as I understand it a lot of the ways to avoid it generally lead to their own contradictions within the framework of the utilitarian, because they mess with valuing and that can lead to stuff like childbirth becoming an immoral act at the crudest levels
"messing with valuing" is a good way to put it. yeah, this comes up on the maximizing-average-welfare approach. if some world consists of two extremely blissful and joyous adults and they have a child who is merely very happy (and they knew this would probably happen), then the average-welfare utilitarian approach would say they acted wrongly. (I thought this was the absurd conclusion, but that's actually something else -- more on that later)
another shitty way to get out of the repugnant conclusion is to introduce a strong harm/benefit asymmetry. then you have this weirdness where all the benefits and good elements in a person's life don't "count" positively, but all the harms do count negatively. there's this guy named david benatar who has published a book on that approach, and he thinks having kids is always wrong, and a life with any frustration of your preferences (including, like, not getting Saints Row 3 for Christmas) is worse than no life at all. this puts him in the unusual position of being in favor of the extinction of the human race. nobody agrees with him, but there's often room in philosophy for a principled lunatic. i mention his approach because it is simple and utterly ridiculous -- much worse than the problem he is trying to solve. (i'm not sure if he's a consequentialist anyway)
there are less extreme asymmetrical views, too, but i haven't found any that are satisfying. they're either kludgey and ad hoc or they have silly consequences.
speaking of which, when i was on the phone with red, i forgot what the absurd conclusion was. it's not about childbirth being wrong; it's like omelas, in the ursula le guin story. ten billion happy, thriving people and one with an absolutely miserable life. one possible asymmetrical theory -- that one miserable life outweighs any number of good ones -- would say that such a population is worse than none at all. this is less extreme than benatar, who just denies that there are lives worth living at all, but it's still pretty bad. among other things, it seems to suggest that if you pressed a button to obliterate all life in the universe, you would make the universe a better place, because there are some humans and other animals with lives not worth living.
fwiw, i think parfit suggested this theory just in order to dismiss it -- i'm not sure anyone believes it. he did that a lot in reasons and persons, sort of mapping the possible theories that you might hold on population ethics, and rejecting each one. no solution works very well. parfit hoped and believed that someone would come up with a "theory X" that would avoid the scyllas and charbydises of population ethics, but 27 years after the publication of reasons and persons, no one has. there's been plenty of interesting work done, but i'm not sure anyone has gotten much closer.
but the point isn't that it's
easy for utilitarians to get out of the repugnant conclusion -- it's not -- but it's also a problem for everyone else. the repugnant conclusion is really a problem in deciding what consequences are best, and everyone has to think about that unless they just deny that consequences matter at all. if you want to be a sane non-utilitarian, you still have to care about consequences. once you stop doing that, you veer into "sure, tell the nazis about the jews in your house, because lying is wrong and consequences don't matter" territory. or: should you save one small child or fifteen small children from a burning building? who cares? consequences don't count! you can see why this isn't a very promising approach.
the repugnant conclusion might be slightly
more of a problem for consequentialists, because for them, consequences are the
only arbiter for what's right and wrong. but even for non-consequentialists, it's difficult to figure out
why you shouldn't bring about parfit's "world z" if you're given the chance.
one more because i can't resist and this is silly
the very idea of Utilitarianism is that it is supposed to be scientific
no it's not
the very idea of utilitarianism is that you should maximize overall utility
you cannot derive utilitarianism from science
where's zombie hume when you need him
Amazing, Bakustra. How quick you are to discard honesty. I did address your argument, you just failed to put two and two together. So read, asshole: