Moral demands and the far future

Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)

GPI Working Paper No. 1-2020, published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

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I argue that moral philosophers have either misunderstood the problem of moral demandingness or at least failed to recognize important dimensions of the problem that undermine many standard assumptions. It has been assumed that utilitarianism concretely directs us to maximize welfare within a generation by transferring resources to people currently living in extreme poverty. In fact, utilitarianism seems to imply that any obligation to help people who are currently badly off is trumped by obligations to undertake actions targeted at improving the value of the long-term future. Reflecting on the demands of beneficence in respect of the value of the far future forces us to view key aspects of the problem of moral demandingness in a very different light.

Other working papers

Can an evidentialist be risk-averse? – Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

Two key questions of normative decision theory are: 1) whether the probabilities relevant to decision theory are evidential or causal; and 2) whether agents should be risk-neutral, and so maximise the expected value of the outcome, or instead risk-averse (or otherwise sensitive to risk). These questions are typically thought to be independent – that our answer to one bears little on our answer to the other. …

The case for strong longtermism – Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

A striking fact about the history of civilisation is just how early we are in it. There are 5000 years of recorded history behind us, but how many years are still to come? If we merely last as long as the typical mammalian species…

Longtermism in an Infinite World – Christian J. Tarsney (Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin) and Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

The case for longtermism depends on the vast potential scale of the future. But that same vastness also threatens to undermine the case for longtermism: If the future contains infinite value, then many theories of value that support longtermism (e.g., risk-neutral total utilitarianism) seem to imply that no available action is better than any other. And some strategies for avoiding this conclusion (e.g., exponential time discounting) yield views that…