On two arguments for Fanaticism
Jeffrey Sanford Russell (University of Southern California)
GPI Working Paper No. 17-2021, published in Noûs
Should we make significant sacrifices to ever-so-slightly lower the chance of extremely bad outcomes, or to ever-so-slightly raise the chance of extremely good outcomes? Fanaticism says yes: for every bad outcome, there is a tiny chance of extreme disaster that is even worse, and for every good outcome, there is a tiny chance of an enormous good that is even better. I consider two related recent arguments for Fanaticism: Beckstead and Thomas’s argument from strange dependence on space and time, and Wilkinson’s Indology argument. While both arguments are instructive, neither is persuasive. In fact, the general principles that underwrite the arguments (a separability principle in the first case, and a reflection principle in the second) are inconsistent with Fanaticism. In both cases, though, it is possible to rehabilitate arguments for Fanaticism based on restricted versions of those principles. The situation is unstable: plausible general principles tell against Fanaticism, but restrictions of those same principles (with strengthened auxiliary assumptions) support Fanaticism. All of the consistent views that emerge are very strange.
Other working papers
Aggregating Small Risks of Serious Harms – Tomi Francis (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
According to Partial Aggregation, a serious harm can be outweighed by a large number of somewhat less serious harms, but can outweigh any number of trivial harms. In this paper, I address the question of how we should extend Partial Aggregation to cases of risk, and especially to cases involving small risks of serious harms. I argue that, contrary to the most popular versions of the ex ante and ex post views, we should sometimes prevent a small risk that a large number of people will suffer serious harms rather than prevent…
A bargaining-theoretic approach to moral uncertainty – Owen Cotton-Barratt (Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University), Hilary Greaves (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
This paper explores a new approach to the problem of decision under relevant moral uncertainty. We treat the case of an agent making decisions in the face of moral uncertainty on the model of bargaining theory, as if the decision-making process were one of bargaining among different internal parts of the agent, with different parts committed to different moral theories. The resulting approach contrasts interestingly with the extant “maximise expected choiceworthiness”…
The asymmetry, uncertainty, and the long term – Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
The Asymmetry is the view in population ethics that, while we ought to avoid creating additional bad lives, there is no requirement to create additional good ones. The question is how to embed this view in a complete normative theory, and in particular one that treats uncertainty in a plausible way. After reviewing…