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Does the repugnant conclusion have any probative force?

Cowie, Christopher

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Abstract

In engaging with the repugnant conclusion many contemporary philosophers, economists and social scientists make claims about what a minimally good life is like. For example, some claim that such a life is quite good by contemporary standards, and use this to defend classical utilitarianism, whereas others claim that it is not, and use this to uphold the challenge that the repugnant conclusion poses to classical utilitarianism. I argue that many of these claims—by both sides—are not well-founded. We have no sufficiently clear sense of what a minimally good life is like. It is a result of this that the repugnant conclusion doesn’t license us in drawing any interesting conclusions.

Citation

Cowie, C. (2017). Does the repugnant conclusion have any probative force?. Philosophical Studies, 174(12), 3021-3039. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0844-7

Journal Article Type Article
Online Publication Date Dec 18, 2016
Publication Date Dec 1, 2017
Deposit Date Sep 6, 2017
Publicly Available Date Oct 24, 2017
Journal Philosophical studies
Print ISSN 0031-8116
Electronic ISSN 1573-0883
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 174
Issue 12
Pages 3021-3039
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0844-7
Related Public URLs https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/262822

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Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2016 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.




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