The weight of suffering
Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 4-2022, forthcoming in The Journal of Philosophy
How should we weigh suffering against happiness? This paper highlights the existence of an argument from intuitively plausible axiological principles to the striking conclusion that in comparing different populations, there exists some depth of suffering that cannot be compensated for by any measure of well-being. In addition to a number of structural principles, the argument relies on two key premises. The first is the contrary of the so-called Reverse Repugnant Conclusion. The second is a principle according to which the addition of any population of lives with positive welfare levels makes the outcome worse if accompanied by sufficiently many lives that are not worth living. I consider whether we should accept the conclusion of the argument and what we may end up committed to if we do not, illustrating the implications of the conclusions for the question of whether suffering in aggregate outweighs happiness among human and non-human animals, now and in future.
Other working papers
The evidentialist’s wager – William MacAskill, Aron Vallinder (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University) Caspar Österheld (Duke University), Carl Shulman (Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University), Johannes Treutlein (TU Berlin)
Suppose that an altruistic and morally motivated agent who is uncertain between evidential decision theory (EDT) and causal decision theory (CDT) finds herself in a situation in which the two theories give conflicting verdicts. We argue that even if she has significantly higher credence in CDT, she should nevertheless act …
Aggregating Small Risks of Serious Harms – Tomi Francis (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
According to Partial Aggregation, a serious harm can be outweighed by a large number of somewhat less serious harms, but can outweigh any number of trivial harms. In this paper, I address the question of how we should extend Partial Aggregation to cases of risk, and especially to cases involving small risks of serious harms. I argue that, contrary to the most popular versions of the ex ante and ex post views, we should sometimes prevent a small risk that a large number of people will suffer serious harms rather than prevent…
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…