Existential risks from a Thomist Christian perspective

Consider longtermism: the view that the morally best options available to us, in many important practical decisions, are those that provide the greatest improvements in the (ex ante) value of the far future. Many who accept longtermism do so because they accept an impartial, aggregative theory of moral betterness in conjunction with expected value theory. But such a combination of views implies absurdity if the (impartial, aggregated) value of humanity’s future is undefined…

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. …

This paper considers the argument according to which, because we should regard it as a priori very unlikely that we are among the most important people who will ever exist, we should increase our confidence that the human species will not persist beyond the current historical era, which seems to represent…