Longtermism in an Infinite World
Christian J. Tarsney (Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin) and Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 4-2023, forthcoming in Essays on Longtermism
The case for longtermism depends on the vast potential scale of the future. But that same vastness also threatens to undermine the case for longtermism: If the future contains infinite value, then many theories of value that support longtermism (e.g., risk-neutral total utilitarianism) seem to imply that no available action is better than any other. And some strategies for avoiding this conclusion (e.g., exponential time discounting) yield views that are much less supportive of longtermism. This chapter explores how the potential infinitude of the future affects the case for longtermism. We argue that (i) there are reasonable prospects for extending risk- neutral totalism and similar views to infinite contexts and (ii) many such extension strategies still support standard arguments for longtermism, since they imply that when we can only affect (or only predictably affect) a finite part of an infinite universe, we can reason as if only that finite part existed. On the other hand, (iii) there are improbable but not impossible physical scenarios in which our actions can have infinite predictable effects on the far future, and these scenarios create substantial unresolved problems for both infinite ethics and the case for longtermism.
Other working papers
Should longtermists recommend hastening extinction rather than delaying it? – Richard Pettigrew (University of Bristol)
Longtermism is the view that the most urgent global priorities, and those to which we should devote the largest portion of our current resources, are those that focus on ensuring a long future for humanity, and perhaps sentient or intelligent life more generally, and improving the quality of those lives in that long future. The central argument for this conclusion is that, given a fixed amount of are source that we are able to devote to global priorities, the longtermist’s favoured interventions have…
Aggregating Small Risks of Serious Harms – Tomi Francis (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
According to Partial Aggregation, a serious harm can be outweighed by a large number of somewhat less serious harms, but can outweigh any number of trivial harms. In this paper, I address the question of how we should extend Partial Aggregation to cases of risk, and especially to cases involving small risks of serious harms. I argue that, contrary to the most popular versions of the ex ante and ex post views, we should sometimes prevent a small risk that a large number of people will suffer serious harms rather than prevent…
Calibration dilemmas in the ethics of distribution – Jacob M. Nebel (University of Southern California) and H. Orri Stefánsson (Stockholm University and Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study)
This paper presents a new kind of problem in the ethics of distribution. The problem takes the form of several “calibration dilemmas,” in which intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequalities requires leading theories of distribution to recommend intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes inequalities—e.g., inequalities in which half the population would gain an arbitrarily large quantity of well-being or resources…