Beliefs about the end of humanity: How bad, likely, and important is human extinction?
Matthew Coleman (Northeastern University), Lucius Caviola (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford), Joshua Lewis (New York University) and Geoffrey Goodwin (University of Pennsylvania)
GPI Working Paper No. 1-2024
Human extinction would mean the end of humanity’s achievements, culture, and future potential. According to some ethical views, this would be a terrible outcome. But how do people think about human extinction? And how much do they prioritize preventing extinction over other societal issues? Across five empirical studies (N = 2,147; U.S. and China) we find that people consider extinction prevention a societal priority and deserving of greatly increased societal resources. However, despite estimating the likelihood of human extinction to be 5% this century (U.S. median), people believe that the chances would need to be around 30% for it to be the very highest priority. In line with this, people consider extinction prevention to be only one among several important societal issues. People’s judgments about the relative importance of extinction prevention appear relatively fixed and hard to change by reason-based interventions.
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. …
The end of economic growth? Unintended consequences of a declining population – Charles I. Jones (Stanford University)
In many models, economic growth is driven by people discovering new ideas. These models typically assume either a constant or growing population. However, in high income countries today, fertility is already below its replacement rate: women are having fewer than two children on average. It is a distinct possibility — highlighted in the recent book, Empty Planet — that global population will decline rather than stabilize in the long run. …
A Fission Problem for Person-Affecting Views – Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
On person-affecting views in population ethics, the moral import of a person’s welfare depends on that person’s temporal or modal status. These views typically imply that – all else equal – we’re never required to create extra people, or to act in ways that increase the probability of extra people coming into existence. In this paper, I use Parfit-style fission cases to construct a dilemma for person-affecting views: either they forfeit their seeming-advantages and face fission analogues…