The Asymmetry, Uncertainty, and the Long Term
Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
GPI Working Paper No. 11-2019, published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
The Asymmetry is the view in population ethics that, while we ought to avoid creating additional bad lives, there is no requirement to create additional good ones. The question is how to embed this view in a complete normative theory, and in particular one that treats uncertainty in a plausible way. After reviewing the many difficulties that arise in this area, I present general ‘supervenience principles’ that reduce arbitrary choices to uncertainty-free ones. In that sense they provide a method for aggregating across states of nature. But they also reduce arbitrary choices to one-person cases, and in that sense provide a method for aggregating across people. The principles are general in that they are compatible with total utilitarianism and ex post prioritarianism in fixed-population cases, and with a wide range of ways of extending these views to variable-population cases. I then illustrate these principles by writing down a complete theory of the Asymmetry, or rather several such theories to reflect some of the main substantive choice-points. In doing so I suggest a new way to deal with the intransitivity of the relation ‘ought to choose A over B’. Finally, I consider what these views have to say about the importance of extinction risk and the long-run future.
Please note that this working paper contains some additional material about cyclic choice and also about ʽhardʼ versions of the asymmetry, according to which harms to independently existing people cannot be justified by the creation of good lives. But for other material, please refer to and cite the published version in Philosophy and Phenomelogical Research.
Other working papers
Non-additive axiologies in large worlds – Christian Tarsney and Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
Is the overall value of a world just the sum of values contributed by each value-bearing entity in that world? Additively separable axiologies (like total utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and critical level views) say ‘yes’, but non-additive axiologies (like average utilitarianism, rank-discounted utilitarianism, and variable value views) say ‘no’…
Staking our future: deontic long-termism and the non-identity problem – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
Greaves and MacAskill argue for axiological longtermism, according to which, in a wide class of decision contexts, the option that is ex ante best is the option that corresponds to the best lottery over histories from t onwards, where t is some date far in the future. They suggest that a stakes-sensitivity argument…
The epistemic challenge to longtermism – Christian Tarsney (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
Longtermists claim that what we ought to do is mainly determined by how our actions might affect the very long-run future. A natural objection to longtermism is that these effects may be nearly impossible to predict— perhaps so close to impossible that, despite the astronomical importance of the far future, the expected value of our present actions is mainly determined by near-term considerations. This paper aims to precisify and evaluate one version of this epistemic objection to longtermism…