Astral Codex Ten

Repugnant Conclusion

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Repugnant Conclusion

Article

Repugnant Conclusion is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between August 23, 2022 and November 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “The Repugnant Conclusion is certainly unintuitive”; “the repugnant conclusion doesn’t seem so repugnant”; “the neutral point where the Repugnant Conclusion would force us to”. It most often appears alongside Brazil, India, MacAskill.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: August 23, 2022
  • Last seen: November 03, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: What We Owe The Future
August 23, 2022 · Original source
This argument, popularly called the Repugnant Conclusion, seems to involve a sleight-of-hand: the philosopher convinces you to add some extra people, pointing out that it won’t make the existing people any worse. Then once the people exist, he says “Ha! Now that these people exist, you’re morally obligated to redistribute utility to help them.” But just because you know this is going to happen doesn’t make the argument fail.
Inline links: Repugnant Conclusion
The Repugnant Conclusion is certainly unintuitive. Does that mean that we should automatically reject the total view? I don’t think so. Indeed, in what was an unusual move in philosophy, a public statement was recently published, cosigned by twenty-nine philosophers, stating that the fact that a theory of population ethics entails the Repugnant Conclusion shouldn’t be a decisive reason to reject that theory. I was one of the cosignatories.
Highlights From The Comments On The Repugnant Conclusion And WWOTF
August 25, 2022 · Original source
If you think of a person with 0.01 happiness as someone whose life is pretty decent by our standards, the repugnant conclusion doesn't seem so repugnant. If you take a page from the negative utilitarians' book (without subscribing fully to them), you can weight the negatives of pain higher than the positives of pleasure, and say that neutral needs many times more pleasure than pain because pain is more bad than pleasure is good.
Another way to put it is that a life of 0.01 happiness is a life you must actually decide you'd want to live, in addition to your own life, if you had the choice to. If your intuition tells you that you wouldn't want to live it, then its value is not truly >0, and you must shift the scale. Then, once your intuition tells you that this is a life you'd marginally prefer to get to experience yourself, then the repugnant conclusion no longer seems repugnant.
Second, MacAskill actually cites some research about where we should put the zero point. Weirdly, it’s not in the section about the repugnant conclusion, it’s in a separate section about whether we should ascribe the future positive value.
Links For October
October 12, 2022 · Original source
22: Stuart Armstrong argues that the “Sadistic Conclusion” - one of the potential alternatives to the Repugnant Conclusion usually considered even worse and not worth thinking about - is actually underrated.
Inline links: is actually underrated
Your Book Review: The Educated Mind
July 14, 2023 · Original source
Where do we see this? Only a few months ago, in his book review of What We Owe the Future, Scott responded to the Repugnant Conclusion (a seemingly-unwinnable philosophical paradox) by saying:
Inline links: his book review of
Writing For The AIs
November 03, 2025 · Original source
One might thread this needle by imagining an AI which has a little substructure, enough to say “poll people on things”, but leaves important questions up to an “electorate” of all humans, living and dead. For example, it might have an ethos resembling utilitarianism, with a free parameter around how thoroughly to accept or reject the repugnant conclusion. Maybe it would hold an election. But are there really enough of these that the best way to cast a vote is a whole writing career, rather than a short list of moral opinions?
Inline links: repugnant conclusion