Talk:Mere addition paradox

"He does not have a solution"??? Before I read the last two paragraphs, I thought "gee, that's easy to explain, hardly worth being called a paradox." It's a typical apples-and-oranges thing. By saying A+ is no worse than A, he just considers the total amount of happiness (because the average person's happiness in the population is in fact reduced). And if you just want to maximize the total amount of happiness, then of course B is better than A (and so is Z). Nothing paradoxical about it. But if you want to maximize the average happiness, then A+ is already worse than A. --Wik 23:33, Sep 6, 2003 (UTC)

But this is where the mere addition comes in. The mere addition of people to group A, to get A Plus, can't be bad, since the people in the 1st group are still just as happy - the addition of a second group can't possibly make things worse, surely? This is a reason for rejecting the principle of average happiness, if nothing else... Evercat 23:37, 6 Sep 2003 (UTC)

It may not make things worse for the first group, but why just consider them? Considered as a whole, A+ is definitely worse than A. The average happiness of the population decreases. If that doesn't matter, and you want to maximize the total sum of happiness instead, then Z is indeed best. Whether you prefer one goal or the other (or some weighted combination of the two) is a subjective matter, but in this "paradox" the goals are incoherently mixed. First it is assumed that an increase in total happiness (despite a decrease in the average) is preferable, and in the end the opposite is suggested. --Wik 23:55, Sep 6, 2003 (UTC)

Well, if you're happy believing that a huge population of only slightly happy people is better than a small population of really happy people, be my guest. :-)

Or, if you're happy believing that a world with a very happy group and a moderately happy group is worse than a world with only the very happy group, be my guest.

But I (as well as most people, I'd have thought) am not happy believing either... Evercat 23:59, 6 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Well, if you're happy with your paradoxical beliefs, be my guest. But if you set coherent goals, which may of course be more complex than just one of the two extremes, you won't have a paradox. --Wik 00:10, Sep 7, 2003 (UTC)

Heh. I'm not trying to set goals - all I'm doing is accepting that:

The mere addition of people whose lives are worth living cannot make things worse (or "is not a bad thing")
Increasing average happiness (by "redistribution" of happiness) cannot make things worse (or "is not a bad thing")

I think both these claims are reasonable; but they do lead to the Repugnant Conclusion. Evercat 00:16, 7 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Well, I for one don't think it's reasonable at all. It is flat out contradictory. The first thing makes things worse for the population as a whole, and the second makes things worse for those individuals who lose in the redistribution. If you consistently apply either an individual or a global view, one of the two will be a bad thing. --Wik 00:49, Sep 7, 2003 (UTC)

To the first case - suppose there exists just one person in the world, but he is absurdly happy. Is it actually a bad thing for God to create a trillion more people, all of whom will be slightly less happy (but nevertheless extremely happy)? I really can't accept this.

To the second case - while the redistribution does make some people worse off, this is more than offset by the gain to the others. So I don't see how this can be a bad thing either.

We can of course just accept the Repugnant Conclusion. Evercat 01:03, 7 Sep 2003 (UTC)

The Repugnant Conclusion is only repugnant if you incorrectly apply addition and substraction. In math it is true that:

A-B+B=A

But that is not the case if we are talking about levels of population and -B = "X people killed", +B = "X people born". Therefore you can argue that one should maximise average happyness instead of the sum of happyness without advocating killing sad people. --Xeeron 17:13, 2 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Note also that you can increase the average happiness of a group by killing all the sad people, as practiced by Monty Python's King Otto. -- The Anome 00:19, 7 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Another reason to reject the idea that average happiness is all that matters. Evercat 01:03, 7 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Why? lysdexia 07:56, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

This assumes that happiness is a scalar quantity, that is, that it'd make sense to say things like "Person A is twice as happy as Person B", or "People A and B summed together are as happy as people C and D". My belief is that this makes no sense.

Why not? And since when was it about good or bad instead of better or worse? Why are right and wrong not mentioned? Someone please write a section on happiness vampires and zombies, with illustrations. :) lysdexia 07:56, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

This is a strange statement: "However, this position does involve the claim that it is actually bad for people of less-than-average happiness to be born, even if their lives are worth living."

It seems to me that I can reject it merely by claiming that averagely happy people's lives aren't worth living since the suffering they go through isn't worth their happiness. This sets a simple floor on the minimum level of happiness which is needed per person.

Well I think the idea that people of average happiness don't have lives worth living is the stranger claim! :-) But yes, if you believe that the threshold for a life worth living is actually very high, this might provide a way out of the problem. Evercat 22:45, 15 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Or put another way, there is a simple way to go around this; define happiness = x - y/p where x is a negative number (intrinsic suffering), y is a larger positive number (the available happiness) and p is the population. As soon as you a large popluation (defined as p > y/x, the (negative) x dominates the positive y.

It seems to me that it's the assumption that happiness is something which is simply divided by population which is the main stupidity of this whole theory.

