In defence of fanaticism
Hayden Wilkinson (Australian National University)
GPI Working Paper No. 4-2020, published in Ethics
Which is better: a guarantee of a modest amount of moral value, or a tiny probability of arbitrarily large value? To prefer the latter seems fanatical. But, as I argue, avoiding such fanaticism brings severe problems. To do so, we must (1) decline intuitively attractive trade-offs; (2) rank structurally identical pairs of lotteries inconsistently, or else admit absurd sensitivity to tiny probability differences;(3) have rankings depend on remote, unaffected events (including events in ancient Egypt); and often (4) neglect to rank lotteries as we already know we would if we learned more. Compared to these implications, fanaticism is highly plausible
Other working papers
The cross-sectional implications of the social discount rate – Maya Eden (Brandeis University)
How should policy discount future returns? The standard approach to this normative question is to ask how much society should care about future generations relative to people alive today. This paper establishes an alternative approach, based on the social desirability of redistributing from the current old to the current young. …
Welfare and felt duration – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
How should we understand the duration of a pleasant or unpleasant sensation, insofar as its duration modulates how good or bad the experience is overall? Given that we seem able to distinguish between subjective and objective duration and that how well or badly someone’s life goes is naturally thought of as something to be assessed from her own perspective, it seems intuitive that it is subjective duration that modulates how good or bad an experience is from the perspective of an individual’s welfare. …
Moral uncertainty and public justification – Jacob Barrett (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) and Andreas T Schmidt (University of Groningen)
Moral uncertainty and disagreement pervade our lives. Yet we still need to make decisions and act, both in individual and political contexts. So, what should we do? The moral uncertainty approach provides a theory of what individuals morally ought to do when they are uncertain about morality…