Does the total principle have any repugnant implications?

Ratio

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 80-98

  Portmore, Douglas W ^a  

^a School of Business   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 55449083544     PISSN: 00340006     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9329.00078     Document Type: Article

References (14)

1. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). All page references in the body of this paper are to this book
2. For an example of such a case, see Derek Parfit, 'On Doing the Best for Our Children', in Michael Bayles (ed.), Ethics and Population (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1976), pp. 100-101
3. I borrow this diagram from Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 388
4. See Roger Crisp, 'Utilitarianism and the Life of Virtue', The Philosophical Quarterly, 42 (1992), pp. 149-52
5. Jonathan Glover, Causing Death and Saving Lives (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 69-71
6. and James Griffin, Well-being: Its Meaning, Measurement and Moral Importance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), fn. 27, pp. 338-340. None of these philosophers make a distinction between the various versions of the Repugnant Conclusion. They simply claim that the Repugnant Conclusion can be avoided by appealing to the discontinuity between certain values. But, as we will see, this is a mistake, because we can only avoid one of the three versions of the Repugnant Conclusion (namely, the Drab Z Conclusion) by making such an appeal
7. 2 See Griffin, Well-being, pp. 85-89
8. Actually, Parfit calls it the 'Lexical View'. See Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 414
9. In Peter Singer (ed.), Applied Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 145-64
10. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism (London, 1863), ch. 2
11. Parfit, 'Overpopulation and the Quality of Life', pp. 160-61
12. Here, I have gone from making a personal assessment of the value of two alternative lives to making an impersonal assessment of the value of two alternative populations. But I think I am justified in making such a leap. For I believe that the best method for making evaluative choices between lives is to imagine the analogue of that choice within a life. Thus, the best method for choosing between two alternative populations involves first imagining leading the lives of each member of each population in serial order, and second, choosing between the two resulting imaginary lives. See C. I. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1946), pp. 546-47
13. and Crisp, 'Utilitarianism and the Life of Virtue', pp. 150-51
14. J. David Velleman, 'Well-being and Time', Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 72 (1991), p. 50