On your first para, I was responding to this claim: “It also seems strange to defend longtermists as only being harmful in theory, since the vast majority of longtermism is theory, and relatively few actions have been taken. That is, almost all longtermist ideas so far have implications which are currently only hypothetical.” I said that most work on bio and AI was not just theory but was applied. I don’t think the things you say in the first para present any evidence against that claim, but rather they seem to grant my initial point.
I agree that there are some things in Bio and AI that are applied—though the vast majority of the work in both areas is still fairly far from application. But my point which granted your initial point was responding to “I don’t think it counterfactually harms the global poor.”
person-affecting view of ethics, which longtermists reject
I’m a longtermist and I don’t reject (asymmetric) person(-moment-)affecting views, at least not those that think necessary ≠ only present people. I would be very hard-pressed to give a clean formalization of necessary people though. I think it’s bad if effective altruists think longtermism can only be justified with astronomical waste-style arguments and not at all if someone has person-affecting intuitions. (Staying in a broadly utilitarian framework. There are, of course, also obligation-to-ancestor-type justifications for longtermism or similar.) The person-affecting part of me just pushes me in the direction of caring more about trajectory change than extinction risk.
Since I could only ever give very handwavey defenses of person-affecting views and even handwaveier explanations of my overall moral views: Here’s a paper by someone that AFAICT is at least sympathetic to longtermism and discusses asymmetric person-affecting views. (I have to admit I never got around to read the paper.) (Writing a paper on how an asymmetric person-affecting view obviously also doesn’t necessarily mean that the author doesn’t actually reject person-affecting views)
Many current individuals will be worse off when resources don’t go to them, for instance, because they are saving future lives, versus when they do, for instance, funds focused on near-term utilitarian goals like poverty reduction. And if, as most of us expect, the world’s wealth will continue to grow, effectively all future people who are helped by existential risk reduction are not what we’d now consider poor. You can defend this via the utilitarian calculus across all people, but that doesn’t change the distributive impact between groups.
Equally, many future people will be worse-off than they would have been if we don’t reduce extinction risks. The claim is about the net total impact on non-white people
Your definition of problematic injustice seems far too narrow, and I explicitly didn’t refer to race in the previous post. The example I gave was that the most disadvantaged people are in the present, and are further injured—not that non-white people (which under current definitions will describe approximately all of humanity in another half dozen generations) will be worse off.
On your first para, I was responding to this claim: “It also seems strange to defend longtermists as only being harmful in theory, since the vast majority of longtermism is theory, and relatively few actions have been taken. That is, almost all longtermist ideas so far have implications which are currently only hypothetical.” I said that most work on bio and AI was not just theory but was applied. I don’t think the things you say in the first para present any evidence against that claim, but rather they seem to grant my initial point.
I agree that there are some things in Bio and AI that are applied—though the vast majority of the work in both areas is still fairly far from application. But my point which granted your initial point was responding to “I don’t think it counterfactually harms the global poor.”
This is question begging: it only counterfactually harms the poor on a person-affecting view of ethics, which longtermists reject
I’m a longtermist and I don’t reject (asymmetric) person(-moment-)affecting views, at least not those that think necessary ≠ only present people. I would be very hard-pressed to give a clean formalization of necessary people though. I think it’s bad if effective altruists think longtermism can only be justified with astronomical waste-style arguments and not at all if someone has person-affecting intuitions. (Staying in a broadly utilitarian framework. There are, of course, also obligation-to-ancestor-type justifications for longtermism or similar.) The person-affecting part of me just pushes me in the direction of caring more about trajectory change than extinction risk.
Since I could only ever give very handwavey defenses of person-affecting views and even handwaveier explanations of my overall moral views: Here’s a paper by someone that AFAICT is at least sympathetic to longtermism and discusses asymmetric person-affecting views. (I have to admit I never got around to read the paper.) (Writing a paper on how an asymmetric person-affecting view obviously also doesn’t necessarily mean that the author doesn’t actually reject person-affecting views)
Is that true?
Many current individuals will be worse off when resources don’t go to them, for instance, because they are saving future lives, versus when they do, for instance, funds focused on near-term utilitarian goals like poverty reduction. And if, as most of us expect, the world’s wealth will continue to grow, effectively all future people who are helped by existential risk reduction are not what we’d now consider poor. You can defend this via the utilitarian calculus across all people, but that doesn’t change the distributive impact between groups.
Equally, many future people will be worse-off than they would have been if we don’t reduce extinction risks. The claim is about the net total impact on non-white people
Your definition of problematic injustice seems far too narrow, and I explicitly didn’t refer to race in the previous post. The example I gave was that the most disadvantaged people are in the present, and are further injured—not that non-white people (which under current definitions will describe approximately all of humanity in another half dozen generations) will be worse off.