A Fission Problem for Person-Affecting Views

Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

GPI Working Paper No. 26-2024, forthcoming in Ergo

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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

Economic growth under transformative AI – Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University) and Anton Korinek (University of Virginia)

Industrialized countries have long seen relatively stable growth in output per capita and a stable labor share. AI may be transformative, in the sense that it may break one or both of these stylized facts. This review outlines the ways this may happen by placing several strands of the literature on AI and growth within a common framework. We first evaluate models in which AI increases output production, for example via increases in capital’s substitutability for labor…

Are we living at the hinge of history? – William MacAskill (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)

In the final pages of On What Matters, Volume II, Derek Parfit comments: ‘We live during the hinge of history… If we act wisely in the next few centuries, humanity will survive its most dangerous and decisive period… What now matters most is that we avoid ending human history.’ This passage echoes Parfit’s comment, in Reasons and Persons, that ‘the next few centuries will be the most important in human history’. …