Brazilian legal philosopher, financial supervisor, GWWC Pledger Bachelor of Laws, Master and Doctor of Philosophy from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), having published articles and translations in the areas of Political Philosophy, Applied Ethics and Philosophy of Economics – with a recent focus on climate risks, Environmental and Social Responsibility, and intergenerational justice. Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, integrating the Ethics and Political Philosophy Laboratory (EPLAB) and the project Present Democracy for Future Generations. Also a member of the Graduate Committee and Special Studies Analyst in the area of supervision of non-banking institutions at the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB). Member of the Inclusive and Sustainable Solutions association (SIS) and of the Effective Altruism community in Brazil (AE Brasil). https://philpeople.org/profiles/ramiro-avila-peres
Ramiro
I love this idea. Maybe one could give it a cool name like “Effective ESG”.
Only one thing makes me a bit skeptic: I remember that in 2006 people started talking about how the dispersion of equity through many investment and pension funds would give rise to a “civil economy” where shareholder interests would tend to converge with public interest. But, except for Covid macro issues and climate change (where major risks for each investor are recongized as positively correlated), I don’t see this happening—but, tbh, they were not EAs.I’d add: lobby financial regulators
Congrats. This is great.
I just found out that LMICs (at least Brazil) import pesticides from countries where such products are banned. Thus advocacy in HIC could target exports, too, since it is often more effective than advocacy in LMICs—e.g., Germany is currently pushing for a ban of such exports in EEUU, while in my home state, norms that forbade importing a pesticide from countries where it is banned have been repealed.
CONSTITUTIONALIZING THE LONG-TERM FUTURE—ESTABLISHING INTERGENERATIONAL JUSTICE IN NATIONAL CONSTITUTIONS
On Sep 19 and Sep 20
This conference might interest longtermists in general (and people in Legal Priorities especifically)
https://ifilnova.pt/en/events/constitutionalizing-the-long-term-future/
What’s the deadline for applications?
Maybe I didn’t quite understande the point, but:
if anonymity is permissible—or, even stronger, desirable—then it seems to me that bans can be easily evaded. One can say “they shouldn’t be evaded!”, but for me it sounds self-defeating to support a norm and at the same time encourage an easy way to evade it. But yeah, legal systems are full of instances of that—but they are often recognized as “bugs”.
I do not think the issue here is that Kemp & Cremer intended to actually evade a ban imposed on Torres, but that their accusation might have been unfair—because it’d be proper to criticize their post given its origins.
First, thank you for bringing this to ur knowledge and raising the issue. On the other hand, I wouldn’t use such strong words here:
It was extremely deceptive of Cremer and Kemp not to disclose this information, because this, rather than the content of what they wrote, may have contributed to the (alleged) reception to their article.
And I can’t help but notice that I totally ignore your identity, too.
I don’t mean this as an accusation. But either the identity of the author of a post is important, and we should all disclose it properly, or it’s totally secondary to the content, and it’s acceptable to hide it, if this is a hinderance.
(maybe Kemp and Cremer would have been more honest if they had credited Torres with a pseudonym… but I suspect we’d still have this discussion anyway)
I wonder if posts under pseudonyms are getting more frequent.
Are we in an Original Position regarding the interests of our descendants?
If you:
Had to make a decision about the basic structure of a society where your distant descendants will live (in 200 or 2000 years), and
only care about their welfare, and
don’t know (almost) anything about who they will be, how many, how their society will be structured, etc.,
Then you are under some sort of veil of ignorance, in a situation quite similar to Rawls’s Original Position… with one major difference: it’s not an abstract thought experiment for ideal political theory.
What led me to this is that I suspect that the welfare of my descendants will likely depend more on the basic structure of their society than on any amount of resources I try to transfer to them – but I’m not sure about that: there are some examples of successful transfers of great wealth through many generations.
I’m not sure Rawls’s theory of justice would follow from this, but it’s quite possible: when I have the welfare of a subset of unidentified individuals in the future in mind, I feel tempted to prefer that their society will abide by something like his two principles of justice. According to Harsanyi, it’s also tempting to prefer something like Average utilitarianism (which, in this context, converges to sum-utilitarianism, because we are abstracting away populational variations).
After thinking this, I didn’t see any major philosophical opinions changing in myself, but I was surprised that I never found any argument over this in the literature.
