Repugnant Conclusion and Expected Misery Argument - Killing Happy Animals: Explorations in Utilitarian Ethics - page 108

that bringing into existence a being that would surely have a miserable
life is morally blameworthy. This implication can be called the Expected
Misery Argument. Contrary to what has been claimed, I will argue that
Prior Existence Utilitarianism can deal with the Expected Misery Argument
and account for the intuition that wantonly bringing into existence a
miserable being is morally blameworthy. Thus, Total Utilitarianism implies
the Repugnant Conclusion, while Prior Existence Utilitarianism is not as
vulnerable as has been suggested to the Expected Misery Argument.
2 The role of intuitions within utilitarianism
We have seen in previous chapters, and we will also see in this chapter,
that counter-intuitive implications are brought forward in the evaluation
of Total Utilitarianism and Prior Existence Utilitarianism. For instance,
I have discussed the scope of the Replaceability Argument in Chapter 4.
The idea that normal human persons would in principle be replaceable
has been found intuitively objectionable. We have seen that Singer takes
much effort to avoid this implication. In order to reduce the scope of the
Replaceability Argument, Singer proposes the moral ledger model. The
moral ledger model implies that welfare can only be negative or neutral
and that all of us who have some unsatisfied desires when we die would
be better off having not lived. Singer, again, takes efforts to avoid this
implication. It seems that even Singer, who has been very critical about
the role of intuitions in the evaluation of moral theories, is concerned
with the intuitive appeal of the theory that he defends. 2
In this chapter, I will explore implications of the Total View and the
Prior Existence View that have played a prominent role in the evalua-
tion of both views. The reason why these implications have received so
much attention is that many people consider them counter-intuitive.
The implications do not correspond to many people's judgements about
right or wrong. These judgements are spontaneous and broadly shared.
Intuitions are 'things that strike us as true without us knowing entirely
why they do'. 3 A moral intuition is usually experienced as a strong and
persistent feeling that something is morally right or wrong. It is marked
by 'directness, (apparent) non-inferentiality, (subjective) compelling-
ness or “glow”'. 4 The intuitions I am talking about are tokens or types of
psychological phenomena that are often triggered in the evaluation of
moral theories. The idea is that intuitions are about something and they
can be true or false: they are considered truth-valued propositional atti-
tudes. 5 Given the prominent role that intuitive judgements play in the
debate about the Total View and the Prior Existence View, it is interesting