The Significance, Persistence, Contingency Framework

William MacAskill, Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) and Aron Vallinder (Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Institute)

GPI Technical Report No. T1-2022

The world, considered from beginning to end, combines many different features, or states of affairs, that contribute to its value. The value of each feature can be factored into its significance—its average value per unit time—and its persistence—how long it lasts. Sometimes, though, we want to ask a further question: how much of the feature’s value can be attributed to a particular agent’s decision at a particular point in time (or to some other originating event)? In other words, to what extent is the feature’s value contingent on the agent’s choice? For this, we must also look at the counterfactual: how would things have turned out otherwise?

Other working papers

On the desire to make a difference – Hilary Greaves, William MacAskill, Andreas Mogensen and Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

True benevolence is, most fundamentally, a desire that the world be better. It is natural and common, however, to frame thinking about benevolence indirectly, in terms of a desire to make a difference to how good the world is. This would be an innocuous shift if desires to make a difference were extensionally equivalent to desires that the world be better. This paper shows that at least on some common ways of making a “desire to make a difference” precise, this extensional equivalence fails.

Heuristics for clueless agents: how to get away with ignoring what matters most in ordinary decision-making – David Thorstad and Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)

Even our most mundane decisions have the potential to significantly impact the long-term future, but we are often clueless about what this impact may be. In this paper, we aim to characterize and solve two problems raised by recent discussions of cluelessness, which we term the Problems of Decision Paralysis and the Problem of Decision-Making Demandingness. After reviewing and rejecting existing solutions to both problems, we argue that the way forward is to be found in the distinction between procedural and substantive rationality…

Staking our future: deontic long-termism and the non-identity problem – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)

Greaves and MacAskill argue for axiological longtermism, according to which, in a wide class of decision contexts, the option that is ex ante best is the option that corresponds to the best lottery over histories from t onwards, where t is some date far in the future. They suggest that a stakes-sensitivity argument…