Dr Christopher Cowie christopher.d.cowie@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor
Does the repugnant conclusion have any probative force?
Cowie, Christopher
Authors
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 |
Files
Published Journal Article
(526 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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.
You might also like
New Work on Biosignatures
(2023)
Journal Article
Why Moral Paradoxes Support Error Theory
(2023)
Journal Article
Confidence of Life Detection: The Problem of Unconceived Alternatives
(2023)
Journal Article
What are Paradoxes?
(2022)
Journal Article
The 'Oumuamua Controversy: A Philosophical Perspective
(2021)
Journal Article
Downloadable Citations
About Durham Research Online (DRO)
Administrator e-mail: dro.admin@durham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search