Measures to avoid the repugnant conclusion

Abstract Many social welfare measures will sometimes rank a large population of very well-faring people below a very large population of barely well-faring people. Thus, they entail the repugnant conclusion . If such rankings are indeed repugnant, there must be some mistake behind measures that imply them. This paper discusses what that mistake might be. After rejecting other proposals, I suggest that the mistaken assumption is that welfare values that are insignificant for individuals, due to being small, could have significant impact on social welfare. To avoid this mistake, two new measures are introduced that aggregate significant and insignificant welfare values differently.