(highlight:: The Implications of a Positive Population Ethics
Key takeaways:
(* Views of population ethics say that in order to add a being to the world to be good, it doesn't just have to be more positive than negative in terms of its experiences, it has to be sufficiently more positive than zero., * This implication leads to the conclusion that life has been bad because relatively few people or beings have lived lives that are just a little bit positive.)
Transcript:
Speaker 1
But many views of population ethics say that actually, in order to add a being to the world to be good, doesn't just have to be, like, more positive than negative in terms of its experiences. Has to be sufficiently more positive than, like, actually, you know, quite a bit better than zero. And views have that implication in order to escape what deri parfet called a repugnant conclusion, where you conclude that very, very large number of beings with lives that are just a little bit positive add up collectively to more than, you know, ten trillion beings of lives of utter bliss, because just lots of little drops of water ad up to more than a tank of water. But if you have this view that, ok, a life has to be sufficiently good for it to be positive, and thoug that a negative, then you get the conclusion that life to day has strongly been just because he thinks tha, relatively few people, or relatively few beings, ar going to be above whatever this kind of critical threshold is above which it's good for someone to exist.
Speaker 2
Exactly.
Speaker 1
Yes. O. If you think that the what parfet calls the repugnant conclusion, world is a bad world. You know, this indefinite lifeof beings a just barely lives worth living. Look, at best, that's what history looks like. Ii, like the 600 million years in which we've had creatures with brains. And so you would conclude pretty strongly that um, history has been, you know, the history of life has been bad.)
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