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Kaj_Sotala comments on The Mere Cable Channel Addition Paradox - Less Wrong Discussion
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Okay, so Parfit's paradox doesn't prove that we should make more people if our resources are constant. And it doesn't prove that we should make more people when we get more resources. But it might still prove that we should agree to make more people and more resources if it's a package deal.
More concretely, if you had a button that created (or made accessible) one additional unit of resource and a million people using that resource to live lives barely worth living, would you press that button? Grabbing only the resources and skipping the people isn't on the menu of the thought experiment. It seems to me that if you would press that button, and also press the next button that redistributes all existing resources equally among existing people, then the repugnant conclusion isn't completely dead...
This might be getting into semantics, but I don't think your proposed dilemma really qualifies as the RC anymore. The RC was interesting because it seemed to derive an obviously unacceptable conclusion (a world full of people whose lives are barely worth living) from premises / steps that were all individually obviously acceptable. Yours employs a step (create people whose lives are barely worth living, without getting enough extra resources to make up for it) that's already ethically ambiguous, due to clearly leading to a world with a population dominated by people whose lives are barely worth living.
In my argument the button could create people and resources leading to a standard of living just below the current average, like in the original RC.
Point taken, though that's still a more morally ambiguous step than the equivalent in the original RC. There are already plenty of people today who think that people shouldn't have more children due to the Earth's resources being limited. That's not an exact mapping to "creating new people that gave us some small amount of extra resources", but it's close and brings to mind the same arguments.