| Date | Speaker(s) | Title | Abstract |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 (Friday 18 Jan) | NO SEMINAR | ||
| Week 2 (Friday 25 Jan) | Matthew Rendall | Discounting, Climate Change And The Ecological Fallacy | Discounting future costs and benefits is often defended on the ground that our descendants will be richer. Simply to treat the future as better off, however, is to commit an ecological fallacy. Even if our descendants are better off when we average across climate change scenarios, this cannot justify discounting costs and benefits in possible states of the world in which they are not. Giving due weight to catastrophe scenarios requires energetic action against climate change. |
| Week 3 (Friday 1 Feb) | NO SEMINAR | ||
| 4pm Week 4 (Friday 8 Feb) | Lara Buchak [NB this talk as at 4pm] | Why we should guarantee a not-so-bad world for future generations | I argue that when thinking about policies that might harm or benefit future people, we should place much more weight on worse consequences than on better ones. This follows from the fact that (I will argue) we ought to make decisions under the assumption that future people are very risk-averse. I explore the implications for some practical decisions, such as climate policy. |
| Week 5 (Friday 15 Feb) | Joanna Burch-Brown | What can effective altruists and decolonial activists learn from each other? | Many contemporary injustices have their roots in histories of slavery, colonialism, and post-slavery racism. Decolonial movements seek to redress the harmful legacies of these injustices, for instance by challenging individual, institutional and structural forms of racism. One example of a decolonial movement is the Countering Colston campaign in Bristol, which has sought to change how Bristol memorializes the history and legacies of its role in slavery. Countering Colston has challenged uncritical memorials of those who built the institutions of slavery, and has campaigned for a major memorial honouring the lives of the enslaved. On the surface of it, this kind of campaign may seem to be at odds with the principles of Effective Altruism; symbolic repair for historical injustice may seem like a poor use of energy. I argue that this impression is mistaken. Finding the most responsible and constructive ways to address legacies of historical injustices of slavery and colonialism is important, and has potentially far-reaching benefits for communities across the globe. I defend this claim by reference to the EA criteria, which encourage us to direct attention towards problems that are 1) great in scale, 2) highly neglected, and 3) highly solvable. Finding the best forms of symbolic, expressive repair has the potential to substantially improve both psychological and physical wellbeing of groups who have suffered injustice; many solutions are replicable at scale globally; symbolic actions can be meaningful to large numbers of people; and these campaigns often motivate people to address other forms of injustice. However, acts of symbolic repair are also risky, with potential to increase polarization, generate political unrest and lead to retrenched racist attitudes. The complexity of these issues, along with their global relevance, makes them an important area for further research. In defending these claims, I highlight key principles for Decolonial Activists and Effective Altruists to learn from one another. Learning these principles will help both movements have a more positive global impact. |
| Week 6 (Friday 22 Feb) | Laura Scherer | First steps towards prioritisation in animal welfare and effective environmentalism | Through my research on animal welfare, I seek to provide a systematic approach to a cross-species comparison of animal welfare – a crucial step towards the prioritisation of alternative production and consumption. To do this, my research presents a framework that allows for such comparisons. Moreover, I apply it to different animal products and national diets. In my latest research work, I discuss the large untapped potential of effective environmentalism (EE) for effective altruism (EA) causes. More specifically, EE could prove instrumental to effectively tackle human welfare (incl. poverty and health) and existential risks (e.g., due to ecosystem collapse). While clear synergies emerge between EE and EA in those two areas, perceived trade-offs with other areas, namely wild animal suffering, might be misconceptions. A first step towards EE is the ranking among different environmental issues, and I show my plan how to tackle this challenge. |
| Week 7 (Friday 1 March) | David Manley | Axiology, identity, and lifespan | How much, if at all, should we value the prospect of extending human lifespan? Some of the costs and benefits are clear, and others can be assessed empirically. But we also face various tricky axiological choice-points. For example: Are persons the fundamental units of well-being, or person-stages? Do we measure the value of outcomes with average or total well-being—or something else? Do units of time in a life yield diminishing marginal value, even if they are equally good in other respects? Which relational features, if any, matter in addition to the local features of persons or person-states? Several of the most plausible ways to negotiate these choice-points yield important structural advantages for lifespan extension. |
| Week 8 (Friday 8 March) | Anders Huitfeldt | A new approach to effect heterogeneity for clinical trials | VanderWeele provided two separate definitions of effect heterogeneity, which he referred to as "effect modification in distribution" and "effect modification in measure". The standard epidemiological approach, which is based on effect modification in measure, is associated with a number of well-described shortcomings, and no consensus exists about the conditions under which investigators can assume effect homogeneity on either the additive or the multiplicative scale. More recently, Bareinboim and Pearl [2] introduced a new graphical framework for transportability, based on effect heterogeneity in distribution. These graphs are an elegant solution to many of the problems associated with traditional approaches, but they require the investigator to make strong assumptions about the data generating mechanism: In particular, it is not sufficient to control for those variables that are associated with the effect of treatment; investigators using this approach are required to account for all causes of the outcome that differ between the populations. In light of these limitations, we propose a new definition of effect heterogeneity, based on “counterfactual outcome state transition parameters”, that is, the proportion of those individuals who would not have been a case by the end of follow-up if untreated, who would have responded to treatment by becoming a case; and the proportion of those individuals who would have become a case by the end of follow-up if untreated who would have responded to treatment by not becoming a case. Effects are said to be equal between populations if and only if these proportions are equal between the populations. Although counterfactual outcome state transition parameters are generally not identified from the data without strong monotonicity assumptions, we show that when they stay constant between populations, there are important implications for model specification, meta-analysis, and research generalization. |