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
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’. …
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. …
On two arguments for Fanaticism – Jeffrey Sanford Russell (University of Southern California)
Should we make significant sacrifices to ever-so-slightly lower the chance of extremely bad outcomes, or to ever-so-slightly raise the chance of extremely good outcomes? Fanaticism says yes: for every bad outcome, there is a tiny chance of of extreme disaster that is even worse, and for every good outcome, there is a tiny chance of an enormous good that is even better.