The Hinge of History Hypothesis: Reply to MacAskill
Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 9 - 2022, published in Analysis
Some believe that the current era is uniquely important with respect to how well the rest of human history goes. Following Parfit, call this the Hinge of History Hypothesis. Recently, MacAskill has argued that our era is actually very unlikely to be especially influential in the way asserted by the Hinge of History Hypothesis. I respond to MacAskill, pointing to important unresolved ambiguities in his proposed definition of what it means for a time to be influential and criticizing the two arguments used to cast doubt on the claim that the current era is a uniquely important moment in human history.
Other working papers
Do not go gentle: why the Asymmetry does not support anti-natalism – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
According to the Asymmetry, adding lives that are not worth living to the population makes the outcome pro tanto worse, but adding lives that are well worth living to the population does not make the outcome pro tanto better. It has been argued that the Asymmetry entails the desirability of human extinction. However, this argument rests on a misunderstanding of the kind of neutrality attributed to the addition of lives worth living by the Asymmetry. A similar misunderstanding is shown to underlie Benatar’s case for anti-natalism.
Crying wolf: Warning about societal risks can be reputationally risky – Lucius Caviola (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) et al.
Society relies on expert warnings about large-scale risks like pandemics and natural disasters. Across ten studies (N = 5,342), we demonstrate people’s reluctance to warn about unlikely but large-scale risks because they are concerned about being blamed for being wrong. In particular, warners anticipate that if the risk doesn’t occur, they will be perceived as overly alarmist and responsible for wasting societal resources. This phenomenon appears in the context of natural, technological, and financial risks…
Ethical Consumerism – Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute and Department of Economics, University of Oxford)
I study a static production economy in which consumers have not only preferences over their own consumption but also external, or “ethical”, preferences over the supply of each good. Though existing work on the implications of external preferences assumes price-taking, I show that ethical consumers generically prefer not to act even approximately as price-takers. I therefore introduce a near-Nash equilibrium concept that generalizes the near-Nash equilibria found in literature on strategic foundations of general equilibrium…