Population ethical intuitions
Lucius Caviola (Harvard University), David Althaus (Center on Long-Term Risk), Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) and Geoffrey Goodwin (University of Pennsylvania)
GPI Working Paper No. 3-2024, published in Cognition
Is humanity's existence worthwhile? If so, where should the human species be headed in the future? In part, the answers to these questions require us to morally evaluate the (potential) human population in terms of its size and aggregate welfare. This assessment lies at the heart of population ethics. Our investigation across nine experiments (N = 5776) aimed to answer three questions about how people aggregate welfare across individuals: (1) Do they weigh happiness and suffering symmetrically?; (2) Do they focus more on the average or total welfare of a given population?; and (3) Do they account only for currently existing lives, or also lives that could yet exist? We found that, first, participants believed that more happy than unhappy people were needed in order for the whole population to be net positive (Studies 1a-c). Second, participants had a preference both for populations with greater total welfare and populations with greater average welfare (Study 3a-d). Their focus on average welfare even led them (remarkably) to judge it preferable to add new suffering people to an already miserable world, as long as this increased average welfare. But, when prompted to reflect, participants' preference for the population with the better total welfare became stronger. Third, participants did not consider the creation of new people as morally neutral. Instead, they viewed it as good to create new happy people and as bad to create new unhappy people (Studies 2a-b). Our findings have implications for moral psychology, philosophy and global priority setting.
Other working papers
Social Beneficence – Jacob Barrett (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
A background assumption in much contemporary political philosophy is that justice is the first virtue of social institutions, taking priority over other values such as beneficence. This assumption is typically treated as a methodological starting point, rather than as following from any particular moral or political theory. In this paper, I challenge this assumption.
Misjudgment Exacerbates Collective Action Problems – Joshua Lewis (New York University) et al.
In collective action problems, suboptimal collective outcomes arise from each individual optimizing their own wellbeing. Past work assumes individuals do this because they care more about themselves than others. Yet, other factors could also contribute. We examine the role of empirical beliefs. Our results suggest people underestimate individual impact on collective problems. When collective action seems worthwhile, individual action often does not, even if the expected ratio of costs to benefits is the same. …
The unexpected value of the future – Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Various philosophers accept moral views that are impartial, additive, and risk-neutral with respect to betterness. But, if that risk neutrality is spelt out according to expected value theory alone, such views face a dire reductio ad absurdum. If the expected sum of value in humanity’s future is undefined—if, e.g., the probability distribution over possible values of the future resembles the Pasadena game, or a Cauchy distribution—then those views say that no real-world option is ever better than any other. And, as I argue…