Who knew the 6.15 Omega Quests… (Spoilers)

[Lurina]

Yet for happiness to exist, beings must live on that are capable of being happy. Hell, the repugnant conclusion is the utilitarian argument for the Sundering all wrapped up in a bow is it not?



One can easily draw a comparison between the Unsundered in the A column and the Sundered shards in B.

I'm not sure why you're using the idea of the repugnant conclusion (assuming you're quoting Derek Parfit here) when total utilitarianism, the idea he's tearing down, is generally rejected by philosophers in favor of variations on average utilitarianism. Even Henry Sidgwick, who's known for raising the question in the first place and did agree with ideas like it being a net good to create more humans so long as it wasn't at the expense of average happiness, still had that qualifier; he wouldn't have approved of something that massively expanded the population at the expense of everyone who existed beforehand, let alone the mean quality of life. To quote his book, The Methods of Ethics:

Assuming, then, that the average happiness of human beings is a positive quantity, it seems clear that utilitarianism directs us to make the number of happy people as large as we can without lowering the average level of happiness. But if we foresee as possible that an increase in numbers will be accompanied by a decrease in average happiness, or vice versa, a point arises that hasn’t ever been explicitly discussed and seems to have been substantially overlooked by many utilitarians—·i.e. seems not to have had even a subliminal influence on their thinking·. Utilitarianism prescribes as the ultimate end of action, happiness on the whole, not any individual’s happiness except considered as a part of the whole.

It follows that if the additional population enjoy on the whole positive happiness, we ought to weigh the amount of happiness gained by the extra number against the amount lost by the remainder. So that the point up to which population ought to be encouraged to increase is not that at which average happiness is the greatest possible, as is often assumed by political economists of the school of Malthus, but that at which the product formed by multiplying the number of persons living by the amount of average happiness reaches its maximum.

The founding principle of utilitarianism as outlined by Jeremy Bentham is the greatest-happiness principle, which is the assertion that all ethics must be grounded in the imperative to create the most happiness and the least suffering for all sentient beings. Abundance of sentient life, either laterally or vertically (through time) is not valuable unless it serves that pursuit. Happiness is not a master to be served, but an emergent goal that comes with the existence of each new person, and the priority must always be on those who are extant as happy and free from suffering as possible. William Shaw puts it concisely: "Utilitarianism values the happiness of people, not the production of units of happiness".

It's not really compatible with Endwalker's value system.