<scp>The Repugnant Conclusion and Utilitarianism under Domain Restrictions</scp>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The paper investigates the problem of the repugnant conclusion in variable‐population social choice. A choice rule exhibits the repugnant conclusion if, given any alternative in which all individuals enjoy a high quality of life, there is always a better alternative (according to the choice rule) in which the population is larger and each individual has a life which is barely worth living. While it is well‐known that classical utilitarianism (CU) exhibits the repugnant conclusion on an unrestricted domain, the paper shows that critical‐level utilitarianism (CLU) also exhibits the repugnant conclusion on an unrestricted domain when repugnance is defined in terms of the critical level. In contrast, both CU and CLU are shown to avoid the repugnant conclusion on a restricted domain defined by bounded resources, the law of conservation of matter, concavity and monotonicity of preferences, positive subsistence consumption, and positive “neutral consumption.” In light of the universality of these restrictions, one may conclude that the problem of the repugnant conclusion may not be as great as previously thought.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".