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options are considered. The aim is neutral welfare maximisation. The
Total View accepts two ways of maximising welfare as equally valid; one
can either make existing beings happier or bring into existence more
beings that are happy. This implies that moral agents would be required
to add more people to the population, if this was the best way of maxim-
ising overall welfare. Even stronger: extra people must be added, even if
this decreases the welfare of the already existing people, provided that the
sum of welfare after the addition is greater than before. If a lot of people
are added, the total amount of welfare will increase, even if the average
welfare per person becomes very low. Consider the following simplified
example: Two persons, A and B, each have a welfare level of 10. So, the
total would be 20. If a person would be added to the scene with a welfare
level of 3 and if this addition would reduce the welfare of A and B from
10 to 9, this would result in a total utility of 21. The Total View would
therefore require the addition if no better way of maximising welfare were
available. This holds if the Total View on who counts morally is accepted
in conjunction with the total view as a method of aggregation.
18
Parfit has famously stretched this implication of what he calls the
'Impersonal Total Principle' further. As Parfit exemplifies: 'The greatest
mass of milk might be found in a heap of bottles, each containing only
a single drop.'
19
Back to the population case, this leads to what Parfit
called the Repugnant Conclusion:
The Repugnant Conclusion
: For any possible population of at least ten
billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some
much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things
are equal, would be better, even though its members have lives that
are barely worth living.
20
So, Parfit describes a scenario in which adding people to the population
maximises welfare. If the welfare of the added people
together
is suffi-
ciently high, it can compensate even huge losses in the welfare of the
previously existing people. The number of 'at least ten billion' is arbi-
trary.
21
The welfare level of the population that Parfit depicts is slightly
above zero. Parfit calls this 'barely worth living', assuming that the zero
level is a point where a life turns from being worth living to not being
worth living. I will leave this interpretation as it is at this point, and
prefer to stick to describing the welfare level as 'slightly above zero',
without making assumptions about when a life is worth living. Anyway,
Parfit finds this implication of the Total View counter-intuitive and calls
it the Repugnant Conclusion.
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