Brazilian legal philosopher, postdoc in intergenerational justice, 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
Hi. I’ll have to present WWOTF’s first chapter to a class of philosophers and economists… I was wondering if someone has any ”.pptx” about the book they’d be willing to share, pretty plz?
The Vanuatu Initiative, climate litigation and the rights of future generations
Thanks for this post.
Just one remark though:The enactment of the Global Catastrophic Risk Management Act
This links to the original proposal. However, as explained by Matt Boyd, the bill that was passed (with some changes—such as placing responsibility over Homeland Security instead of the President) is part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 (p. 1290).
Thanks. Great post, btw. May I translate a part of it? and why don’t you post it here on EA forum?
[Question] What paper on EA should I present in class on Philosophy and Economics?
btw isn’t this a reference to Hemingway’s the Old man & the Sea?
I haven’t reviewed other comments, yet, but this reminded me that many years ago President Lula said (I think during an interview or debate, while running for a second term) every fisherperson knows that, when one goes fishing, it’s necessary to bring along the proper equipment—and a prepared meal or snack to sustain the time and effort the fishery might take. You don’t fish hungry, much less starving.
I can’t find the precise source because any google search gets full of other irrelevant materials—actually, there are too many sources linking Lula and his policies (Fome Zero, Bolsa Familia, etc.) to this proverb, and his team has often tried to reformulate it in ways like “we’ll give fish PLUS teach fishing”. But I think nothing trumps this old extended metaphor (and the way it was phrased really made it seem like the credit belongs to him—but that’s the talent of a populist, to display the wisdom of the avg Joe).
Btw, “Lula” means “squid” in Portuguese, a delicacy for fisherpeople- maybe another evidence of nominative determinism?
Thansk for this. Right now, I just wanted to remark that I loved the prize here.
There’ve been many contests in the EAsphere awarding awesome financial prizes… while for many people here, I guess that being doing something great (and then receiving props for it) is incentive enough.
(Perhaps you should call this “innovative proverb maker of the year”
Translations in Brazil: much more than you needed to know
Thanks for this. I really think we should have more paper summaries like this, on a regular basis.
There’s a point that caught my attention
Longtermism, aggregation, and catastrophic risk (Emma J. Curran)
[…]
This argument relies on an aggregative view where we should be driven by sufficiently many small harms outweighing a smaller number of large harms. However there are some cases where we might say such decision-making is impermissible e.g. letting a man get run over by a train instead of pulling a lever to save the man but also make lots of people late for work. One argument for why it’s better to save the man from death is the separateness of persons—there is no actual person who experiences the sum of the individual harms of being late—so there can be no aggregate complaint.
I really liked this paper and its whole argument. On the other hand, and I here I’m probably even going against the usual deontologist literature, I’m not sure that the problem with these counter-intuitive examples of aggregating small harms / pleasures is aggregation per se, but that in such cases hedonist aggregation tends to conflict with other types of aggregation – such as through a preference-based ordinal social welfare function (for instance, if every individual prefers a slight delay to having someone killed, then nobody should be killed) – or that they might violate something like a Golden Rule (if I wouldn’t want to die to avoid millions of minor delays, then I must not want to let someone die to avoid small delays). I suspect that just saying, like Rawls and Scanlon etc., that aggregation violates “separateness of persons” turns an interesting discussion into a “fight between strawmen”[1]
- ^
EAs sometimes ridicule people for siding with deontologists in such dilemmas. Rob Wiblin once said to A. Mogensen (during an 80kh podcast interview) that:
“[...] at least for myself, as I mentioned, I actually don’t share this intuition at all, that there’s no number of people who could watch the World Cup where it would be justified to allow someone to die by electrocution. And in fact, I think that intuition that there’s no number is actually crazy and ridiculous and completely inconsistent with other actions that we take all the time.”
If you agree with Rob’s statement, ask yourself questions like:
a) Would you die to allow millions to watch the World Cup?
b) Would you want someone to die to allow you to watch the World Cup—if that’s the only way?
c) Would you support a norm (or vote for a law) stating that it is OK to let people die so we can watch the World Cup?
d) If we were to vote to let Bernard die for us to watch the World Cup, would you vote yes?
e) Do you think others would (usually) answer “yes” to these previous questions?
Nothing here contradicts that we do let people die (though in situations where they voluntarily choose to take some risk in exchange of fair previous compensation) for us to watch the World Cup; not even that the world is a “better place” (in the sense that, e.g., there’s more welfare) if people die for our watching the World Cup. It might be the optimal policy, indeed.
But I think that, if you answered “no” to some of the questions above, you are not entitled to say that this intuition is “crazy and ridiculous”. After all, if you prefer to save a life to watching the World Cup, and if you think others would reason similarly, why do you think that it is “crazy” to state that we should interrupt the show to save one person?
