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
Aggregating Small Risks of Serious Harms – Tomi Francis (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
According to Partial Aggregation, a serious harm can be outweighed by a large number of somewhat less serious harms, but can outweigh any number of trivial harms. In this paper, I address the question of how we should extend Partial Aggregation to cases of risk, and especially to cases involving small risks of serious harms. I argue that, contrary to the most popular versions of the ex ante and ex post views, we should sometimes prevent a small risk that a large number of people will suffer serious harms rather than prevent…
Time Bias and Altruism – Leora Urim Sung (University College London)
We are typically near-future biased, being more concerned with our near future than our distant future. This near-future bias can be directed at others too, being more concerned with their near future than their distant future. In this paper, I argue that, because we discount the future in this way, beyond a certain point in time, we morally ought to be more concerned with the present well- being of others than with the well-being of our distant future selves. It follows that we morally ought to sacrifice…
Calibration dilemmas in the ethics of distribution – Jacob M. Nebel (University of Southern California) and H. Orri Stefánsson (Stockholm University and Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study)
This paper presents a new kind of problem in the ethics of distribution. The problem takes the form of several “calibration dilemmas,” in which intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequalities requires leading theories of distribution to recommend intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes inequalities—e.g., inequalities in which half the population would gain an arbitrarily large quantity of well-being or resources…