Respect for others' risk attitudes and the long-run future

Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

GPI Working Paper No. 20-2022, published in Noûs

When our choice affects some other person and the outcome is unknown, it has been argued that we should defer to their risk attitude, if known, or else default to use of a risk avoidant risk function. This, in turn, has been claimed to require the use of a risk avoidant risk function when making decisions that primarily affect future people, and to decrease the desirability of efforts to prevent human extinction, owing to the significant risks associated with continued human survival. I raise objections to the claim that respect for others’ risk attitudes requires risk avoidance when choosing for future generations. In particular, I argue that there is no known principle of interpersonal aggregation that yields acceptable results in variable population contexts and is consistent with a plausible ideal of respect for others’ risk attitudes in fixed population cases.

Other working papers

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Estimating long-term impacts of actions is important in many areas but the key difficulty is that long-term outcomes are only observed with a long delay. One alternative approach is to measure the effect on an intermediate outcome or a statistical surrogate and then use this to estimate the long-term effect. …

Dynamic public good provision under time preference heterogeneity – Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute and Department of Economics, University of Oxford)

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‘The only ethical argument for positive 𝛿’? – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)

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