The scope of longtermism
David Thorstad (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 6-2021
Longtermism holds roughly that in many decision situations, the best thing we can do is what is best for the long-term future. The scope question for longtermism asks: how large is the class of decision situations for which longtermism holds? Although longtermism was initially developed to describe the situation of cause-neutral philanthropic decisionmaking, it is increasingly suggested that longtermism holds in many or most decision problems that humans face. By contrast, I suggest that the scope of longtermism may be more restricted than commonly supposed. After specifying my target, swamping axiological strong longtermism (swamping ASL), I give two arguments for the rarity thesis that the options needed to vindicate swamping ASL in a given decision problem are rare. I use the rarity thesis to pose two challenges to the scope of longtermism: the area challenge that swamping ASL often fails when we restrict our attention to specific cause areas, and the challenge from option unawareness that swamping ASL may fail when decision problems are modified to incorporate agents’ limited awareness of the options available to them.
Other working papers
Welfare and felt duration – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
How should we understand the duration of a pleasant or unpleasant sensation, insofar as its duration modulates how good or bad the experience is overall? Given that we seem able to distinguish between subjective and objective duration and that how well or badly someone’s life goes is naturally thought of as something to be assessed from her own perspective, it seems intuitive that it is subjective duration that modulates how good or bad an experience is from the perspective of an individual’s welfare. …
Funding public projects: A case for the Nash product rule – Florian Brandl (Stanford University), Felix Brandt (Technische Universität München), Dominik Peters (University of Oxford), Christian Stricker (Technische Universität München) and Warut Suksompong (National University of Singapore)
We study a mechanism design problem where a community of agents wishes to fund public projects via voluntary monetary contributions by the community members. This serves as a model for public expenditure without an exogenously available budget, such as participatory budgeting or voluntary tax programs, as well as donor coordination when interpreting charities as public projects and donations as contributions. Our aim is to identify a mutually beneficial distribution of the individual contributions. …
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…