Meaning, medicine, and merit
Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
GPI Working Paper No. 3-2019, published in Utilitas
Given the inevitability of scarcity, should public institutions ration healthcare resources so as to prioritize those who contribute more to society? Intuitively, we may feel that this would be somehow inegalitarian. I argue that the egalitarian objection to prioritizing treatment on the basis of patients’ usefulness to others is best thought of as semiotic: i.e. as having to do with what this practice would mean, convey, or express about a person’s standing. I explore the implications of this conclusion when taken in conjunction with the observation that semiotic objections are generally flimsy, failing to identify anything wrong with a practice as such and having limited capacity to generalize beyond particular contexts.
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…
The unexpected value of the future – Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Various philosophers accept moral views that are impartial, additive, and risk-neutral with respect to betterness. But, if that risk neutrality is spelt out according to expected value theory alone, such views face a dire reductio ad absurdum. If the expected sum of value in humanity’s future is undefined—if, e.g., the probability distribution over possible values of the future resembles the Pasadena game, or a Cauchy distribution—then those views say that no real-world option is ever better than any other. And, as I argue…
The weight of suffering – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
How should we weigh suffering against happiness? This paper highlights the existence of an argument from intuitively plausible axiological principles to the striking conclusion that in comparing different populations, there exists some depth of suffering that cannot be compensated for by any measure of well-being. In addition to a number of structural principles, the argument relies on two key premises. The first is the contrary of the so-called Reverse Repugnant Conclusion…