It’s true that I might be conflating individual preferences and moral preferences / judgment here, but I am not sure about how easy it is to separate them; I’d probably lose any pleasure in watching a match if I knew someone unwillingly died for it – and I would certainly not say “Well, too bad; but by the Sure Thing Principle, it should not affect my preferences – may they have not died in vain”. Just like in the literature about the connection between perception and judgment, particularly when it comes to providing contexto, I think our individual preferences and mental states are deeply connected to more abstract judgments regarding norms.
Sorry for this long footnote, since it’s not exaclty related to the core of the post, I felt it’d be inappropriate to insert it in the main comment.
- ^
This is awesome. Thanks for the post.
However, I’d really like to know more about how this (and the corresponding Brussels effect) could interact wit topics such as:ESG Financial disclosures regulations regarding animal welfare;
Countries’ resistance in complying with EU agencies recommandations;
Countries’ internal laws and practices disregarding animal rights / welfare—e.g., Portugal’s Supreme Court striking criminal laws regarding torturing animals.
I couldn’t avoid noticing that TIME didn’t mention her case
It turns out that I changed my mind again. I don’t see why we couldn’t establish pigouvian taxes for (some?) c-risks. For instance, taxing nuclear weapons (or their inputs, such as nuclear fuel) according to some tentative guesstimate of the “social cost of nukes” would provide funding for peace efforts and possibly even be in the best interest of (most of?) current nuclear powers, as it would help slow down nuclear proliferation. This is similar to Barratt et al.’s paper on making gian of function researchers buy insurance.
Hedonist Utilitarian Philosopher screams in agony: “Whaaaaat? So we have actual evidence of the existence of immortal rational sentient beings that can regenerate almost any damage and YOU WANT TO KILL them? LARRY, YOU MONSTER!”
An objection to the non-identity problem: shouldn’t disregarding the welfare of non-existent people preclude most interventions on child mortality and education?
One objection against favoring the long-term future is that we don’t have duties towards people who still don’t exist. However, I believe that, when someone presents a claim like that, probably what they want to state is that we should discount future benefits (for some reason), or that we don’t have a duty towards people who will only exist in the far future. But it turns out that such a claim apparently proves too much; it proves that, for instance, we have no obligation to invest on reducing the mortality of infants less than one year old in the next two years
The most effective interventions in saving lives often do so by saving young children. Now, imagine you deploy an intervention similar to those of Against Malaria Foundation—i.e., distributing bednets to reduce contagion. At the beggining, you spend months studying, then preparing, then you go to the field and distribute bednets, and then one or two years later you evaluate how many malaria cases were prevented in comparison to a baseline. It turns out that most cases of averted deaths (and disabilities and years of life gained) correspond to kids who had not yet been conceived when you started studying.
Similarly, if someone starts advocating an effective basic education reform today, they will only succeed in enacting it in some years—thus we can expect that most of the positive effects will happen many years later.
(Actually, for anyone born in the last few years, we can expect that most of their positive impact will affect people who are not born yet. If there’s any value in positivel influencing these children, most of it will happen to people who are not yet born)
This means that, at the beggining of this project, most of the impact corresponded to people who didn’t exist yet—so you were under no moral obligation to help them.
Is this a setback in animal welfare laws? https://www.publico.pt/2023/01/18/sociedade/noticia/ministerio-publico-pede-inconstitucionalidade-norma-lei-maus-tratos-animais-2035566 I was surprised that Portuguese constitutional legal doctrine prevented criminalizing torturing animals
https://www.tribunalconstitucional.pt/tc/acordaos/20210867.html There are quite definitive precedents
Oh I was hoping you would propose this: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-end-of-history
Sorry for the joke, I actually like your idea. But the military indeed sorta prevent having wars by doing military exercises to expensively signal strength and capabilities. That’s how we have prevented WW III so far. So the crux is doing this without such an economic waste.
Thanks for this review. I’m linking here another post commenting a previous review for those interested in the subject. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gcPp2bPin3wywjnGH/is-space-colonization-desirable-review-of-dark-skies-space
On UAP and glitches in the matrix: I sometimes joke that, if we ever build something like a time machine, we should go back in time and produce those phenomena as pranks on our ancestors, or to “ensure timeline integrity.” I was even considering writing an April Fool’s post on how creating a stable worldwide commitment around this “past pranks” policy (or, similarly, committing to go back in time to investigate those phenomena and “play pranks” only if no other explanation is found) would, by EDT, imply lower probabilities of scary competing explanations for unexplained phenomena—like aliens, supernatural beings or glitches in the matrix. (another possible intervention is to write a letter to superintelligent descendants asking them to, if possible, go back in time to enforce that policy… I mean, you know how it goes)
(crap I just noticed I’m plagiarizing Interstellar!)
So it turns out that, though I find this whole subject weird and amusing, and don’t feel particularly willing to dedicate more than half an hour to it… the reasoning seems to be sound, and I can’t spot any relevant flaws. If I ever find myself having one of those experiences, I do prefer to think “I’m either hallucinating, or my grandkids are playing with the time machine again”
Hi. I’ll have to present WWOTF’s first chapter to a class of philosophers and economists… I was wondering if someone has any ”.pptx” about the book they’d be willing to share, pretty plz? 😅