Can we accept the Repugnant Conclusion? 2

In this video, I finish looking at strategies for accepting the Repugnant Conclusion.

[pasty]

Great job! A vastly underapreciated video!

[dominikkrasula]

For me it seems that some people may deny The Minimal Non-Extreme Priority Principle...
1 like some wierd sorts of Deontologism that do not want to add people who have negative welfare
2 Or some extreme versions of Rawlsians, since Rawls himself thought that people under the veil of ignorance would be very risk-averse... and if someone takes this to more extreme view, we may be under Veil so risk-averse that we would rather choose for all to have very law positive welfare than face risk of being one who would have negative welfare

[ChaiElephant]

I have two points:

1) In my opinion, the so-called "Sadistic Conclusion" is not very sadistic at all. All it says is that creating a large enough number of sub-excellent lives can be worse than creating a few bad lives. To use the aesthetics example: Putting one crappy painting in an otherwise excellent art gallery can be better than flooding the gallery with good but not excellent pieces. The sadistic conclusion jives more with our intuitions about our moral requirements when it comes to the creation of new lives. We

[AlonzoFyfe]

The Dominance Principle, which you discuss in the latter half of this presentation, is false.

The Dominance Principle states, "If population A contains the same number of people as population B, and every person in A has higher welfare than any person in B, then A is better than B".

If we deny objective, intrinsic prescriptivity and require that value exists only as relationships between states of affairs and desires, then the proposition "A is better than B" requires asking, "Relative to which desires?" This is true, if the desires in question are A's desires. But, relative to B's desires, this is false. For the population of B, B may satisfy more of its desires than A. They have no reason to choose A over B nor would they be motivated to do so unless false beliefs blind them to this fact.

[rebeccasteuwer]

Thanks for the nice video. I can't quote work out the 'negative repugnant conclusion', moving from a smaller population with people in extreme misery to a much larger population where people are only slightly worse off than nothing. Would you mind explaining?

[IAmMckiev]

In the definition of " The Minimal Non-Extreme Priority Principle", it says: there exists a number n. In case n=1, the conclusion is not so obvious

[WorthlessWinner]

3:00 "maybe you think having a bad life is better than no life at all" - this seems to be another thing that evolves around how we define "a life is worth living"
4:00 not exactly obvious that this is too much; If this IS too much, then it would be a morally good thing to kill people in the situation you describe, which I doubt you would agree with.
Now you've got me wondering if the holocaust is worse than drug prohibition; there would need to be 200K deaths a year due to the war on drugs for that to be true, which seems an unlikely but not impossible thing to be true. It's even hard to conceive of large harms distributed over a long period like any harms due to the drug war would be.