Egyptology and Fanaticism
Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 12-2023, forthcoming in Philosophical Studies
Various decision theories share a troubling implication. They imply that, for any finite amount of value, it would be better to wager it all for a vanishingly small probability of some greater value. Counterintuitive as it might be, this fanaticism has seemingly compelling independent arguments in its favour. In this paper, I consider perhaps the most prima facie compelling such argument: an Egyptology argument (an analogue of the Egyptology argument from population ethics). I show that, despite recent objections from Russell (2023) and Goodsell (2021), the argument's premises can be justified and defended, and the argument itself remains compelling.
Other working papers
How much should governments pay to prevent catastrophes? Longtermism’s limited role – Carl Shulman (Advisor, Open Philanthropy) and Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Longtermists have argued that humanity should significantly increase its efforts to prevent catastrophes like nuclear wars, pandemics, and AI disasters. But one prominent longtermist argument overshoots this conclusion: the argument also implies that humanity should reduce the risk of existential catastrophe even at extreme cost to the present generation. This overshoot means that democratic governments cannot use the longtermist argument to guide their catastrophe policy. …
Do not go gentle: why the Asymmetry does not support anti-natalism – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
According to the Asymmetry, adding lives that are not worth living to the population makes the outcome pro tanto worse, but adding lives that are well worth living to the population does not make the outcome pro tanto better. It has been argued that the Asymmetry entails the desirability of human extinction. However, this argument rests on a misunderstanding of the kind of neutrality attributed to the addition of lives worth living by the Asymmetry. A similar misunderstanding is shown to underlie Benatar’s case for anti-natalism.
The unexpected value of the future – Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Various philosophers accept moral views that are impartial, additive, and risk-neutral with respect to betterness. But, if that risk neutrality is spelt out according to expected value theory alone, such views face a dire reductio ad absurdum. If the expected sum of value in humanity’s future is undefined—if, e.g., the probability distribution over possible values of the future resembles the Pasadena game, or a Cauchy distribution—then those views say that no real-world option is ever better than any other. And, as I argue…