Population Ethics and Conflict-of-Value Imprecision

Parfit (2016) has suggested a new way of avoiding the paradoxes and impossibility theorems in population ethics by revising our beliefs about fundamental axiological concepts such as “equally good” and “better than”. More specifically, Parfit suggests that “We might claim that…given the conflict between…values, [w]orlds are only imprecisely comparable, and would be imprecisely equally good.” From this it follows that many of the comparisons of different future populations will involve imprecise comparisons and hence that transitivity of “better than” might fail. Parfit suggests that this move in combination with an appeal to lexically superior values will open up a way of avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion without implying other counterintuitive conclusion, and thus solve one of the major challenges in ethics. This chapter tries to clarify Parfit’s proposal and evaluate whether it, or a possible development of it, will help us with the impossibility theorems in population ethics.