Longtermism in an Infinite World
Christian J. Tarsney (Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin) and Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 4-2023, forthcoming in Essays on Longtermism
The case for longtermism depends on the vast potential scale of the future. But that same vastness also threatens to undermine the case for longtermism: If the future contains infinite value, then many theories of value that support longtermism (e.g., risk-neutral total utilitarianism) seem to imply that no available action is better than any other. And some strategies for avoiding this conclusion (e.g., exponential time discounting) yield views that are much less supportive of longtermism. This chapter explores how the potential infinitude of the future affects the case for longtermism. We argue that (i) there are reasonable prospects for extending risk- neutral totalism and similar views to infinite contexts and (ii) many such extension strategies still support standard arguments for longtermism, since they imply that when we can only affect (or only predictably affect) a finite part of an infinite universe, we can reason as if only that finite part existed. On the other hand, (iii) there are improbable but not impossible physical scenarios in which our actions can have infinite predictable effects on the far future, and these scenarios create substantial unresolved problems for both infinite ethics and the case for longtermism.
Other working papers
The scope of longtermism – David Thorstad (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Longtermism holds roughly that in many decision situations, the best thing we can do is what is best for the long-term future. The scope question for longtermism asks: how large is the class of decision situations for which longtermism holds? Although longtermism was initially developed to describe the situation of…
Moral uncertainty and public justification – Jacob Barrett (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) and Andreas T Schmidt (University of Groningen)
Moral uncertainty and disagreement pervade our lives. Yet we still need to make decisions and act, both in individual and political contexts. So, what should we do? The moral uncertainty approach provides a theory of what individuals morally ought to do when they are uncertain about morality…
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…