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
Existential Risk and Growth – Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute and Department of Economics, University of Oxford) and Leopold Aschenbrenner
Technologies may pose existential risks to civilization. Though accelerating technological development may increase the risk of anthropogenic existential catastrophe per period in the short run, two considerations suggest that a sector-neutral acceleration decreases the risk that such a catastrophe ever occurs. First, acceleration decreases the time spent at each technology level. Second, since a richer society is willing to sacrifice more for safety, optimal policy can yield an “existential risk Kuznets curve”; acceleration…
Longtermist political philosophy: An agenda for future research – Jacob Barrett (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) and Andreas T. Schmidt (University of Groningen)
We set out longtermist political philosophy as a research field. First, we argue that the standard case for longtermism is more robust when applied to institutions than to individual action. This motivates “institutional longtermism”: when building or shaping institutions, positively affecting the value of the long-term future is a key moral priority. Second, we briefly distinguish approaches to pursuing longtermist institutional reform along two dimensions: such approaches may be more targeted or more broad, and more urgent or more patient.
A Fission Problem for Person-Affecting Views – Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
On person-affecting views in population ethics, the moral import of a person’s welfare depends on that person’s temporal or modal status. These views typically imply that – all else equal – we’re never required to create extra people, or to act in ways that increase the probability of extra people coming into existence. In this paper, I use Parfit-style fission cases to construct a dilemma for person-affecting views: either they forfeit their seeming-advantages and face fission analogues…