There’s a publication just out in Utilitas, in which 29 authors – including me – state our agreement that the fact that a theory implies Derek Parfit’s ‘repugnant conclusion’ is not an adequate reason to reject it. This follows forty years of population ethics in which philosophers have tried to avoid the repugnant conclusion, but failed to come up with a convincing theory that does so.
It’s an honour to be amongst such esteemed co-authors, and hopefully this intervention will move the field of population ethics forwards. Thanks to Dean Spears for doing much of the legwork on this.
The paper is here (open access and very short).
And I tweeted about it here (more accessible if you haven’t come across the repugnant conclusion before).
Nikhil Venkatesh 