I’m a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Global Priorities Institute.
Previously, I was a Philosophy Fellow at the Center for AI Safety.
So far, my work has mostly been about the moral importance of future generations. Going forward, it will mostly be about AI.
You can email me at elliott.thornley@philosophy.ox.ac.uk
All good points, but Tarsney’s argument doesn’t depend on the assumption that longtermist interventions cannot accidentally increase x-risk. It just depends on the assumption that there’s some way that we could spend $1 million that would increase the epistemic probability that humanity survives the next thousand years by at least 2x10^-14.
Thanks! This is valuable feedback.
By ‘persistent difference’, Tarsney doesn’t mean a difference that persists forever. He just means a difference that persists for a long time in expectation: long enough to make the expected value of the longtermist intervention greater than the expected value of the neartermist benchmark intervention.
Perhaps you want to know why we should think that we can make this kind of persistent difference. I can talk a little about that in another comment if so.
A point that seems worth noting, from Puzzles for Everyone:
In an especially striking example of conflating utilitarianism with anything remotely approaching systematic thinking, popular substacker Erik Hoel recently characterized the Beckstead & Thomas paper on decision-theoretic paradoxes as addressing “how poorly utilitarianism does in extreme scenarios of low probability but high impact payoffs.” Compare this with the very first sentence of the paper’s abstract: “We show that every theory of the value of uncertain prospects must have one of three unpalatable properties.” Not utilitarianism. Every theory.
(Alas, when I tried to point this out in the comments section, after a brief back-and-forth in which Erik initially doubled down on the conflation, he abruptly decided to instead delete my comments explaining his mistake.)
Yes, nice point. We could depart from the total view and go for a neutral band. But it’s worth noting that this move comes with problems of its own.
Great point. But note that if lives of monk-like tranquility are neutral, that makes the Mirrored Repugnant Conclusion harder to accept:
For any population of hellish lives, there is a population of barely bad lives that is worse.
The total view in population ethics implies this Mirrored Repugnant Conclusion.
If lives of monk-like tranquility are neutral, then lives of monk-like tranquility plus a mosquito bite are barely bad, and so the total view implies:
For any population of hellish lives, there is a population of lives of monk-like tranquility plus a mosquito bite that is worse.
I think in ordinary cases, necessitarianism ends up looking a lot like presentism. If someone presently exists, then they exist regardless of my choices. If someone doesn’t yet exist, their existence likely depends on my choices (there’s probably something I could do to prevent their existence).
Necessitarianism and presentism do differ in some contrived cases, though. For example, suppose I’m the last living creature on Earth, and I’m about to die. I can either leave the Earth pristine or wreck the environment. Some alien will soon be born far away and then travel to Earth. This alien’s life on Earth will be much better if I leave the Earth pristine. Presentism implies that it doesn’t matter whether I wreck the Earth, because the alien doesn’t exist yet. Necessitarianism implies that it would be bad to wreck the Earth, because the alien will exist regardless of what I do.
I’m just trying to fix that discrepancy.
I see. That seems like a good thing to do.
Here’s another good argument against person-affecting views that can be explained pretty simply, due to Tomi Francis.
Person-affecting views imply that it’s not good to add happy people. But Q is better than P, because Q is better for the hundred already-existing people, and the ten billion extra people in Q all live happy lives. And R is better than Q, because moving to R makes one hundred people’s lives slightly worse and ten billion people’s lives much better. Since betterness is transitive, R is better than P. R and P are identical except for the extra ten billion people living happy lives in R. Therefore, it’s good to add happy people, and person-affecting views are false.
Okay, that seems fair. And I agree that the Dutch book is a good argument against the person-affecting intuitions you lay out. But the argument only shows that people initially attracted to those person-affecting intuitions should move to a non-Dutch-bookable person-affecting view. If we want to move people away from person-affecting views entirely, we need other arguments.
The person-affecting views endorsed by philosophers these days are more complex than the families I listed. They’re not so intuitively ridiculous (though I think they still have problems. I have a couple of draft papers on this.).
Also a minor terminological note, you’ve called your argument a Dutch book and so have I. But I think it would be more standard to call it a money pump. Dutch books are a set of gambles all taken at once that are guaranteed to leave a person worse off. Money pumps are a set of trades taken one after the other that are guaranteed to leave a person worse off.
Yup!
Agreed
My impression is that each family of person-affecting views avoids the Dutch book here.
Here are four families:
(1) Presentism: only people who presently exist matter.
(2) Actualism: only people who will exist (in the actual world) matter.
(3) Necessitarianism: only people who will exist regardless of your choice matter.
(4) Harm-minimisation views (HMV): Minimize harm, where harm is the amount by which a person’s welfare falls short of what it could have been.
Presentists won’t make trade 2, because Alice doesn’t exist yet.
Actualists can permissibly turn down trade 3, because if they turn down trade 3 then Alice will actually exist and her welfare matters.
Necessitarians won’t make trade 2, because it’s not the case that Alice will exist regardless of their choice.
HMVs won’t make trade 1, because Alice is harmed in World 2 but not World 1.
Nice post! I share your meta-ethical stance, but I don’t think you should call it ‘moral quasi-realism’. ‘Quasi-realism’ already names a position in meta-ethics, and it’s different to the position you describe.
Very roughly, quasi-realism agrees with anti-realism in stating:
(1) Nothing is objectively right or wrong.
(2) Moral judgments don’t express beliefs.
But, in contrast to anti-realism, quasi-realism also states:
(3) It’s nevertheless legitimate to describe certain moral judgments as true.
The conjunction of (1)-(3) defines quasi-realism.
What you call ‘quasi-realism’ might be compatible with (2) and (3), but its defining features seem to be (1) plus something like:
(4) Our aim is to abide by the principles that we’d embrace if we were more thoughtful, informed, etc.
(1) plus (4) could point you towards two different positions in meta-ethics. It depends whether you think it’s appropriate to describe the principles we’d embrace if we were more thoughtful, etc., as true.
If you think it is appropriate to describe these principles as true, then that counts as an ideal observer theory.
If you think it isn’t appropriate to describe these principles as true, then your position is just anti-realism plus the claim that you do in fact try to abide by the principles that you’d embrace if you were more thoughtful, etc.
Sweet! I’ve messaged him.
How about Dylan Balfour’s ‘Pascal’s Mugging Strikes Again’? It’s great.
I remember Toby Ord gave a talk at GPI where he pointed out the following:
Let L be long-term value per unit of resources and N be near-term value per unit of resources. Then spending 50% of resources on the best long-term intervention and 50% of resources on the best near-term intervention will lead you to split resources equally between A and C. But the best thing to do on a 0.5*(near-term value)+0.5*(long-term value) value function is to devote 100% of resources to B.
Yes, that all sounds right to me. Thanks for the tip about uniformity and fanaticism! Uniformity also comes up here, in the distinction between the Quantity Condition and the Trade-Off Condition.
Nice post! Consider this a vote for more summaries.