Maybe because it’s not such a good way of reasoning about future generations: there are more effective ways of improving future welfare than fostering political liberalism. But I guess this is the sort of reasoning we’d expect from something like a reciprocity-based theory of longtermism.
For anyone trying to get updated on the debate over SEC Climate-related disclosures proposal, this is a good summary: https://sites.duke.edu/thefinregblog/2021/07/09/summary-of-comment-letters-for-the-secs-climate-risk-disclosure-rfi/
A very good question, and a nice and thoughtful answer.
I think this has been an ongoing debate on donation matching and giving multipliers
I’d just add that this is one of the reasons why neglectedness is my favorite (and neglected) ITN metric—it’s hard to crowd-out resources for neglected causes.
Good point. This made me think that a way to mitigate this problem (instead of trying to “solve” it) is by acknowledging the importance of being open to new acquaintances and of people who serve as “nodes” or “bridges” for different social networks.
Thanks for this post. It fits my experience and reasoning. I suspect that people don’t see it as a major problem, yet, because we are still used to think of EA as a “small movement”. I suspect this is one of the usual issues in the long-term growth of a movement, either becoming an obstacle for scaling, or threatening the “fidelity” to core principles.
I recognized it on my second reply and addressed this. I still think it misses the point.
I don’t think it provides a point against EAs—which usually start from ideas people already agree with (and are not willing to give up on—that’s the whole point of the reversal test advocated by Toby Ord to precisely eliminate status quo bias) and then draw the corresponding conclusions.
I shouldn’t have implied you made any claim about the moral value of embryos. I should have said, instead, that someone who thinks they are morally valuable would bite the bullet...
And Ord thinks that’s a very problematic position—it apparently implies that we should try to prevent the loss embryos even if it happens right after conception. So it is not absurd to see his point as akin to a reductio.
On the other handThat doesn’t mean they’re wrong about X- they might be weak or hypocritical or bad at reasoning
If they are “weak or hypocritical or bad at reasoning” then their failing to act on X conflicts with other beliefs—like their belief in X. They can solve the conflict by either dropping X, or changing their behavior. We usaully don’t convince people to donate to GD by first convincing them that suffering matters; we assume they agree that suffering matters and show them that their belief that suffering matters imply they should donate...
If someone says “Oh, but now I don’t think suffering matters anymore” you need to use different arguments—you have to show that this new position conflicts with other premises they defend
I was gonna add that maybe what you meant is that Ord’s argument would justify a subjectivist moral theory. But I don’t see anything implying it in the text, though. His point is more like some sort of reflexive equilibrium, when one has to see which of the inconsistent moral intuitions must remain. that’s how moral reasoning usually works. Your way of solving this is by biting the bullet that embryos might be the moral tragedy of our time. Others will solve the inconsistency in some other way. But one’s modus ponens is someone else’s modus tollens (https://www.gwern.net/Modus)… if someone replied that selfish behavior is inconsistent with altruistic principles, I’d have to agree—at least since Thrasymacus people have used this when arguing for some sort of moral skepticism. The reasonig is logically valid; that’s precisely why this position is kind of hard to retort. You can’t just reply that this is wrong; you must show how it conflicts with other beliefs the person is supposed to have.
Edit: on the fun side: on of the moral pros of assisted reproduction is that it helps save us from the non-identity problem, as it mitigates the contingencies of human reproduction.
If you’re looking for a reason to leave effective altruism, I give the Scourge five out of five revealed preferences
Why would a paper with no reference to EA that one major author who identifies with EA wrote 14 years ago be a conclusive reason to leave EA? Even if abortion was something EAs usually defend, you could just see EA as “a tower of assumptions” (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-as-a-tower-of)
Thanks for this reply, meu caro. My remarks:
1. Though “bliss” and (tranquil) “nirvana” are vague, and some people might equate them, in the text being discussed they are made a bit more precisified… But I guess we both agree that it is still far away from making them precise terms—especially because we are not very good at measuring welfare. I consider this as evidence that uncertainty plays a role in our “repugnant” intuitions.2. Allow me to be brief and tentative: I don’t consider my remarks as evidence against the total view. I suspect the total view is the right theory of value / good (though I distinguish this from a theory of justice / duty—which is another way of answering “what should we do?”). I think that RC reasoning is probably correct—but it is hard to apply in uncertain comparison, or might be quite trivial (and so not very “repugnant”) in certain ones.
