The paralysis argument

William MacAskill, Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)

GPI Working Paper No. 6-2019, published in Philosophers’ Imprint

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Given plausible assumptions about the long-run impact of our everyday actions, we show that standard non-consequentialist constraints on doing harm entail that we should try to do as little as possible in our lives. We call this the Paralysis Argument. After laying out the argument, we consider and respond to a number of objections. We then suggest what we believe is the most promising response: to accept, in practice, a highly demanding morality of beneficence with a long-term focus.

Other working papers

Tough enough? Robust satisficing as a decision norm for long-term policy analysis – Andreas Mogensen and David Thorstad (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)

This paper aims to open a dialogue between philosophers working in decision theory and operations researchers and engineers whose research addresses the topic of decision making under deep uncertainty. Specifically, we assess the recommendation to follow a norm of robust satisficing when making decisions under deep uncertainty in the context of decision analyses that rely on the tools of Robust Decision Making developed by Robert Lempert and colleagues at RAND …

Towards shutdownable agents via stochastic choice – Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford), Alexander Roman (New College of Florida), Christos Ziakas (Independent), Leyton Ho (Brown University), and Louis Thomson (University of Oxford)

Some worry that advanced artificial agents may resist being shut down. The Incomplete Preferences Proposal (IPP) is an idea for ensuring that doesn’t happen. A key part of the IPP is using a novel ‘Discounted REward for Same-Length Trajectories (DREST)’ reward function to train agents to (1) pursue goals effectively conditional on each trajectory-length (be ‘USEFUL’), and (2) choose stochastically between different trajectory-lengths (be ‘NEUTRAL’ about trajectory-lengths). In this paper, we propose evaluation metrics…

Is In-kind Kinder than Cash? The Impact of Money vs Food Aid on Social Emotions and Aid Take-up – Samantha Kassirer, Ata Jami, & Maryam Kouchaki (Northwestern University)

There has been widespread endorsement from the academic and philanthropic communities on the new model of giving cash to those in need. Yet the recipient’s perspective has mostly been ignored. The present research explores how food-insecure individuals feel and respond when offered either monetary or food aid from a charity. Our results reveal that individuals are less likely to accept money than food aid from charity because receiving money feels relatively more shameful and relatively less socially positive. Since many…