Rawls's original position and the veil-of-ignorance he uses to support it has a major weakness: it's a time-slice theory. Your whole argument rests on it. You're talking about the "existing population" at some particular moment in time.
Here I am replying to you 3 hours later. In the mean time, close to 20,000 people have died around the world [1]. Thousands more have been born. So if we're to move outside the realm of academics, as you put it, we force ourselves to contend with the fact that there is no "existing population" to maximize happiness for. The population is perhaps better thought of as a river of people, always flowing out to sea.
The Repugnant Conclusion is relevant, perhaps now more than at any time in the past, because we've begun to grasp -- scientifically, if not politically -- the finitude of earth's resources. By continuing the way we are, toward ever-increasing consumption of resources and ever-growing inequality, we are racing towards humanitarian disasters the likes of which have never been seen before.
> By continuing the way we are, toward ever-increasing consumption of resources and ever-growing inequality, we are racing towards humanitarian disasters the likes of which have never been seen before.
We aren't doing that. Increasing human populations don't increase resource consumption because 1. resources aren't always consumed per-capita 2. we have the spare human capital to invent new cleaner technology.
It's backwards actually - decreasing populations, making for a deflating economy, encourage consumption rather than productivity investment. That's how so many countries managed to deforest themselves when wood fires were still state of the art.
Also, "resources are finite" isn't an argument against growth because if you don't grow /the resources are still finite/. So all you're saying is we're going to die someday. We know that.
> That's how so many countries managed to deforest themselves when wood fires were still state of the art.
It was mostly ship building that deforested eg the countries around the Mediterranean and Britain. Firewood was mostly harvested reasonably sustainably from managed areas like coppices in many places. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing
> By continuing the way we are, toward ever-increasing consumption of resources and ever-growing inequality, we are racing towards humanitarian disasters the likes of which have never been seen before.
What do you mean by ever growing inequality? Global inequality has decreased in recent decades. (Thanks largely to China and to a lesser extent India moving from abject poverty to middle income status.)
By some measures we are also using less resources than we used to. Eg peak resource usage in the US, as measured in total _mass_ of stuff flowing through the economy, peaked sometime in the 1930s.
Here I am replying to you 3 hours later. In the mean time, close to 20,000 people have died around the world [1]. Thousands more have been born. So if we're to move outside the realm of academics, as you put it, we force ourselves to contend with the fact that there is no "existing population" to maximize happiness for. The population is perhaps better thought of as a river of people, always flowing out to sea.
The Repugnant Conclusion is relevant, perhaps now more than at any time in the past, because we've begun to grasp -- scientifically, if not politically -- the finitude of earth's resources. By continuing the way we are, toward ever-increasing consumption of resources and ever-growing inequality, we are racing towards humanitarian disasters the likes of which have never been seen before.
[1] https://www.medindia.net/patients/calculators/world-death-cl...