Existential risks from a Thomist Christian perspective

Stefan Riedener (University of Zurich)

GPI Working Paper No. 1-2021, published in Effective Altrusim and Religion

Let’s say with Nick Bostrom that an ‘existential risk’ (or ‘x-risk’) is a risk that ‘threatens the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development’ (2013, 15). There are a number of such risks: nuclear wars, developments in biotechnology or artiﬁcial intelligence, climate change, pandemics, supervolcanos, asteroids, and so on (see e.g. Bostrom and Ćirković 2008). [...]

Other working papers

Population ethics with thresholds – Walter Bossert (University of Montreal), Susumu Cato (University of Tokyo) and Kohei Kamaga (Sophia University)

We propose a new class of social quasi-orderings in a variable-population setting. In order to declare one utility distribution at least as good as another, the critical-level utilitarian value of the former must reach or surpass the value of the latter. For each possible absolute value of the difference between the population sizes of two distributions to be compared, we specify a non-negative threshold level and a threshold inequality. This inequality indicates whether the corresponding threshold level must be reached or surpassed in…

The case for strong longtermism – Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

A striking fact about the history of civilisation is just how early we are in it. There are 5000 years of recorded history behind us, but how many years are still to come? If we merely last as long as the typical mammalian species…

Intergenerational equity under catastrophic climate change – Aurélie Méjean (CNRS, Paris), Antonin Pottier (EHESS, CIRED, Paris), Stéphane Zuber (CNRS, Paris) and Marc Fleurbaey (CNRS, Paris School of Economics)

Climate change raises the issue of intergenerational equity. As climate change threatens irreversible and dangerous impacts, possibly leading to extinction, the most relevant trade-off may not be between present and future consumption, but between present consumption and the mere existence of future generations. To investigate this trade-off, we build an integrated assessment model that explicitly accounts for the risk of extinction of future generations…