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
Exceeding expectations: stochastic dominance as a general decision theory – Christian Tarsney (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk (like Pascal’s Mugging), and intolerably paradoxical in cases like the St. Petersburg and Pasadena games. In this paper I show that, under certain conditions, stochastic dominance reasoning can capture most of the plausible implications of expectational reasoning while avoiding most of its pitfalls…
The Hinge of History Hypothesis: Reply to MacAskill – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Some believe that the current era is uniquely important with respect to how well the rest of human history goes. Following Parfit, call this the Hinge of History Hypothesis. Recently, MacAskill has argued that our era is actually very unlikely to be especially influential in the way asserted by the Hinge of History Hypothesis. I respond to MacAskill, pointing to important unresolved ambiguities in his proposed definition of what it means for a time to be influential and criticizing the two arguments…
Dispelling the Anthropic Shadow – Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
There are some possible events that we could not possibly discover in our past. We could not discover an omnicidal catastrophe, an event so destructive that it permanently wiped out life on Earth. Had such a catastrophe occurred, we wouldn’t be here to find out. This space of unobservable histories has been called the anthropic shadow. Several authors claim that the anthropic shadow leads to an ‘observation selection bias’, analogous to survivorship bias, when we use the historical record to estimate catastrophic risks. …