Critical-set views, biographical identity, and the long term
Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 7-2024, forthcoming in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy
Critical-set views avoid the Repugnant Conclusion by subtracting some constant from the welfare score of each life in a population. These views are thus sensitive to facts about biographical identity: identity between lives. In this paper, I argue that questions of biographical identity give us reason to reject critical-set views and embrace the total view. I end with a practical implication. If we shift our credences towards the total view, we should also shift our efforts towards ensuring that humanity survives for the long term.
Other working papers
Time discounting, consistency and special obligations: a defence of Robust Temporalism – Harry R. Lloyd (Yale University)
This paper defends the claim that mere temporal proximity always and without exception strengthens certain moral duties, including the duty to save – call this view Robust Temporalism. Although almost all other moral philosophers dismiss Robust Temporalism out of hand, I argue that it is prima facie intuitively plausible, and that it is analogous to a view about special obligations that many philosophers already accept…
Against Anti-Fanaticism – Christian Tarsney (Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin)
Should you be willing to forego any sure good for a tiny probability of a vastly greater good? Fanatics say you should, anti-fanatics say you should not. Anti-fanaticism has great intuitive appeal. But, I argue, these intuitions are untenable, because satisfying them in their full generality is incompatible with three very plausible principles: acyclicity, a minimal dominance principle, and the principle that any outcome can be made better or worse. This argument against anti-fanaticism can be…
Population ethics with thresholds – Walter Bossert (University of Montreal), Susumu Cato (University of Tokyo) and Kohei Kamaga (Sophia University)
We propose a new class of social quasi-orderings in a variable-population setting. In order to declare one utility distribution at least as good as another, the critical-level utilitarian value of the former must reach or surpass the value of the latter. For each possible absolute value of the difference between the population sizes of two distributions to be compared, we specify a non-negative threshold level and a threshold inequality. This inequality indicates whether the corresponding threshold level must be reached or surpassed in…