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
Calibration dilemmas in the ethics of distribution – Jacob M. Nebel (University of Southern California) and H. Orri Stefánsson (Stockholm University and Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study)
This paper presents a new kind of problem in the ethics of distribution. The problem takes the form of several “calibration dilemmas,” in which intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequalities requires leading theories of distribution to recommend intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes inequalities—e.g., inequalities in which half the population would gain an arbitrarily large quantity of well-being or resources…
Minimal and Expansive Longtermism – Hilary Greaves (University of Oxford) and Christian Tarsney (Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin)
The standard case for longtermism focuses on a small set of risks to the far future, and argues that in a small set of choice situations, the present marginal value of mitigating those risks is very great. But many longtermists are attracted to, and many critics of longtermism worried by, a farther-reaching form of longtermism. According to this farther-reaching form, there are many ways of improving the far future, which determine the value of our options in all or nearly all choice situations…
AI alignment vs AI ethical treatment: Ten challenges – Adam Bradley (Lingnan University) and Bradford Saad (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
A morally acceptable course of AI development should avoid two dangers: creating unaligned AI systems that pose a threat to humanity and mistreating AI systems that merit moral consideration in their own right. This paper argues these two dangers interact and that if we create AI systems that merit moral consideration, simultaneously avoiding both of these dangers would be extremely challenging. While our argument is straightforward and supported by a wide range of pretheoretical moral judgments, it has far-reaching…