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DESCRIPTION:Work in Progress Seminar Series | Winter 2023\n\n“Longtermism's
  Techno-Narrative and its Criticisms”\n\nKeven Bisson\n	Friday\, March 3\, 
 2023\n	3:30-5:30 PM\n	Leacock Building\, Room 927\n\nAbstract: \n	According t
 o Greaves and MacAskill in The Case for Strong Longtermism\, we morally ou
 ght to prioritize the far-future. The main way to prioritize the far-futur
 e is by mitigating existential risks\, risks that threaten the potential o
 f humanity. The main reason put forward by longtermists is utilitarian in 
 nature: if we weight future people and present people equally\, expected-v
 alue analyses show that all interventions focusing on the far-future (prev
 ention of pandemics\, AI takeover\, and asteroid deflection) can do much m
 ore good than the most effective short-term intervention (distribution of 
 anti-malaria bednets).\n\nI raise a problem for the metric used in their e
 xpected-value analyses: they do not account for the moral distinction betw
 een saving lives and increasing the number of lives. These two types of co
 nsequence are considered equal and are conflated together in a single metr
 ic. However\, I argue that they are incommensurable and should be separate
 d. My thesis is that taking this into account\, we ought not to prioritize
  the far-future over the present.\n\nConsidering the two types of conseque
 nces on par leads to the problematic view that we ought to be indifferent 
 between saving the life of someone and ensuring that a supplementary perso
 n is born. I argue that we ought to favour to save the person but that we 
 cannot use a ratio to keep a single metric. To avoid these problems\, long
 termists ought to compare short-term and longterm interventions on two met
 rics.\n\nOn one hand\, reducing existential risk is expected to save the l
 ives of the people that would have died from the catastrophe. Moreover\, b
 y avoiding human extinction\, trillions of expected supplementary lives th
 at would not have existed without the existential risk mitigation interven
 tion would exist. On the other hand\, distributing bednets saves lives eff
 iciently. Moreover\, even if including the descendants of the person saved
  to be part of the effect of saving this person is considered bad practice
 \, in the total utilitarian framework of longtermism it is acceptable.\n\n
 The results of comparing short-term and long-term interventions become unc
 lear when separating the two morally incommensurable metrics. Intervention
 s focusing on the far-future are moderately less effective to save lives t
 han bednets distribution but moderately more effective to increase the num
 ber of people. On this analysis\, we ought not to prioritize the long-term
  over the short-term but treat them separately and relatively equally.\n
DTSTART:20230303T203000Z
DTEND:20230303T223000Z
LOCATION:Room 927\, Leacock Building\, CA\, QC\, Montreal\, H3A 2T7\, 855 r
 ue Sherbrooke Ouest
SUMMARY:Keven Bisson\, 'Longtermism's Techno-Narrative and its Criticisms'
URL:https://www.mcgill.ca/philosophy/channels/event/keven-bisson-longtermis
 ms-techno-narrative-and-its-criticisms-344624
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