How should risk and ambiguity affect our charitable giving?
Lara Buchak (Princeton University)
GPI Working Paper No. 8 - 2022, published in Utilitas
Suppose we want to do the most good we can with a particular sum of money, but we cannot be certain of the consequences of different ways of making use of it. This paper explores how our attitudes towards risk and ambiguity bear on what we should do. It shows that risk-avoidance and ambiguity-aversion can each provide good reason to divide our money between various charitable organizations rather than to give it all to the most promising one. It also shows on how different attitudes towards risk and ambiguity affect whether we should give to an organization which does a small amount of good for certain or to one which does a large amount of good with some small, unknown probability.
Other working papers
Economic inequality and the long-term future – Andreas T. Schmidt (University of Groningen) and Daan Juijn (CE Delft)
Why, if at all, should we object to economic inequality? Some central arguments – the argument from decreasing marginal utility for example – invoke instrumental reasons and object to inequality because of its effects…
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.
Tough enough? Robust satisficing as a decision norm for long-term policy analysis – Andreas Mogensen and David Thorstad (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
This paper aims to open a dialogue between philosophers working in decision theory and operations researchers and engineers whose research addresses the topic of decision making under deep uncertainty. Specifically, we assess the recommendation to follow a norm of robust satisficing when making decisions under deep uncertainty in the context of decision analyses that rely on the tools of Robust Decision Making developed by Robert Lempert and colleagues at RAND …