ABSTRACT
Some of the most plausible candidates lead to a highly counter-intuitive result: the Repugnant Conclusion. Perhaps, however, considerations of the Repugnant Conclusion push us in this direction too. These paradoxes push us in the unenviable direction of accepting a set of mutually inconsistent propositions: a set that contains both the falsity of the Repugnant Conclusion, and the premises that entail its truth. There are a number of options. One is that the reasoning that leads us to the Repugnant Conclusion – and the Very Repugnant Conclusion and the Reverse Repugnant Conclusion – goes wrong somewhere. Perhaps, for example, the principle of transitivity of betterness on which it relies is false. Another option is that these seemingly implausible results are in fact true, but that we have simply yet to find a sufficiently plausible debunking explanation of their seeming implausibility.
