  A related issue arises from population change. Imagine that a government considers whether to provide free contraceptives to curb a rise in population. Without free contraceptives, overcrowding will bring hunger, disease, and pain, so each person will be worse off. Still, each new person will have enough pleasure and other goods that the total net utility will increase with the population. Classic utilitarianism focuses on total utility, so it seems to imply that this government should not provide free contraceptives. That seems implausible to many utilitarians. To avoid this result, some utilitarians claim that an act is morally wrong if and only if its consequences contain more pain (or other disvalues) than an alternative, regardless of positive values (cf. R. N. Smart 1958). This negative utilitarianism implies that the government should provide contraceptives, since that program reduces pain (and other disvalues), even though it also decreases total net pleasure (or good). Unfortunately, negative utilitarianism also seems to imply that the government should painlessly kill everyone it can, since dead people feel no pain (and have no false beliefs, diseases, or disabilities – though killing them does cause loss of ability). A more popular response is average utilitarianism, which says that the best consequences are those with the highest average utility (cf. Rawls 1971, 161–75). The average utility would be higher with the contraceptive program than without it, so average utilitarianism yields the more plausible result—that the government should adopt the contraceptive program. Critics sometimes charge that the average utility could also be increased by killing the worst off, but this claim is not at all clear, because such killing would put everyone in danger (since, after the worst off are killed, another group becomes the worst off, and then they might be killed next). Still, average utilitarianism faces problems of its own (such as “the mere addition paradox” in Parfit 1984, chap. 19). In any case, all maximizing consequentialists, whether or not they are pluralists, must decide whether moral rightness depends on maximizing total good or average good.