Okay, well, talk about that threshold theory in a moment, but an alternative to the total view

is the average account. So you might think that when it comes to assessing populations, that a population in which there were 5 billion people with extremely worthwhile lives was

far superior to a world in which there were trillions and trillions of lives, which were all just better than nothing.

So what about the average view? So moral philosophers don't agree on many things, but one thing they do agree on is that the average view has

got to be wrong. The

reason for thinking this is just consider very

negative lives. So suppose that you have a first world, which has a million people who have terrible, terrible lives, let's say it's they're all at minus 100, that means like lives of excruciating torment. And now suppose

you have the option of adding a billion more people who will also have truly terrible lives, but

lives that aren't quite as bad as that first million, so they're at minus 99. On the

average view, that would be a good thing to do. It would be a good thing to add a billion people to the

population with lives of terrible suffering, just

because that would bring up the average well-being. That

seems like a real ever.

So the average view is not plausible. Your threshold view is the view that we're doing the world of favor from an impersonal point of view if we bring in a life above the threshold. Can you say something more about what this threshold is? So these

are known as critical level views. One was actually defended by my old supervisor who I know has been on this podcast, John Blume. My reason for endorsing it is a little different than John's where I think like, well, we need to take into account our uncertainty over population ethics. I think we should have some degree of belief in the total view. We should have some degree of belief in person affecting views where it's not good to bring into existence new people, nor is it bad to bring into existence

people with bad lives.

We should also have some degree of belief in these kind of threshold views, this critical level view. And so the critical level I would endorse is kind of somewhere in between kind

of typical critical levels that critical level theorists want to promote and the total view which has no critical level or the level is zero. And how

exactly do you set that though? It's

tough. I mean, it's a matter for kind of model

intuition where we should reflect on this argument that leads us to sort of

a pugnant conclusion,

which is saying, well, every time we have

some starting population of a large number of people with very, very good lives, and

if we could change that by making the average well-being a little bit lower, but the total number of

people much, much larger, is that a good thing to do?

I think there can be arguments that is a good thing to do. But at some point, we might conclude actually now the level of well-being of average well-being is low enough that really there's no amount of

increased population size that would compensate for the fact that average well-being has been lowered. And if we get to that point in terms of our moral intuitions,

then that suggests

that's the point of what's known as the critical level.

Right.