William MacAskill: Effective Altruism
Forthcoming in The Norton Introduction to Ethics
Other 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…
Longtermism in an Infinite World – Christian J. Tarsney (Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin) and Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
The case for longtermism depends on the vast potential scale of the future. But that same vastness also threatens to undermine the case for longtermism: If the future contains infinite value, then many theories of value that support longtermism (e.g., risk-neutral total utilitarianism) seem to imply that no available action is better than any other. And some strategies for avoiding this conclusion (e.g., exponential time discounting) yield views that…
A Fission Problem for Person-Affecting Views – Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
On person-affecting views in population ethics, the moral import of a person’s welfare depends on that person’s temporal or modal status. These views typically imply that – all else equal – we’re never required to create extra people, or to act in ways that increase the probability of extra people coming into existence. In this paper, I use Parfit-style fission cases to construct a dilemma for person-affecting views: either they forfeit their seeming-advantages and face fission analogues…