Philosophical Considerations Relevant to Valuing Continued Human Survival: Conceptual Analysis, Population Axiology, and Decision Theory
Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 9-2023
Many think that human extinction would be a catastrophic tragedy, and that we ought to do more to reduce extinction risk. There is less agreement on exactly why. If some catastrophe were to kill everyone, that would obviously be horrific. Still, many think the deaths of billions of people don’t exhaust what would be so terrible about extinction. After all, we can be confident that billions of people are going to die – many horribly and before their time - if humanity does not go extinct. The key difference seems to be that they will be survived by others. What’s the importance of that?
Other working papers
Moral demands and the far future – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
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…
Tough enough? Robust satisficing as a decision norm for long-term policy analysis – Andreas Mogensen and David Thorstad (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
This paper aims to open a dialogue between philosophers working in decision theory and operations researchers and engineers whose research addresses the topic of decision making under deep uncertainty. Specifically, we assess the recommendation to follow a norm of robust satisficing when making decisions under deep uncertainty in the context of decision analyses that rely on the tools of Robust Decision Making developed by Robert Lempert and colleagues at RAND …
Prediction: The long and the short of it – Antony Millner (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Daniel Heyen (ETH Zurich)
Commentators often lament forecasters’ inability to provide precise predictions of the long-run behaviour of complex economic and physical systems. Yet their concerns often conflate the presence of substantial long-run uncertainty with the need for long-run predictability; short-run predictions can partially substitute for long-run predictions if decision-makers can adjust their activities over time. …