Aggregating Small Risks of Serious Harms
Tomi Francis (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 21-2024
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 a small number of people from certainly suffering the same harms. Along the way, I object to the ex ante view on the grounds that it gives an implausible degree of priority to preventing identified over statistical harms, and to the ex post view on the grounds that it fails to respect the separateness of persons. An insight about the nature of claims emerges from these arguments: there are three conceptually distinct senses in which a person’s claim can be said to have a certain degree of strength. I make use of the distinction between these three senses in which a claim can be said to have strength in order to set out a new, more plausible, view about the aggregation of people’s claims under risk.
Other working papers
How to resist the Fading Qualia Argument – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
The Fading Qualia Argument is perhaps the strongest argument supporting the view that in order for a system to be conscious, it does not need to be made of anything in particular, so long as its internal parts have the right causal relations to each other and to the system’s inputs and outputs. I show how the argument can be resisted given two key assumptions: that consciousness is associated with vagueness at its boundaries and that conscious neural activity has a particular kind of holistic structure. …
Doomsday and objective chance – Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
Lewis’s Principal Principle says that one should usually align one’s credences with the known chances. In this paper I develop a version of the Principal Principle that deals well with some exceptional cases related to the distinction between metaphysical and epistemic modality. I explain how this principle gives a unified account of the Sleeping Beauty problem and chance-based principles of anthropic reasoning…
Against the singularity hypothesis – David Thorstad (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
The singularity hypothesis is a radical hypothesis about the future of artificial intelligence on which self-improving artificial agents will quickly become orders of magnitude more intelligent than the average human. Despite the ambitiousness of its claims, the singularity hypothesis has been defended at length by leading philosophers and artificial intelligence researchers. In this paper, I argue that the singularity hypothesis rests on scientifically implausible growth assumptions. …