William MacAskill: Effective Altruism
Forthcoming in The Norton Introduction to Ethics
Other papers
The epistemic challenge to longtermism – Christian Tarsney (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
Longtermists claim that what we ought to do is mainly determined by how our actions might affect the very long-run future. A natural objection to longtermism is that these effects may be nearly impossible to predict— perhaps so close to impossible that, despite the astronomical importance of the far future, the expected value of our present actions is mainly determined by near-term considerations. This paper aims to precisify and evaluate one version of this epistemic objection to longtermism…
Staking our future: deontic long-termism and the non-identity problem – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
Greaves and MacAskill argue for axiological longtermism, according to which, in a wide class of decision contexts, the option that is ex ante best is the option that corresponds to the best lottery over histories from t onwards, where t is some date far in the future. They suggest that a stakes-sensitivity argument…
Cassandra’s Curse: A second tragedy of the commons – Philippe Colo (ETH Zurich)
This paper studies why scientific forecasts regarding exceptional or rare events generally fail to trigger adequate public response. I consider a game of contribution to a public bad. Prior to the game, I assume contributors receive non-verifiable expert advice regarding uncertain damages. In addition, I assume that the expert cares only about social welfare. Under mild assumptions, I show that no information transmission can happen at equilibrium when the number of contributors…