Personalized Neutral-Range Utilitarianism with Incommensurable Lives: What Form Does It Take? And Is It Repugnant?

This paper considers Neutral-Range Utilitarianism (NRU) – a utilitarian theory that posits a range of lives that are neutral in impersonal value, in the sense that adding people with such lives to the world’s population doesn’t make the world, or its population, either better or worse. The paper considers a particular version of this utilitarian axiology, Personalized NRU (PNRU), according to which a life is in this way impersonally neutral if and only if it is neutral in its personal value, i.e., if it is neither better nor worse for a person to have such a life than not to exist at all. A personally neutral life might in principle be either ‘strictly neutral’, i.e., equally as good for a person as non-existence, or ‘weakly neutral’, i.e., incommensurable with non-existence: neither better or worse, nor equally as good. The range of lives that are barely worth living. However, as it turns out, the apparent repugnance of this conclusion is considerably mitigated by the introduction of the neutral range. It is shown that barely good lives cannot be only marginally better than bad lives: the distance between the former and the latter must be significant. This claim crucially depends on the argument that a framework in which weakly neutral lives are allowed has no room for strictly neutral lives. Unfortunately, though, PNRU leads to another repugnant conclusion that is less easy to come to terms with: For any population, however wonderful, there is another possible population that isn’t worse even though everyone in that other population has a life that not only isn’t good (not even barely good) but also is very close to being positively bad. That PNRU has this worrying implication is a problem that needs to be recognized and confronted. weakly neutral may well be relatively extended. It seems plausible that some of them may be better for a person than others. PNRU differs from the more familiar versions of NRU, according to which even good lives (either all or all up to some wellbeing limit) are impersonally neutral: adding people with such lives doesn’t make the world better. Unlike PNRU, these versions conflict with a basic welfarist claim that what is good for a person is pro tanto impersonally good. The paper considers PNRU in a framework that differs from the standard one for utilitarian axiologies in that it allows for incommensurable lives. Lives can be incommensurable in personal value with non-existence, but also with each other. Is utilitarian aggregation possible if all these incommensur-abilities are allowed? The paper addresses the question how PNRU should be formulated in such a non-standard model. The second question addressed in the paper concerns the Repugnant Conclusion. Given additional assumptions, PNRU implies that for any population there is a better one in which everyone’s life is barely good –but also is very close to being positively bad. That PNRU has this worrying implication is a problem that needs to be recognized and confronted.