Your scenario leaves a lot to be desired.

Yeah two people only.

Well Your scenario can easily be countered with the imaginary scenario that you have a town with 1 billion residents, far too little housing, no green space left due to trying to provide housing and the city only has natural resources for perhaps 300.000.000.

Now 100.000.000 immigrants arrive. There is not enough food, water, hygiene. Hopefully, opening delis will solve the issue.

Yes, it is absurd. But no more so than a world of 2.

History though does prove your theory right. When proud and brave Europeans immigrated to what would become the United States.

"When they arrive there are no stores to buy goodies from because who would create such a store for just 2 people? Perhaps an immigrant, could open a deli!""

Thankfully for the native people's immigrants came in to create a consumer capitalist culture.

Can you imagine the utter horror if they native peoples were allowed to keep their versions of society going and develop it the way they wanted. They sure were blessed by the immigrants. A lot the natives' peoples also became xenophobes and we sure now what bastards' xenophobes are.

[astrange]

This is silly because you don't have to imagine any scenarios. Good economic models are based on empirical data, not on imagining things, and "immigrants don't increase unemployment or decrease wages" is just about the strongest empirical result there is.

The reason being that someone moving closer to you increases demand for labor more than supply, and immigrants generally have complimentary (slightly different) skills to natives. So the person whose labor the immigrant most competes with is another immigrant.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-immigration-doesnt-reduce-...

As for remittances/brain drain, there are certainly theoretical issues but it seems to be okay in the end because it boosts investment in the originating country.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-skilled-immigration-usuall...

[Spivak]

And if you subscribe to MMT you should love immigrants because they're free "unemployed" people you didn't have to spend money raising so you have greater runway to print more money without inflation.

[galaxyLogic]

And if they are illegal immigrants, even better, they will work hard for a very small salary. They even do very little crime because they don't want to be thrown out of the country.

I think in general immigration from say Mexico to US is a loss for Mexico and a win for US.

[galaxyLogic]

Country of two people is not hard to imagine, think of a desert island with Robinson and Crusoe.

Overpopulation could be a problem but when people become better off financially they for some reason tend to have fewer children.

[shadowgovt]

All of this having been said, replacing happiness with revenue makes chasing marginal users make a lot of sense.

If you have a sure-fire way to get half the people on the planet to give you $1, you can afford a yacht. Even if it means the tool you make for them only induces them to ever give you that $1 and not more... Why do you care? You have a yacht now. You can contemplate whether you should have made them something more useful from the relative safety and comfort of your yacht.

[skybrian]

Yes, more generally, I’m reminded of David Chapman’s essay, “No Cosmic Meaning” [1]. Thought experiments are a good way to depress yourself if you take them seriously.

But I think that utilitarianism has a vague but somewhat related problem in treating “utility” as a one-dimensional quantity that you can add up? There are times when adding things together and doing comparisons makes a kind of sense, but it’s an abstraction. Nothing says you ought to quantify and add things up in a particular way, and utilitarianism doesn’t provide a way of resolving disputes about quantifying and adding. Not that it really tries, because it’s furthermore a metaphor about doing math, which isn’t the same thing as doing math.

[1] https://meaningness.com/no-cosmic-meaning

[greiskul]

The big problem with utilitarinism, is that people think that a preference function for the utilitariam that is creating a given world is something simple. Then some people are like, no, it's more complex, we need to take into account X, Y and Z. But the truth is, no human being is capable of defining a good utility function, even for ourselves. We don't know all the parameters, and we don't know how to combine those parameters to add them up. So I would say that formal, proper utilitarinism, is not a metaphor for math: it is math. But is right now in the area of non constructive math.

Maybe our descedants will elevate it outside of that with computers someday. Cause the human brain with just pieces of papers and text, probably cannot do it.

[Gibbon1]

Also utilitarinism was created by people who were utterly unaware that the world is fundamentally chaotic. Instead they thought it could be represented by a system of linear equations.

It's fundamentally broken in practice.

[pdonis]

> utilitarianism has a vague but somewhat related problem in treating “utility” as a one-dimensional quantity that you can add up?

Yes, it does. This is one of the most common (and in my view, most compelling) criticisms of utilitarianism.

[at_a_remove]

One of the very muddled thoughts I have in my head, along with Goodhart's Law and AIs which blissfully attempt to convert the universe into paperclips, is that having a single function maximized as a goal seems to give rise to these bizarre scenarios if you begin to scan for their existence.

I have started to think that you need at least two functions, in tension, to help forestall this kind of runaway behavior.

[pdonis]

Even "two functions, in tension" still assumes that you can capture values as functions at all. But the reason ethics and morality are hard in the first place is that there are no such functions. We humans have multiple incommensurable, and sometimes incompatible, values that we can't capture with numbers. That means it's not even a matter of not being able to compute the "right" answer; it's that the very concept of there being a single "right" answer doesn't seem to work.

[at_a_remove]

I think that's what it will approach in the limit, yes, if you are talking about humans. For AIs, I think it will be somewhat less so, and that it would be preferable for the sake of predictability.

[pdonis]

> a situation that doesn't follow at all from utilitarianism

Except that it does according to many utilitarians. That's why it has been a topic of discussion for so long.

> you're imagining dividing happiness among more people, but imagining them all with the same amount of suffering

No. "Utility" includes both positive (happiness) and negative (suffering) contributions. The "utility" numbers that are quoted in the argument are the net utility numbers after all happiness and all suffering have been included.

> You're picturing a drudging life where people work all day and have barely any source of happiness.

Or a life with a lot of happiness but also a lot of suffering, so the net utility is close to zero, because the suffering almost cancels out the happiness. (This is one of the key areas where many if not most people's moral intuitions. including mine, do not match up with utilitarianism: happiness and suffering aren't mere numbers and you can't just blithely have them cancel each other that way.)

> if you can magically divide up some total amount of happiness, why not the same with suffering?

Nothing in the argument contradicts this. The argument is not assuming a specific scenario; it is considering all possible scenarios and finding comparisons between them that follow from utilitiarianism, but do not match up with most people's moral intuitions. It is no answer to the argument to point out that there are other comparisons that don't suffer from this problem; utilitarianism claims to be a universal theory of morality and ethics, so if any possible scenario is a problem for it, then it has a problem.

> you're ignoring the fact that people can create happiness for others

But "can" isn't the same as "will". The repugnant conclusion takes into account the possibility that adding more people might not have this consequence. The whole point is that utilitarianism (or more precisely the Total Utility version of utilitarianism, which is the most common version) says that a world with more people is better even if the happiness per person goes down, possibly way down (depending on how many more people you add), which is not what most people's moral intuitions say.

> It's crazy to think the total amount of happiness to distribute is independent of the world population.

The argument never makes this assumption. You are attacking a straw man. Indeed, in the comparisons cited in the argument, the worlds with more people have more total happiness--just less happiness per person.

[Murfalo]

Thank you for this! I have very similar thoughts. Felt like I was going crazy each time I saw these types of conversations sparked by mention of the "repugnant" conclusion...

[julianeon]

Here's a simpler way to phrase the problem.

The current world population is about 8 billion.

By this argument, and also by your argument, it should actually be 999 billion. Or a number even higher than that.

The conclusion boils down to:

1. Find maximum population number earth can support.

2. Hit that number.

I do think that, when put this way, it seems simplistic.

[curiousllama]

To be fair, boiling something down to a simple statement does indeed tend to produce simplistic statements

[olddustytrail]

Here's an even simpler way to phrase the problem.

The current world population is about 8 billion.

By my argument it should be 2 billion.

Your argument is therefore rather foolish.