Calvin Baker

It is nearly half a century since moral philosophers first began to grapple with a series of troubling axiological paradoxes. It now looks as though they may resist satisfactory resolution. Concern is growing that this supports skepticism. I provide the first full articulation and defense of this concern in the form of a case for global axiological skepticism and a tentative roadmap for extension to a broader moral skepticism. The result is an alternative to the disagreement- and debunking-based arguments that predominate in contemporary metaethics.

This paper concerns the difficulty of avoiding an additive version of the Very Repugnant Conclusion. An impossibility theorem is provided which shows that we cannot avoid this version of the Repugnant Conclusion even if we deny the Mere Addition Principle and closely related principles which place limits on the badness of adding happy people, such as “Dominance Addition” and additive “Non-Sadism” conditions. I argue that the impossibility theorem shows that the additive version of the Very Repugnant Conclusion cannot reasonably be avoided by population-ethical means alone. One must instead either deny structural conditions such as acyclicity, adopt a radically unorthodox fixed-population axiology, or accept this version of the Very Repugnant Conclusion.