But the Mere Addition Paradox is a theoretical matter. It's a thought experiment. You're meant to just accept the assumptions that happiness can be measured and can be equal for everyone in a population, to see what conclusions follow. Evercat 22:45, 15 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

In this case, to maximise total happiness we have to minimise population. With more realistic happiness equation (there's only so much happiness a single person can gather in a lifetime, for example) then we can probably select any population size we wish.

Azikala 19:33, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

comments

(First, a joke: Hey, I wouldn't be terribly happy either if my existence were described as a "mere addition" to the existence of some absurdly happy individual.) I found the article to be a bit lacking in its explanation. It seems that, for the purpose of this paradox, amounts of happiness can be compared and averaged, and that they are measured in reference to some "zero". (As Lysdexia pointed out, they appear to be scalar quantities.) Is it reasonable to replace or supplement the graphs with numerical examples? Or would that give the happiness quantities additional properties that are undesirable/distracting? Actually, I only just realized that in the graphs, the x axis does not represent population size, as stated. Instead, the sizes of the rectangles along the x axis represents population size, if I understand correctly. At any rate, I find the graphs confusing. -- Wmarkham

A couple other comments: Would links to utility and social welfare function be appropriate? Also, are there any relevent papers or other references that discuss this topic? -- Wmarkham

Perhaps morality is not defined by the states, but only by the transitions: some transitions are moral and some are not, without regard to the before and after states. This does open a whole new can of worms.

The article suggests "Some say that this paradox can be defeated by simply denying its first axiom: that adding people of less-than-average happiness into the world doesn't make the overall situation worse." and points out that that implies it would be bad for people with less than average happiness to be born.

However, it seems like there's a third alternative: adding people of less than average happiness *sometimes* makes the overall situation worse. In this view, creating A+ does not reduce the total happiness, but similar steps in further iterations of the argument might.

Well it's up to the critics to specify when and why mere addition can be bad, or when and why increasing the average happiness (at the cost of the highest level of happiness attained) is bad... Evercat 22:36, 15 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There's also a related answer which in some ways is equivalent: The first step involves adding some people who are moderately happy--i.e. who are less happy than A, but not too much less happy. This requires some kind of threshhold for what "moderate" is and how much less happy the people may be. Depending on how this threshhold is related to the current degree of happiness, repeating the steps may cause convergence; if so, the average happiness, while it decreases each iteration, woukd never get below a certain value. Ken Arromdee 20:12, 15 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well, not really: it works as long as we agree that creating people whose lives are worth living is never bad. But Parfit considers this very argument in section 147 of his book (well worth reading, by the way, or at least the second half is). You're right that there would be a certain level that we could not go below and still say that things were as good or better than they were before, but that level is going to be fairly low. Do we really want to believe that a huge population of people who are somewhat happy, is better than a relatively small population that is very very happy? Maybe we do, I don't know. Evercat 22:36, 15 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There's no paradox here, just the illusion of one due to semantics and perceptions skewed by trying to quantify happiness. The biggest bias is in the wording "barely worth living." There's a lot of inference implicit in this phrase, considering that we're trying to make a somewhat objective judgement. When people consider their lives to be barely worth living, it usually implies that they have a lot of unhappiness.

Happiness can't be quantified. If we try, we come up with something like this: in scenario A, 1000 people each experience 1000 moments of happiness, resulting in a million total moments of happiness. Each further scenario increases the total moments of happiness. Z might include a billion people each experiencing one moment of happiness. If the rest of life is neutral (so that, outside the moment of happiness, the people's lives are ordinary, though not distressing; about as worth living as not), then the one moment of happiness does indeed make each of their lives worth living. This is hardly repugnant (a neutral life is not repugnant, just neutral. We just perceive it to be repugnant because we expect happiness). It is better for there to be a billion moments of happiness than a million. We've spread the happiness out; nothing wrong with that.

If this seems a bit reductive, well, that's what you get when you try to quantify happiness. It's not valid, you just end up with words filled with innuendo such as "repugnant." It only seems repugnant because my goodness, all those years of working at a job, raising kids, conflict etc. and just for a single moment of happiness! But you can't do that -- the tireless effort of work can be seen as unhappiness, which changes everything. The only way to address the 'paradox' is to avoid all of these things and try to quantify happiness as I've done above, and then the paradox disappears.24.64.223.203 23:32, 27 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A solution, I think

I think the solution to the paradox is that the transition from A to A+ is practically imposible. Since the world has limited resources, we cannot just add moderately happy people without making the old group less happy. With more effective farming and such, there is room for more people, and that is just what happened through history. If the earth was infinitely big, then I would suggest increasing the population.

I know this is a thought example. But in unrealistic though example, we cannot use out ethical inutition. It seems like a "Repugnant Conclusion", but that's because out sense of ethics is made for real situation. --Apoc2400 10:37, 22 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

mistaken resolution section

The resolution section requires significant amendment.

