Consider the following facts:
- For any population of people of happiness h, you can add more people of happiness less than h, and still improve things.
- For any population of people, you can spread people's happiness in a more egalitarian way, while keeping the same average happiness, and this makes things no worse.
This sounds a lot like the mere addition paradox, illustrated by the following diagram:
This is seems to lead directly to the repugnant conclusion - that there is a huge population of people who's lives are barely worth living, but that this outcome is better because of the large number of them (in practice this conclusion may have a little less bite than feared, at least for non-total utilitarians).
But that conclusion doesn't follow at all! Consider the following aggregation formula, where au is the average utility of the population and n is the total number of people in the population:
au(1-(1/2)n)
This obeys the two properties above, and yet does not lead to a repugnant conclusion. How so? Well, property 2 is immediate - since only the average utility appears, the reallocating utility in a more egalitarian way does not decrease the aggregation. For property 1, define f(n)=1-(1/2)n. This function f is strictly increasing, so if we add more members of the population, the product goes up - this allows us to diminish the average utility slightly (by decreasing the utility of the people we've added, say), and still end up with a higher aggregation.
How do we know that there is no repugnant conclusion? Well, f(n) is bounded above by 1. So let au and n be the average utility and size of a given population, and au' and n' those of a population better than this one. Hence au(f(n)) < au'(f(n')) < au'. So the average utility can never sink below au(f(n)): the average utility is bounded.
So some weaker versions of the mere addition argument do not imply the repugnant conclusion.
It's just an investigation around these issues - no real conclusion yet.