This paper concerns the difficulty of avoiding an additive version of the Very Repugnant Conclusion. An impossibility theorem is provided which shows that we cannot avoid this version of the Repugnant Conclusion even if we deny the Mere Addition Principle and closely related principles which place limits on the badness of adding happy people, such as “Dominance Addition” and additive “Non-Sadism” conditions. I argue that the impossibility theorem shows that the additive version of the Very Repugnant Conclusion cannot reasonably be avoided by population-ethical means alone. One must instead either deny structural conditions such as acyclicity, adopt a radically unorthodox fixed-population axiology, or accept this version of the Very Repugnant Conclusion.

We examine a general class of variable-value population principles. Our particular focus is on the extent to which such principles can avoid the repugnant and sadistic conclusions. We show that if a mild limit property is imposed, avoidance of the repugnant conclusion implies the sadistic conclusion. This result generalizes earlier observations by showing that they apply to a substantially larger class of principles. Our second theorem states that, under the limit property, the axiom of mere addition also conflicts with avoidance of the repugnant conclusion. This result is a consequence of a similar observation that appears in the earlier literature.

On parity views of mere addition if someone (or a group of people) is added to the world at a range of well-being levels – or ‘neutral range’ – leaving existing people unaffected, addition is on a par with the initial situation. Two distinct parity views – ‘rough equality’ and fitting-attitudes views – defend the ‘intuition of neutrality’. The first can be interpreted or adjusted so that it can rebut John Broome's objection that the neutral range is wide. The two views respond in distinct ways to two of Broome's other objections. Both views can, nonetheless, be plausibly defended against these objections.