Minimal and Expansive Longtermism
Hilary Greaves (University of Oxford) and Christian Tarsney (Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin)
GPI Working Paper No. 3-2023, forthcoming in Essays on Longtermism
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, and will continue to do so over the coming decades even if we make substantial investments in longtermist priorities. This chapter highlights the gap between the minimal form of longtermism established by standard arguments and this more expansive view, and considers (without reaching any firm conclusions) which form of longtermism is more plausible.
Other working papers
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. …
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…
Doomsday and objective chance – Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
Lewis’s Principal Principle says that one should usually align one’s credences with the known chances. In this paper I develop a version of the Principal Principle that deals well with some exceptional cases related to the distinction between metaphysical and epistemic modality. I explain how this principle gives a unified account of the Sleeping Beauty problem and chance-based principles of anthropic reasoning…