The freedom of future people
Andreas T Schmidt (University of Groningen)
GPI Working Paper No. 10-2023
What happens to liberal political philosophy, if we consider not only the freedom of present but also future people? In this article, I explore the case for long-term liberalism: freedom should be a central goal, and we should often be particularly concerned with effects on long-term future distributions of freedom. I provide three arguments. First, liberals should be long-term liberals: liberal arguments to value freedom give us reason to be (particularly) concerned with future freedom, including freedom in the far future. Second, longtermists should be liberals, particularly under conditions of empirical and moral uncertainty. Third, long-term liberalism plausibly justifies some restrictions on the freedom of existing people to secure the freedom of future people, for example when mitigating climate change. At the same time, it likely avoids excessive trade-offs: for both empirical and philosophical reasons, long-term and near-term freedom show significant convergence. Throughout I also highlight important practical implications, for example on longtermist institutional action, climate change, human extinction, and global catastrophic risks.
Other working papers
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…
Do not go gentle: why the Asymmetry does not support anti-natalism – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
According to the Asymmetry, adding lives that are not worth living to the population makes the outcome pro tanto worse, but adding lives that are well worth living to the population does not make the outcome pro tanto better. It has been argued that the Asymmetry entails the desirability of human extinction. However, this argument rests on a misunderstanding of the kind of neutrality attributed to the addition of lives worth living by the Asymmetry. A similar misunderstanding is shown to underlie Benatar’s case for anti-natalism.
Imperfect Recall and AI Delegation – Eric Olav Chen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford), Alexis Ghersengorin (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) and Sami Petersen (Department of Economics, University of Oxford)
A principal wants to deploy an artificial intelligence (AI) system to perform some task. But the AI may be misaligned and aim to pursue a conflicting objective. The principal cannot restrict its options or deliver punishments. Instead, the principal is endowed with the ability to impose imperfect recall on the agent. The principal can then simulate the task and obscure whether it is real or part of a test. This allows the principal to screen misaligned AIs during testing and discipline their behaviour in deployment. By increasing the…