It Only Takes One: The Psychology of Unilateral Decisions
Joshua Lewis (New York University), Carter Allen (UC Berkeley), Christoph Winter (ITAM, Harvard University and Institute for Law & AI) and Lucius Caviola (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
GPI Working Paper No. 14-2024
Sometimes, one decision can guarantee that a risky event will happen. For instance, it only took one team of researchers to synthesize and publish the horsepox genome, thus imposing its publication even though other researchers might have refrained for biosecurity reasons. We examine cases where everybody who can impose a given event has the same goal but different information about whether the event furthers that goal. Across 8 experiments (including scenario studies with elected policymakers, doctors, artificial-intelligence researchers, and lawyers and judges and economic games with laypeople, N = 1,518, and 3 supplemental studies, N = 847) people behave suboptimally, balancing two factors. First, people often impose events with expected utility only slightly better than the alternative based on the information available to them, even when others might know more. This approach is insufficiently cautious, leading people to impose too frequently, a situation termed the unilateralist’s curse. Second, counteracting the first factor, people avoid sole responsibility for unexpectedly bad outcomes, sometimes declining to impose seemingly desirable events. The former heuristic typically dominates and people unilaterally impose too often, succumbing to the unilateralist’s curse. But when only few people can impose, who know the stakes are high, responsibility aversion reduces over-imposing.
Other working papers
Time discounting, consistency and special obligations: a defence of Robust Temporalism – Harry R. Lloyd (Yale University)
This paper defends the claim that mere temporal proximity always and without exception strengthens certain moral duties, including the duty to save – call this view Robust Temporalism. Although almost all other moral philosophers dismiss Robust Temporalism out of hand, I argue that it is prima facie intuitively plausible, and that it is analogous to a view about special obligations that many philosophers already accept…
Longtermist political philosophy: An agenda for future research – Jacob Barrett (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) and Andreas T. Schmidt (University of Groningen)
We set out longtermist political philosophy as a research field. First, we argue that the standard case for longtermism is more robust when applied to institutions than to individual action. This motivates “institutional longtermism”: when building or shaping institutions, positively affecting the value of the long-term future is a key moral priority. Second, we briefly distinguish approaches to pursuing longtermist institutional reform along two dimensions: such approaches may be more targeted or more broad, and more urgent or more patient.
Philosophical considerations relevant to valuing continued human survival: Conceptual Analysis, Population Axiology, and Decision Theory – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Many think that human extinction would be a catastrophic tragedy, and that we ought to do more to reduce extinction risk. There is less agreement on exactly why. If some catastrophe were to kill everyone, that would obviously be horrific. Still, many think the deaths of billions of people don’t exhaust what would be so terrible about extinction. After all, we can be confident that billions of people are going to die – many horribly and before their time – if humanity does not go extinct. …