#321 - Reckoning with Parfit
Making Sense with Sam Harris - Subscriber Content
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The Repugnant Conclusion
The repugnant conclusion is part of its claim that for any set of people, let's say there are imagine there are eight billion people on the planet who have all of them very happy lives. The philosopher felt it couldn't possibly be right because it's so counterintuitive and yet he thought that there were arguments which suggested that it was the right conclusion to draw. And to the end of his life, he was trying to find a solution to the repugnant Conclusion. It does seem in some sense destructive of the whole enterprise of doing population ethics in a consequentialist way.
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