ABSTRACT
The Repugnant Conclusion is a controversial theorem that compares the values of different populations. There are many ways of getting to this theorem; the Repugnant Conclusion is the result of several quite distinct lines of reasoning. That is perhaps one of the reasons that it is worth taking seriously. Results that can be derived in independent ways are robust. The Repugnant Conclusion is a comparative claim about populations. The Repugnant Conclusion compares a population of high-quality lives with a population of lives that are ‘barely worth living’. These are lives that have marginally positive welfare. The Diminishing-Value View effectively imposes a limit to prevent this potentially infinite accumulation of goodness, thereby avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion. On the Diminishing-Value View, the goodness of the population is a decreasing function of the welfares of all its lives.
