Should longtermists recommend hastening extinction rather than delaying it?
Richard Pettigrew (University of Bristol)
GPI Working Paper No. 2-2022, forthcoming at The Monist
Longtermism is the view that the most urgent global priorities, and those to which we should devote the largest portion of our current resources, are those that focus on ensuring a long future for humanity, and perhaps sentient or intelligent life more generally, and improving the quality of those lives in that long future. The central argument for this conclusion is that, given a fixed amount of a resource that we are able to devote to global priorities, the longtermist’s favoured interventions have greater expected goodness than each of the other available interventions, including those that focus on the health and well-being of the current population. In this paper, I argue that, even granting the longtermist’s axiology and their consequentialist ethics, we are not morally required to choose whatever option maximises expected utility, and may not be permitted to do so. Instead, if their axiology and consequentialism is correct, we should choose using a decision theory that is sensitive to risk, and allows us to give greater weight to worse-case outcomes than expected utility theory. And such decision theories do not recommend longtermist interventions. Indeed, sometimes, they recommend hastening human extinction. Many, though not all, will take this as a reductio of the longtermist’s axiology or consequentialist ethics. I remain agnostic on the conclusion we should draw.
Other working papers
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…
When should an effective altruist donate? – William MacAskill (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
Effective altruism is the use of evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to maximize positive impact on others with a given unit of resources, and the taking of action on that basis. It’s a philosophy and a social movement that is gaining considerable steam in the philanthropic world. For example,…
Social Beneficence – Jacob Barrett (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
A background assumption in much contemporary political philosophy is that justice is the first virtue of social institutions, taking priority over other values such as beneficence. This assumption is typically treated as a methodological starting point, rather than as following from any particular moral or political theory. In this paper, I challenge this assumption.