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
Future Suffering and the Non-Identity Problem – Theron Pummer (University of St Andrews)
I present and explore a new version of the Person-Affecting View, according to which reasons to do an act depend wholly on what would be said for or against this act from the points of view of particular individuals. According to my view, (i) there is a morally requiring reason not to bring about lives insofar as they contain suffering (negative welfare), (ii) there is no morally requiring reason to bring about lives insofar as they contain happiness (positive welfare), but (iii) there is a permitting reason to bring about lives insofar as they…
Once More, Without Feeling – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
I argue for a pluralist theory of moral standing, on which both welfare subjectivity and autonomy can confer moral status. I argue that autonomy doesn’t entail welfare subjectivity, but can ground moral standing in its absence. Although I highlight the existence of plausible views on which autonomy entails phenomenal consciousness, I primarily emphasize the need for philosophical debates about the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and moral standing to engage with neglected questions about the nature…
How should risk and ambiguity affect our charitable giving? – Lara Buchak (Princeton University)
Suppose we want to do the most good we can with a particular sum of money, but we cannot be certain of the consequences of different ways of making use of it. This paper explores how our attitudes towards risk and ambiguity bear on what we should do. It shows that risk-avoidance and ambiguity-aversion can each provide good reason to divide our money between various charitable organizations rather than to give it all to the most promising one…