Global Priorities Seminar - Trinity term 2020

5 June:

Speaker: John Broome (University of Oxford)

Title: "Population, separability, and discounting"

Abstract: When economists aggregate people’s wellbeing to make judgement about the overall good of a society, they sometimes discount later wellbeing compared with earlier wellbeing. This makes good sense only if all wellbeing is dated, which implies that wellbeing is separable across times. But this sort of separability makes it hard to take proper account of the value of extending people’s lives. Any solution to this problem will depend on a theory about the value of population. The upshot is that any theory of discounting is committed to a particular ethics of population.

A recording of this seminar talk is available here.

12 June:

Speaker: Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

Title: "The good news about just saving"

Abstract: Most of the people who will ever live will probably live in the future, long after we are dead. Over them, we hold immense, unchecked power. What would it mean to exercise that power justly? For concreteness, I focus on the question of how much we should save on behalf of future generations and on attempts to solve this problem using Rawlsian social contract theory: i.e., by considering what principles rational, mutually disinterested persons would collectively choose when deprived of knowledge about how they personally fare under the terms of their collective agreement. I argue that we can solve a number of significant problems for the application of Rawlsian social contract theory to issues of intergenerational justice by assuming that the parties in the Original Position obey evidential decision theory. Furthermore, I argue that the application of evidential decision theory to the question of just saving is not at all ad hoc: there are strong independent reasons to think that Rawlsian social contract theorists ought to view the parties in the Original Position as obeying evidential decision theory.

A recording of this seminar talk is available here.

19 June:

Speaker: Johanna Thoma (London School of Economics)

Title: “Risk imposition by artificial agents: the moral proxy problem"

Abstract: The ambition for the design of autonomous artificial agents is that they can make decisions at least as good as, or better than those humans would make in the relevant decision context. Human agents tend to have inconsistent risk attitudes to small stakes and large stakes gambles. While expected utility theory, the theory of rational choice designers of artificial agents ideally aim to implement in the context of risk, condemns this as irrational, it does not identify which attitudes need adjusting. I argue that this creates a dilemma for regulating the programming of artificial agents that impose risks: Whether they should be programmed to be risk averse at all, and if so just how risk averse, depends on whether we take them to be moral proxies for individual users, or for those in a position to control the aggregate choices made by many artificial agents, such as the companies programming the artificial agents, or regulators representing society at large. Both options are undesirable.

A recording of this seminar talk is available here.

26 June:

Speaker: Christian Tarsney (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

Title: "Non-additive axiologies in large worlds"

Abstract: Is the value of a world just the sum of values contributed by each value-bearing entity in that world? Additively separable axiologies (like total utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and critical level views) say "yes", but non-separable axiologies (like average utilitarianism, rank-discounted utilitarianism, and variable value views) say "no". The distinction between additive and non-additive axiologies is practically important: The former support "arguments from astronomical scale" which suggest (among other things) that the far future is vastly more important than the near future, while the latter apparently do not. We show, however, that when there is a large enough "background population" unaffected by our choices, a wide range of non-additive axiologies converge in their practical implications with some additive axiology -- for instance, in the limit, average utilitarianism converges with critical-level utilitarianism and various egalitarian theories converge with prioritiarianism. We further argue that we are in fact in the relevant limit -- what is true in the limit is true of us. This means, among other things, that arguments from astronomical scale can succeed even if we reject axiological separability.

A recording of this seminar talk is available here.