William MacAskill: Effective Altruism
Forthcoming in The Norton Introduction to Ethics
Other papers
Shutdownable Agents through POST-Agency – Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Many fear that future artificial agents will resist shutdown. I present an idea – the POST-Agents Proposal – for ensuring that doesn’t happen. I propose that we train agents to satisfy Preferences Only Between Same-Length Trajectories (POST). I then prove that POST – together with other conditions – implies Neutrality+: the agent maximizes expected utility, ignoring the probability distribution over trajectory-lengths. I argue that Neutrality+ keeps agents shutdownable and allows them to be useful.
Doomsday and objective chance – Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
Lewis’s Principal Principle says that one should usually align one’s credences with the known chances. In this paper I develop a version of the Principal Principle that deals well with some exceptional cases related to the distinction between metaphysical and epistemic modality. I explain how this principle gives a unified account of the Sleeping Beauty problem and chance-based principles of anthropic reasoning…
Future Suffering and the Non-Identity Problem – Theron Pummer (University of St Andrews)
I present and explore a new version of the Person-Affecting View, according to which reasons to do an act depend wholly on what would be said for or against this act from the points of view of particular individuals. According to my view, (i) there is a morally requiring reason not to bring about lives insofar as they contain suffering (negative welfare), (ii) there is no morally requiring reason to bring about lives insofar as they contain happiness (positive welfare), but (iii) there is a permitting reason to bring about lives insofar as they…