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
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…
Tiny probabilities and the value of the far future – Petra Kosonen (Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin)
Morally speaking, what matters the most is the far future – at least according to Longtermism. The reason why the far future is of utmost importance is that our acts’ expected influence on the value of the world is mainly determined by their consequences in the far future. The case for Longtermism is straightforward: Given the enormous number of people who might exist in the far future, even a tiny probability of affecting how the far future goes outweighs the importance of our acts’ consequences…
Measuring AI-Driven Risk with Stock Prices – Susana Campos-Martins (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
We propose an empirical approach to identify and measure AI-driven shocks based on the co-movements of relevant financial asset prices. For that purpose, we first calculate the common volatility of the share prices of major US AI-relevant companies. Then we isolate the events that shake this industry only from those that shake all sectors of economic activity at the same time. For the sample analysed, AI shocks are identified when there are announcements about (mergers and) acquisitions in the AI industry, launching of…