Total View

Definition and Core Idea

The Total View (also called the Total Principle or total utilitarian view) is a position in population ethics, the branch of moral philosophy that studies how to compare outcomes involving different numbers and identities of people. According to the Total View, the moral value of an outcome is determined solely by the total sum of well-being of all individuals who ever exist in that outcome. An outcome is better, morally speaking, if and only if the aggregate well-being across all persons is greater.

In contrast to views that focus on average well-being, fairness, or priority to the worst off, the Total View is indifferent to how well-being is distributed, provided that the total amount increases. This makes it a paradigmatic form of total utilitarianism applied to questions about population size, future generations, and the ethics of creating new lives.

Formal Characterization

In simplified terms, let:

• W(i) be the lifetime well-being of individual i (which may be positive, zero, or negative).
• S be a possible state of the world, containing a set of individuals I(S).

The Total View evaluates each state S by its total value:

V(S) = Σ W(i), summed over all i in I(S).

Given two possible outcomes A and B, the Total View holds:

• A is morally better than B if and only if V(A) > V(B).
• A and B are morally equally good if V(A) = V(B).

On this formulation:

• Adding a new person with positive well-being increases total value and is therefore morally improving (other things equal).
• Adding a person with negative well-being decreases total value and is morally worsening.
• It can be better, by this standard, to have many people each living lives barely worth living, if the combined well-being exceeds that of a smaller population living very good lives.

This last implication connects the Total View to Derek Parfit’s famous Repugnant Conclusion, according to which, for any world with very high well-being for a smaller number of people, there is a much larger world with very modest but still positive well-being for each person that is deemed better by totalist standards.

Motivations and Attractions

Proponents of the Total View cite several considerations in its favor:

1. Equal moral weight of persons
   The Total View treats each person’s well-being as counting equally and additively. No unit of well-being is discounted because of who experiences it, when they live, or how many others exist. This matches a common utilitarian intuition that morality should be impartial and person-neutral.

2. Future people matter morally
   By summing well-being across all who ever exist, the Total View naturally includes future generations on the same footing as present ones. If future people can have lives worth living, then increasing their numbers (within resource constraints) can be, in principle, a moral improvement, since their well-being contributes to the total.

3. Coherent extension of classical utilitarianism
   Classical act utilitarianism evaluates actions by their impact on the total happiness or preference satisfaction of all affected individuals. The Total View extends this idea to contexts where the number and identity of future persons are themselves affected by choices—such as climate policy, reproductive decisions, and long-term technological development.

4. Comparative clarity
   The Total View gives a single, quantitative standard for comparing outcomes. This can be seen as an advantage in policy contexts, where trade-offs are unavoidable and some ordering of options appears necessary. It avoids certain paradoxes and intransitivities that beset more complex distributive or person-affecting views.

Objections and Alternatives

Despite its attractions, the Total View is highly controversial, and has generated extensive debate.

1. The Repugnant Conclusion
   The most famous objection is that the Total View entails the Repugnant Conclusion: for any possible population of very high well-being, there exists a much larger population whose members have lives barely worth living that is, on total grounds, better. Critics contend that this clashes with the intuition that a world in which everyone leads very meager lives cannot be better than one in which a smaller number of people live extraordinarily good lives.

   Defenders respond in several ways:

   • Some accept the conclusion as a counterintuitive but ultimately forced implication of plausible ethical principles.
   • Others argue that when all relevant dimensions of well-being are properly accounted for, the highly populated “barely worth living” scenario is much less realistic or attractive than critics assume.

2. Neglect of distribution and fairness
   Because the Total View is concerned only with the sum, it can in principle endorse outcomes with severe inequality, so long as the total increases. A world where some are extremely well off and others endure very low but still positive well-being may be ranked above a more equal world with slightly lower total well-being.

   Alternative views, such as prioritarianism or egalitarianism, give extra moral weight to the worse off or to equality, often at the cost of straightforward total maximization.

3. The “mere addition” worry
   Another concern is that the Total View treats the creation of additional happy lives as always good (if they are above zero in well-being), even when nobody existing in the smaller population is better off. This invites the question whether “mere addition” of extra people can count as an improvement when it benefits no existing individual.

   Person-affecting views attempt to block this implication by holding, in some form, that an outcome is morally better only if it is better for someone, typically someone who would exist in both outcomes. These views often struggle, however, with their own puzzles, such as how to handle cases where identity depends on the decisions being evaluated.

4. Overpopulation and quality-of-life concerns
   Critics also argue that, in practice, aiming to maximize total well-being might encourage very large populations living close to subsistence levels—a pattern sometimes described as “overcrowded but positive.” They suggest that moral common sense pays greater attention to the quality rather than the mere quantity of lives.

   Some propose average utilitarianism, which ranks outcomes by the average well-being per person rather than the total. Yet average views face their own counterintuitive implications—for instance, that adding a large number of additional people with high but slightly below-average well-being could be morally bad because it lowers the average.

5. Risk, uncertainty, and very long-term futures
   The Total View, when combined with uncertainty and very long time horizons, can imply an extremely strong focus on reducing small risks of vast future harms or securing small chances of vast future benefits. Supporters see this as a consistent application of impartial concern; critics worry it may overly dominate current moral priorities or be too sensitive to speculative scenarios.

In contemporary moral philosophy, no consensus has emerged on whether the Total View should be accepted, modified, or rejected. It remains a central reference point in debates about intergenerational ethics, existential risk, and the moral significance of creating new people, shaping how philosophers and policy theorists think about the long-term future of humanity.