Prioritarianism and Population Ethics

Abstract

Abstract Roughly stated, prioritarianism is the view that we should give priority to the worse off in the distribution of welfare. Like other distributive principles, it struggles with coming up with plausible judgments in the sphere of population ethics. Thus, prioritarians may either hold that prioritarianism applies to different-number comparisons of outcomes or that it does not. If the former, this has various counterintuitive implications, not least that prioritarianism implies not only the Repugnant Conclusion, but also what has been labeled the Super-Repugnant Conclusion, according to which an outcome, A, may be better than another, B, even though people have excellent lives in B and lives only barely worth living in A and B hold a higher total of benefits. If the latter, prioritarianism is a seriously incomplete distributive principle. In this chapter, these implications are considered as well as various ways in which prioritarians may attempt to avoid problematic conclusions in population ethics. These attempts include adopting a person-affecting account of morality, adopting an average or critical-level prioritarian function, and appealing to value incomparability. Finally, it is considered whether prioritarianism is less plausible than, for example, total utilitarianism in the sphere of population ethics. Thus while, unlike utilitarianism, prioritarianism may imply the Super-Repugnant Conclusion, it may seem more plausible than the former principle when it comes to, for example, the negative Repugnant Conclusion (which deals with negative welfare) and the so-called asymmetry.

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