Hilary Greaves: Book review of Scheffler's "Why worry about future generations?"
Other papers
Critical-set views, biographical identity, and the long term – Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Critical-set views avoid the Repugnant Conclusion by subtracting some constant from the welfare score of each life in a population. These views are thus sensitive to facts about biographical identity: identity between lives. In this paper, I argue that questions of biographical identity give us reason to reject critical-set views and embrace the total view. I end with a practical implication. If we shift our credences towards the total view, we should also shift our efforts towards ensuring that humanity survives for the long term.
The weight of suffering – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
How should we weigh suffering against happiness? This paper highlights the existence of an argument from intuitively plausible axiological principles to the striking conclusion that in comparing different populations, there exists some depth of suffering that cannot be compensated for by any measure of well-being. In addition to a number of structural principles, the argument relies on two key premises. The first is the contrary of the so-called Reverse Repugnant Conclusion…
Dynamic public good provision under time preference heterogeneity – Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute and Department of Economics, University of Oxford)
I explore the implications of time preference heterogeneity for the private funding of public goods. The assumption that players use a common discount rate is knife-edge: relaxing it yields substantially different equilibria, for two reasons. First, time preference heterogeneity motivates intertemporal polarization, analogous to the polarization seen in a static public good game. In the simplest settings, more patient players spend nothing early in time and less patient players spending nothing later. Second…