Critical-level Utilitarianism Research Articles

Non-Additive Axiologies in Large Worlds

Is the overall value of a world just the sum of values contributed by each value-bearing entity in that world? Additively separable axiologies (like total utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and critical level views) say 'yes', but non-additive axiologies (like average utilitarianism, rank-discounted utilitarianism, and variable value views) say 'no'. This distinction appears to be practically important: among other things, additive axiologies generally assign great importance to large changes in population size, and therefore tend to strongly prioritize the long-term survival of humanity over the interests of the present generation. Non-additive axiologies, on the other hand, need not assign great importance to large changes in population size. We show, however, that when there is a large enough `background population' unaffected by our choices, a wide range of non-additive axiologies converge in their implications with additive axiologies—for instance, average utilitarianism converges with critical-level utilitarianism and various egalitarian theories converge with prioritarianism. We further argue that real-world background populations may be large enough to make these limit results practically significant. This means that arguments from the scale of potential future populations for the astronomical importance of avoiding existential catastrophe, and other arguments in practical ethics that seem to presuppose additive separability, may succeed in practice whether or not we accept additive separability as a basic axiological principle.

A New Argument Against Critical-Level Utilitarianism

AbstractOne prominent welfarist axiology, critical-level utilitarianism, says that individual lives must surpass a specified ‘critical level’ in order to make a positive contribution to the comparative status of a given population. In this article I develop a new dilemma for critical-level utilitarians. When comparatively evaluating populations composed of different species, critical-level utilitarians must decide whether the critical level is a universal threshold or whether the critical level is a species-relative threshold. I argue that both thresholds lead to a range of axiological puzzles and objections as yet undiscussed within the literature, and therefore conclude that critical-level utilitarianism should not be taken as a morally plausible welfarist axiology. I show that certain competitive formulations of critical range utilitarianism are subject to the argument too, and that further attempts to relativise critical levels to a particular group or category of welfare bearer (in particular, individual-relative critical levels) are unsustainable.

Optimal taxation, critical-level utilitarianism and economic growth

We analyze tax policies in an intertemporal economy with endogenous fertility under critical-level utilitarianism, both from a positive and a normative standpoint. On the positive side, we analyze the effects of a change in the tax on capital income and on fertility, both separately and combined so as to keep the per-capita public debt constant. On the normative side, we characterize the first- and second-best optimal tax structures, for both exogenous and endogenous labor supply.

The optimum growth rate for population under critical-level utilitarianism

We characterize optimal consumption, capital, and population growth of a production economy under critical-level utilitarianism. First, we show that neither classical utilitarianism nor average utilitarianism can avoid a corner solution for the population growth rate, in that under the former, population grows at the maximum speed (the so-called repugnant conclusion) while under the latter, it grows at the minimum. Second, we show that critical level utilitarianism yields an interior solution for the population growth rate provided the critical level belongs to a positive, open interval. Finally, we characterize the transition to the steady state and perform comparative dynamics analysis.

The Repugnant Conclusion and Utilitarianism under Domain Restrictions

AbstractThe paper investigates the problem of the repugnant conclusion in variable‐population social choice. A choice rule exhibits the repugnant conclusion if, given any alternative in which all individuals enjoy a high quality of life, there is always a better alternative (according to the choice rule) in which the population is larger and each individual has a life which is barely worth living. While it is well‐known that classical utilitarianism (CU) exhibits the repugnant conclusion on an unrestricted domain, the paper shows that critical‐level utilitarianism (CLU) also exhibits the repugnant conclusion on an unrestricted domain when repugnance is defined in terms of the critical level. In contrast, both CU and CLU are shown to avoid the repugnant conclusion on a restricted domain defined by bounded resources, the law of conservation of matter, concavity and monotonicity of preferences, positive subsistence consumption, and positive “neutral consumption.” In light of the universality of these restrictions, one may conclude that the problem of the repugnant conclusion may not be as great as previously thought.

Life Extension versus Replacement

abstract It seems to be a widespread opinion that increasing the length of existing happy lives is better than creating new happy lives although the total welfare is the same in both cases, and that it may be better even when the total welfare is lower in the outcome with extended lives. I shall discuss two interesting suggestions that seem to support this idea, or so it has been argued. Firstly, the idea there is a positive level of well‐being above which a life has to reach to have positive contributive value to a population, so‐called Critical Level Utilitarianism. Secondly, the view that it makes an outcome worse if people are worse off than they otherwise could have been, a view I call Comparativism. I shall show that although these theories do capture some of our intuitions about the value of longevity, they contradict others, and they have a number of counterintuitive implications in other cases that we ultimately have to reject them.

IMPARTIALITY IN WEIGHING LIVES

Weighing Lives examines the problems of choice that we face when the options available to us not only have consequences for different people at different times but also for what people there are at each point in time, for who is alive and when. The principal conclusion of the book is that the goodness of a distribution of wellbeing across a population over some period of time is measured by the sum of the standardized wellbeings of the individuals belonging to it (over that time period), where the standardized wellbeing of an individual is the difference between their wellbeing and a constant that measures the ‘critical level’ of wellbeing above which someone’s existence is a good thing. Broome is not the first to make this claim it is, for instance, the heart of what Blackorby, Bossert and Donaldson ([1],[2]) call Critical-level Utilitarianism but his book surely provides the most careful and systematic examination of both its foundations and its consequences. The idea of a critical or neutral level of wellbeing, of a level at which it is better that someone exists than that they do not, is in apparent contradiction with intuitions that many people have about what they or policy makers should do when considering options that affect the number of living people. Consider the following two examples:

Foreign aid and population policy: some ethical considerations

This paper analyzes a two-period foreign-aid model where assistance can be given in the form of consumption or population-control aid. Population size in period 2 is endogenous. Using the family of ethical principles called critical-level utilitarianism (CLU), we examine the properties of ethically optimal resource allocations. Our results show that the direction of the ethical response of population size to changes in the cost of population control and the size of the grant depends on the relationship between the critical level of well-being, an ethical parameter, and the standard of living in the recipient country.

THE WELFARE ECONOMICS OF POPULATION

Intuition suggests there is no value in adding people to the population if it brings no benefits to people already living: creating people is morally neutral in itself. This paper examines the difficulties of incorporating this intuition into a coherent theory of the value of population. It takes three existing theories within welfare economics--average utilitarianism relativist utilitarianism and critical-level utilitarianism--and considers whether they can satisfactorily accommodate the intuition that creating people is neutral. (EXCERPT)

Normative population theory

We have shown, contrary to the claims of Cowen, that average and critical-level utilitarianism, which do not suffer from the repugnant conclusion, do not recommend the killing of people with low but positive utilities. We have shown, in addition, that Methuselah's paradox and the repugnant conclusion do not stem from preferences that are represented by additive utility functions. Further, we have shown that Cowen's ideal participant method suffers from the repugnant conclusion. We believe that Parfit's [4] criticism of classical utilitarianism — that it satisfies the repugnant conclusion — should be taken seriously. That suggests that the ideal participant method should be rejected (along with classical utilitarianism) as a reasonable solution to the optimal population problem.