Quarantined Prioritarianism

Abstract

While utilitarianism is vulnerable to a Repugnant Conclusion with regard to populations of variable sizes, prioritarianism, it has been observed, does even worse. Because it gives greater weight to utility at lower absolute levels, prioritarianism encounters a Super Repugnant Conclusion. It is not surprising, then, that in his last published paper on prioritarianism, Derek Parfit argued that the priority view ought not to apply to cases involving ‘different people’. Prioritarianism, in other words, ought to be ‘quarantined’, and restricted to ‘same people’ cases. This chapter advances four related claims with respect to quarantined prioritarianism. First, contra Parfit it shows that it is far from obvious that prioritarianism ought to be quarantined in the first place, and that doing so entails a certain cost, namely sacrificing its alleged ‘completeness’. Second, that if prioritarianism is, for some reason, to be quarantined, then that should hold, contra Michael Otsuka, with respect to Different Numbers Choices and never with respect to Same Number Choices. Third, this ‘narrow’ quarantining approach is in fact consistent with other tenets of Parfit’s axiology that we have good reason to endorse (such as his ‘No Difference View’, and his views on the Value of Existence). And fourth, it is shown that future generations do, after all, present a certain difficulty to standard formulations of prioritarianism (e.g. Nils Holtug’s), and that a minor yet important revision to how we understand the priority view is called for.