There is a fairly substantial literature on the mere addition paradox and the related repugnant conclusion (there is a recent book devoted entirely to writings on the repugnant conclusion). The resolutions presented in this article are not represented in the literature on this topic (they appear to be original to Wikipedia) because they are misguided. The resolutions offered appeal to extrinsic characteristics of overpopulation - it tends to make things worse for people by stretching resources thin, spreading disease, causing empathetic sorrow, and so forth. Parfit is aware of the negative effects of overpopulation. His examples intentionally appeal to populations that are isolated from one another (R&P 419-20: "A+ contains another group, whom I call the extra people. These people have lives that are worth living, and they affect no one else . . . assume, for simplicity, that the two groups in A+ are not aware of each other's existence, and could not communicate."). This is because Parfit is interested in the question of mere addition - extrinsic factors aside, is the universe better with more people in it? It is no answer to this question to say that population growth in a given setting would be detrimental. Such population growth would not be a mere addition.

Perhaps the author of this entry does not intend to resolve the paradox but rather to challenge its relevance. If that is the case, he or she should say so. Let me suggest, though, at least one reason why the more theoretical question is relevant: If there is intrinsic value in adding more people whose lives are worth living, then we should be willing to bear the extrinsic costs of a certain degree of overpopulation in exchange for the added value of more people. Alternatively, if there is no intrinsic value, or if producing more people with lives worth living can be intrinsically bad, we should be much more concerned with the costs of overpopulation. Alecbings 16:56, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

For this reason, I amended the intro to make explicit that the two groups are totally separate, and I deleted the following, which seems to presuppose some interaction between the two groups:

The latter can be resolved by stating that for this person it is not bad be born at all, but bad to be born at the given time, simultaneously with many other persons in the same situation. If more and more people live at the same time at a given place, life gets miserable for all.

The paradox is also weak in one of its assumptions: Adding people of much less-than-average happiness into the world makes life more miserable for the formerly happy people (group A) as well, because they are confronted with poverty and diseases in people they know, possibly friends or even loved ones -- One might be inclined to help only the friends, but this will make them dependent on you and this dependency usually destroys a friendship after a while and reduces it to a mere façade.

The knowledge and sight of outrageous injustice is quite incompatible with true happiness for most people on both sides, see also the results about the "Tit for Tat" strategy on iterated prisoner's dilemma. One might argue that the groups could be isolated from each other and the rich ones could just ignore the others. But this means that society falls apart and that life is based on ignorance and lies. Knowing and facing the truth about reality constitutes an important part of happiness, particularly but not exclusively for scientists and artists.

In addition, the formerly happy people may contract diseases from the miserable ones. They might also live in fear of a revolution, so they need weapons, again isolation and protection against them, making life miserable for themselves, too.

Human history is a source of many examples of the points mentioned above.

The reasoning is similar to the discussion about the reintroduction of torture: On a very hypothetical basis and remote of the real experiences history taught us, abstract subtleties are discussed in order to question established principles of civilization.

-Dan 03:00, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

I think you're right that many of the resolutions offered presuppose tidbits that aren't directly related to the thought experiment. Best I can tell there is no way out of it as it is set up. I think the interesting thing about it is that in trying to work it out individually a number of different ethical considerations must be made & that seems to be what people were up to in the above comments.

However, I thought I should add something to these considerations based on lessons learned from the social sciences. According to much research of late, the appropriate conclusion to draw is that one population is not better/worse than any other b/c happiness is far more subjective & individuals actually assess their happiness based on those around them. If there are deviants it messes with everyone but in each of the three populations this is not the case - in population A+ the two different levels of happiness are completely separate & distinct populations. Thus, there is no 'gold standard' for happiness; rather, the key is equality. 66.57.13.12 14:00, 14 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Barely Worth Living - a clarification and resolution?

The Repugnant Conclusion includes the loaded phrase 'barely worth living'. What does this mean?

Suppose we add a dotted horizontal line to the original diagram, at a height somewhere lower than that of the shortest column, and label this 'Worth Living'. Then columns whose height's are above this line consist of people whose lives are worth living.

This is assumed, but not explicitly, stated by the original 'paradox'.

Now presumably The Repugnant Conclusion describes a situation represented by a column as wide as possible, whose height is just over this dotted line. So everyone in this population has a life that is worth living. Therefore we accept the so-called Repugnant conclusion, and the paradox is gone. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Deglog (talk • contribs) 14:30, 3 December 2006 (UTC).[reply]

Other opinions

There is John Rawl's A Theory of Justice, where he considers a minimax way of choosing the world where it has the best worst case scenario.

In addition, Average vs. Total Utility should be discussed. --70.111.218.254 14:55, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the key is the average utility vs total utility. The mere addition phrase for some reason made me think of families. World A could be some rich bachelor. World A+ could the rich bachelor getting married and this relationship with its pros and cons nets out to zero but brings great happiness to his wife (like the Pretty Woman movie or something). World B is them having children and becoming slightly less happy but bringing much happiness and existence to the children. The repugnant conclusion becomes a "large family". Not a perfect match of course. 64.42.233.61 17:10, 4 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]