Longtermist institutional reform
Tyler M. John (Rutgers University) and William MacAskill (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
GPI Working Paper No. 14-2020, published in The Long View: Essays on Policy, Philanthropy, and the Long-Term Future
There is a vast number of people who will live in the centuries and millennia to come. Even if homo sapiens survives merely as long as a typical species, we have hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us. And our future potential could be much greater than that again: it will be hundreds of millions of years until the Earth is sterilized by the expansion of the Sun, and many trillions of years before the last stars die out. In all probability, future generations will outnumber us by thousands or millions to one; of all the people who we might affect with our actions, the overwhelming majority are yet to come. [...]
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…
‘The only ethical argument for positive 𝛿’? – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
I consider whether a positive rate of pure intergenerational time preference is justifiable in terms of agent-relative moral reasons relating to partiality between generations, an idea I call discounting for kinship. I respond to Parfit’s objections to discounting for kinship, but then highlight a number of apparent limitations of this…
Moral demands and the far future – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
I argue that moral philosophers have either misunderstood the problem of moral demandingness or at least failed to recognize important dimensions of the problem that undermine many standard assumptions. It has been assumed that utilitarianism concretely directs us to maximize welfare within a generation by transferring resources to people currently living in extreme poverty. In fact, utilitarianism seems to imply that any obligation to help people who are currently badly off is trumped by obligations to undertake actions targeted at improving the value…