A Fission Problem for Person-Affecting Views
Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 26-2024, forthcoming in Ergo
On person-affecting views in population ethics, the moral import of a person’s welfare depends on that person’s temporal or modal status. These views typically imply that – all else equal – we’re never required to create extra people, or to act
in ways that increase the probability of extra people coming into existence.
In this paper, I use Parfit-style fission cases to construct a dilemma for person-affecting views: either they forfeit their
seeming-advantages and face fission analogues of the problems faced by their rival impersonal views, or else they turn out to be not so person-affecting after all. In light of this dilemma, the attractions of person-affecting views largely evaporate. What
remains are the problems unique to them.
Other working papers
How much should governments pay to prevent catastrophes? Longtermism’s limited role – Carl Shulman (Advisor, Open Philanthropy) and Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Longtermists have argued that humanity should significantly increase its efforts to prevent catastrophes like nuclear wars, pandemics, and AI disasters. But one prominent longtermist argument overshoots this conclusion: the argument also implies that humanity should reduce the risk of existential catastrophe even at extreme cost to the present generation. This overshoot means that democratic governments cannot use the longtermist argument to guide their catastrophe policy. …
When should an effective altruist donate? – William MacAskill (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
Effective altruism is the use of evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to maximize positive impact on others with a given unit of resources, and the taking of action on that basis. It’s a philosophy and a social movement that is gaining considerable steam in the philanthropic world. For example,…
Ethical Consumerism – Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute and Department of Economics, University of Oxford)
I study a static production economy in which consumers have not only preferences over their own consumption but also external, or “ethical”, preferences over the supply of each good. Though existing work on the implications of external preferences assumes price-taking, I show that ethical consumers generically prefer not to act even approximately as price-takers. I therefore introduce a near-Nash equilibrium concept that generalizes the near-Nash equilibria found in literature on strategic foundations of general equilibrium…