 Depending on how precisely various different value principles are worked out they have different implications, which critics have regarded as devastating. For instance, on Ng’s explication of this view (Ng 1989) according to which the value of a population is determined by the product of the average welfare and a concave transformation of the number of lives, it follows that it can be better to add people with negative welfare rather than positive welfare to a population. More exactly, Ng’s theory implies the “Sadistic Conclusion” (Arrhenius 2000a): For any number of lives with any negative welfare (e.g. tormented lives), there are situations in which it would be better to add these lives rather than some number of lives with positive welfare. Moreover, even if it might be reasonable to hold that the value of extra lives with positive welfare decreases asymptotically towards a limit, the analogous assumption about lives with negative welfare isn’t very attractive. Hence, given the reasonable assumption that the negative value of adding extra lives with negative welfare does not decrease relatively to population size, a proportional expansion in the population size can turn a good population into a bad one—a version of the so-called “Absurd Conclusion” (Parfit 1984). A population of one million people enjoying very high positive welfare and one person with negative welfare seems intuitively to be a good population. However, since there is a limit to the positive value of positive welfare but no limit to the negative value of negative welfare, proportional expansions (two million lives with positive welfare and two lives with negative welfare, three million lives with positive welfare and three lives with negative welfare, and so forth) will in the end yield a bad population.