Welfare and felt duration
Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 14-2023
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. However, I argue that we know of no way to make sense of what subjective duration consists in on which this claim turns out to be plausible. Moreover, some plausible theories of what subjective duration consists in strongly suggest that subjective duration is irrelevant in itself.
Other working papers
Numbers Tell, Words Sell – Michael Thaler (University College London), Mattie Toma (University of Warwick) and Victor Yaneng Wang (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
When communicating numeric estimates with policymakers, journalists, or the general public, experts must choose between using numbers or natural language. We run two experiments to study whether experts strategically use language to communicate numeric estimates in order to persuade receivers. In Study 1, senders communicate probabilities of abstract events to receivers on Prolific, and in Study 2 academic researchers communicate the effect sizes in research papers to government policymakers. When…
How important is the end of humanity? Lay people prioritize extinction prevention but not above all other societal issues. – Matthew Coleman (Northeastern University), Lucius Caviola (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) et al.
Human extinction would mean the deaths of eight billion people and the end of humanity’s achievements, culture, and future potential. On several ethical views, extinction would be a terrible outcome. How do people think about human extinction? And how much do they prioritize preventing extinction over other societal issues? Across six empirical studies (N = 2,541; U.S. and China) we find that people consider extinction prevention a global priority and deserving of greatly increased societal resources. …
A bargaining-theoretic approach to moral uncertainty – Owen Cotton-Barratt (Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University), Hilary Greaves (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
This paper explores a new approach to the problem of decision under relevant moral uncertainty. We treat the case of an agent making decisions in the face of moral uncertainty on the model of bargaining theory, as if the decision-making process were one of bargaining among different internal parts of the agent, with different parts committed to different moral theories. The resulting approach contrasts interestingly with the extant “maximise expected choiceworthiness”…