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
A paradox for tiny probabilities and enormous values – Nick Beckstead (Open Philanthropy Project) and Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
We show that every theory of the value of uncertain prospects must have one of three unpalatable properties. Reckless theories recommend risking arbitrarily great gains at arbitrarily long odds for the sake of enormous potential; timid theories recommend passing up arbitrarily great gains to prevent a tiny increase in risk; nontransitive theories deny the principle that, if A is better than B and B is better than C, then A must be better than C.
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’. …
Exceeding expectations: stochastic dominance as a general decision theory – Christian Tarsney (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk (like Pascal’s Mugging), and intolerably paradoxical in cases like the St. Petersburg and Pasadena games. In this paper I show that, under certain conditions, stochastic dominance reasoning can capture most of the plausible implications of expectational reasoning while avoiding most of its pitfalls…