William MacAskill: Effective Altruism

Forthcoming in The Norton Introduction to Ethics

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Other papers

The paralysis argument – William MacAskill, Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)

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…

How to resist the Fading Qualia Argument – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

The Fading Qualia Argument is perhaps the strongest argument supporting the view that in order for a system to be conscious, it does not need to be made of anything in particular, so long as its internal parts have the right causal relations to each other and to the system’s inputs and outputs. I show how the argument can be resisted given two key assumptions: that consciousness is associated with vagueness at its boundaries and that conscious neural activity has a particular kind of holistic structure. …