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22 J. Ethics & Soc. Phil. 382 (2022)
Critical Levels, Critical Ranges, and Imprecise Exchange Rates in Population Axiology

handle is hein.journals/jetshy22 and id is 393 raw text is: Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy https://doi.org/lo.26556/jesp.v22i3.1593 VOL. 22, NO. 3 - SEPTEMBER 2022 © 2022 Author CRITICAL LEVELS, CRITICAL RANGES, AND IMPRECISE EXCHANGE RATES IN POPULATION AXIOLOGY Elliott Thornley H OW DO WE DETERMINE whether one population is at least as good as another? Here is one easy answer. We use a number to represent each person's welfare-how good their life is for them-with the size of the number proportional to how good their life is. Positive numbers represent good lives, negative numbers represent bad lives, and zero represents lives that are neither good nor bad. We then sum these numbers to get the value of each pop- ulation. A population Xis at least as good as a population Yiff the value of X is at least as great as the value of Y. A theory of how populations relate with respect to goodness is called a population axiology, and we can call this population axiology the Total View. The Total View implies that we can improve populations by adding lives that are barely worth living, and some find this implication distasteful. We can avoid this implication by first subtracting some positive constant from the number representing a person's welfare and then summing the results. Call these popula- tion axiologies critical-level views. Critical-level views cannot account for two intuitions that many people find appealing. The first is that there is a range of welfare levels such that adding lives at these levels makes a population neither better nor worse. The second is that populations of different sizes may be incommensurable, so that neither popula- tion is better than the other and yet nor are they equally good. In that case, we might prefer to subtract a range of positive constants from the number repre- senting a person's welfare and then calculate the value of a population relative to each constant within the range. We can then claim that X is at least as good as Yiff the value of X is at least as great as the value of Y relative to each constant within the range. If neither X nor Y is at least as good as the other, they are in- commensurable. Call these population axiologies critical-range views. Critical-level and critical-range views fall within the more general class of critical-set views. I offer a characterization and taxonomy of these views below, 382

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