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
A bargaining-theoretic approach to moral uncertainty – Owen Cotton-Barratt (Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University), Hilary Greaves (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
This paper explores a new approach to the problem of decision under relevant moral uncertainty. We treat the case of an agent making decisions in the face of moral uncertainty on the model of bargaining theory, as if the decision-making process were one of bargaining among different internal parts of the agent, with different parts committed to different moral theories. The resulting approach contrasts interestingly with the extant “maximise expected choiceworthiness”…
Philosophical considerations relevant to valuing continued human survival: Conceptual Analysis, Population Axiology, and Decision Theory – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Many think that human extinction would be a catastrophic tragedy, and that we ought to do more to reduce extinction risk. There is less agreement on exactly why. If some catastrophe were to kill everyone, that would obviously be horrific. Still, many think the deaths of billions of people don’t exhaust what would be so terrible about extinction. After all, we can be confident that billions of people are going to die – many horribly and before their time – if humanity does not go extinct. …
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…