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
Can an evidentialist be risk-averse? – Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Two key questions of normative decision theory are: 1) whether the probabilities relevant to decision theory are evidential or causal; and 2) whether agents should be risk-neutral, and so maximise the expected value of the outcome, or instead risk-averse (or otherwise sensitive to risk). These questions are typically thought to be independent – that our answer to one bears little on our answer to the other. …
How to resist the Fading Qualia Argument – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
The Fading Qualia Argument is perhaps the strongest argument supporting the view that in order for a system to be conscious, it does not need to be made of anything in particular, so long as its internal parts have the right causal relations to each other and to the system’s inputs and outputs. I show how the argument can be resisted given two key assumptions: that consciousness is associated with vagueness at its boundaries and that conscious neural activity has a particular kind of holistic structure. …
The weight of suffering – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
How should we weigh suffering against happiness? This paper highlights the existence of an argument from intuitively plausible axiological principles to the striking conclusion that in comparing different populations, there exists some depth of suffering that cannot be compensated for by any measure of well-being. In addition to a number of structural principles, the argument relies on two key premises. The first is the contrary of the so-called Reverse Repugnant Conclusion…