9/17/2023 0 Comments Lockdown in melbourne 2022In each population, quality of life is equal between individuals (“no one is worse off than anyone else”) (Parfit 1984, p. B is twice the size of A, and has about two-thirds of A’s level of wellbeing. A is a small population with very high quality of life. In one, he compares two populations, A and B. Parfit ( 1984) introduced a set of cases designed to test our intuitions about the number of people in a population versus those people’s quality of life. 1, I’ll say a bit more about some of the population ethicists’ useful discussions. Thus I want to pick up on and extend the project Godfrey-Smith started in his paper, of looking more closely at what reductions in quality of life have been imposed on which groups of people, and whether they can be said to have gotten us closer to the point at which quality should start to have priority over quantity than policy-makers have acknowledged. At least in the abstract, philosophers have shown that there are situations in which quality should be preferred (the world imagined in Derek Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion, which I’ll talk more about below, is one example). The other is that it’s not clear that the strong priority given to quantity over quality is really justified. Footnote 3 That means the trade-off is not quality versus quantity, in all cases, but sometimes quantity versus quantity, with one set of impacts on quantity being largely overlooked. One is that policy-makers have tended to focus on the risk of death and disease caused by COVID-19, but not the risk of death and disease caused by the proposed mitigation strategy, namely lockdowns Footnote 2 (as Peter Godfrey-Smith argues persuasively, in this issue).
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