So I just thought of a position I think that, as of right now, I am forced to accept. I don't find it completely implausible, but it is certainly a little of a stretch. It comes from the fact that not going below a life worth living trumps peak value.
Take two worlds. Let us stipulate once again (for the sake of argument only) that any population that has a wellbeing below 5 is considered not worth living. They both have two populations (A and B). In the first world, A has a wellbeing of 3 billion and B has a wellbeing of 4. In the second world, both populations have a wellbeing of 6. Because of the fact that I have made not going below a life worth living more important than peak value, I am forced to accept that the 2nd world is a better world.
I'm not quite certain if this is a bad thing, I honestly am not sure what is the right answer here. My elitism cries out that world one is far superior, but I am not sure what the general public would think. Either way, it's definitely a problem I need to address, because no matter where I draw the line for "a life worth living", I will run into this problem. And it's quite easy to make it even more dramatic (change the wellbeing values of A and B in world one to 3 quintillion and 4.99, respectively).
I hate philosophy sometimes.
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This does look like a problem result to me. But is it really a result of the stated view?
ReplyDeleteFirst, I’m a bit confused by the usage of the ‘life worth living’ terminology. Usually, people thinking about this stuff tend to talk of 0 as the cut off for a life worth living. Then any positive number represents a life with more good than bad from the point of view of the person living that life – a life that is worth living overall. Any negative number represents a net bad life - one such that living it is worse than never having existed. When people talk about setting a higher ethical cutoff than 0 (the bad level as Parfit put it), they are not usually talking about stipulating that the lives worth living cutoff shall be assigned some number other than zero (that would just be a gratuitous change of the scale that would make no substantive difference to anything). They are typically still taking zero to be the cut off for a life worth living but claiming that it’s morally bad to have a life below a certain higher level of overall wellbeing even though that life is worth living – i.e. it’s bad to have a life that is worth living but only just.
I don’t see that this adjustment makes any difference to the oddness of the result though. Still, to make ‘going below a life worth living (or below some other bad level) more important than peak value’ does not entail making it infinitely more important.