Desire-Fulfilment and Consciousness
Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 24-2024
I show that there are good reasons to think that some individuals without any capacity for consciousness should be counted as welfare subjects, assuming that desire-fulfilment is a welfare good and that any individuals who can accrue welfare goods are welfare subjects. While other philosophers have argued for similar conclusions, I show that they have done so by relying on a simplistic understanding of the desire-fulfilment theory. My argument is intended to be sensitive to the complexities and nuances of contemporary developments of the theory, while avoiding highly counter-intuitive implications of previous arguments for the same conclusion.
Other working papers
The Hinge of History Hypothesis: Reply to MacAskill – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
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…
Existential Risk and Growth – Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute and Department of Economics, University of Oxford) and Leopold Aschenbrenner
Technologies may pose existential risks to civilization. Though accelerating technological development may increase the risk of anthropogenic existential catastrophe per period in the short run, two considerations suggest that a sector-neutral acceleration decreases the risk that such a catastrophe ever occurs. First, acceleration decreases the time spent at each technology level. Second, since a richer society is willing to sacrifice more for safety, optimal policy can yield an “existential risk Kuznets curve”; acceleration…
Tiny probabilities and the value of the far future – Petra Kosonen (Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin)
Morally speaking, what matters the most is the far future – at least according to Longtermism. The reason why the far future is of utmost importance is that our acts’ expected influence on the value of the world is mainly determined by their consequences in the far future. The case for Longtermism is straightforward: Given the enormous number of people who might exist in the far future, even a tiny probability of affecting how the far future goes outweighs the importance of our acts’ consequences…