3. I agree that RC reasoning does not involve uncertainty / risk / probabilities. But I find the premises and its steps quite reminiscent of some “low probability—high expectancy” cases—so that I suspect the formal arguments are related (besides the fact that both conclusions seem to be entailed by expected utility theory). When I do have the time to engage with the literature, I’ll start with Nebel’s Intrapersonal Addition Paradox, and Kosonen’s solution.
I agree that scope neglect probably explains a bit here, but I don’t think that’s all. For instance, nobody would deny that 2 people living in bliss is a worse state than 1bi in nirvana. And even population ethicists feel uncomfortable with RC.
Besides my mentioning of uncertainty above, I also guess (very tentatively) that some other factors might mess up with our intuitions:
i) scarcity concerns: we evolved under resource scarcity, which biases us towards lower populations;
ii) social norms might bias us against RC;
iii) contractualist reasoning: if you were in something like an Original Position and had to choose which world you would prefer to live in, you’d pick the “low pop living in bliss” world, of course (from a selfish POV, at least). Similarly, we might say that living in a country with a high avg HDI (e.g., Sweden) is better than another one with lower avg HDI (e.g., Nigeria) - because avg HDI here is a good predictor for how good is the life of an individual living in that country. But I guess this just shows contractualist reasoning is unsuited for population ethics: we are interested in how good a place is all things considered, and not in “how good is this place for those who live here”.
P.S.: Something that puzzles me is that RC seems to be analogous to the problem of fanaticism in Pascalian scenarios—and yet I don’t see this analogy being widely explored.
[TL;DR: I guess taking uncertainty seriously takes the sting out of population ethics. And it’s usually a good heuristics for counterintuitive quasi-fanatical conclusions.]
Thanks for the post. But I don’t think it works. Your point is that there should be no controversy over RC, because all it implies is that zillions of people living a tranquil nirvana is better than 10 bi (or n) people living in blissful paradise...? It looks like you basically just set a higher bar for what counts as positive value. One could argue along the same line saying that 2 people in bliss is worse than 1k living in nirvana.
The problem is:
Parfit called it “repugnant” for a reason, and he tried to find arguments against it. I don’t see the point of making it kind of trivial… Actually, the philosophically interesting point is to explain why it is controversial. I suspect easy answers tend to be wrong here.
I don’t live in a nirvana-like state, but I still think my life has positive value. I can totally reckon there are lives of negative value, and I can imagine my life becoming one. But it’s interesting to acknowledge that other people think about this differently.
I invite you to take uncertainty seriously. Some argue that, because of that, RC doesn’t have “any probative force”, particularly if some comparisons are highly imprecise or impossible
My personal take so far is that RC is right: there is a *logically possible* world w with a huge population m with lives barely worth living which is better than a world with n people living in ultimate bliss. For instance, I’m pretty confident that 10 bi living in nirvana is better than 2 people living in bliss; just like 10^18 people in nirvana is probably better than 10bi living in bliss.
But as the comparison between the corresponding worlds gets harder, for a determinate world w’, it might become more unlikely that you can prove that U(w ) > U(w’ ) – i.e., that you can justifiably believe that such-and-such w and w’ are those worlds. Uncertainty increases with each step in the chain of your argument.
Plus, I think that a good (and old) heuristics for consequentialists to avoid counterintuitive solutions is to consider uncertainty, and check if the conclusion remains sound – especially if you have something like “inductive steps”. E.g.: Sure, a world w where 1 person is tortured for 50y for n others to live in bliss is better than our current world… but how certain can you be that such-and-such precise world is w?
Deal. Thanks a lot.
Well, I certainly don’t know any analyst claiming to consider GCRs when evaluating an asset, but maybe I should have searched better. I’d like to be proved wrong.
But it’s actually hard to price worst-case scenarios: On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change | Martin Weitzman (harvard.edu)
I think “Weitzman’s dismal theorem” is the climate economics version of “fanaticism” debates in EA. And this is one of the core objections of Stern against IAMs.
So I think it’s fair to have a high credence that GCRs are not usually internalized into asset prices.