Carol had decided to use a large slice of her substantial wealth to improve life in an impoverished village in southern Tanzania. However, since she had reservations about birth-control programmes, the development agency which she was working with had come up with two possible plans.
The first would involve no birth-control element. This would probably see the population of the village rise from 100 to 150 and the quality of life index, which measures subjective as well as objective factors, rise modestly from an average of 2.4 to 3.2.
The second plan did include a non-coercive birth-control programme. This would see the population remain stable at 100, but the average quality of life would rise to 4.0.
Given that only those with a quality of life ranked as 1.0 or lower consider their lives not to be worth living at all, the first plan would lead to there being more worthwhile lives than the second, whereas the second would result in fewer lives, but ones which were even more fulfilled. Which plan would make the best use of Carol’s money?
Source: Part four of Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit (Oxford University Press, 1984)
Carol’s dilemma is not simply one of choosing between quality or quantity, for when we use things such as quality of life indices we are quantifying quality. That is just as complicated as it sounds.
What is Carol trying to achieve? There are three plausible answers. One is to increase the number of worthwhile lives. Another is to increase the total amount of quality of life. And the third is to create the conditions for the most worthwhile forms of life as possible.
Consider the first option. Clearly, if she goes with the no-birth-control plan, there will be more lives worth living as a result. But is this a desirable outcome? If we think it is, it seems we are led to an absurd conclusion. For since all lives other than the most wretched are worth living, that would mean we should always try to bring as many people into the world as possible, just as long as the quality of their lives doesn’t fall below a minimum level. But would it really be a good thing if we trebled the population of Britain, for example, impoverishing it in the process, in order to bring more lives worth living into the world?
The second possible goal is to increase the total amount of quality of life. Again, the first plan achieves this. Although the maths can only approximate to the reality, we can see roughly how 150 lives each with a 3.2 quality of life rating scores a total of 480 ‘points’, whereas 100 lives each with a 4.0 rating scores only 400. So there is more quality of life under the first plan.
But this too can lead to absurdity. For if we use this as the basis for our judgements, we would think it better to bring 1,000 people into the world with the prospect of a miserable 1.1 quality of life rating than 100 with the maximum rating of 10. (The rating system used here is fictitious.)
That leaves the third possibility: create the conditions for the most worthwhile and satisfying forms of human life possible, and don’t worry about trying to maximise either the total number of people or total amount of quality of life. It’s better to have fewer people genuinely content than many more barely satisfied.
Although that sounds like a reasonable conclusion, it has implications in other areas of life and ethics which some find more disturbing. For once we start to say that there is no value in creating more life for its own sake, even if those lives would be worth living, potential lives, in the form of early foetuses, no longer have any special value. The fact that a foetus might become a human being with a worthwhile life is no reason to think we are morally obliged to do all we can to ensure it does so. Of course, many are perfectly happy to accept this conclusion. Those who aren’t need to ask themselves why they aren’t.
See also
| 20. | Condemned to life |
| 84. | The pleasure principle |
| 87. | Fair inequality |
| 98. | The experience machine |