Population axiology

Greaves, H. R. G.

doi:10.1111/phc3.12442

Cited by 68 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Questions of population ethics, however, are beyond the scope of this article (for surveys, see e.g. Arrhenius n.d. and Greaves 2017).…”

Section: The Standard Framework For Discountingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discounting for Public Policy: A Survey

Greaves¹

2017

Economics and Philosophy

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This article is a critical survey of the debate over the value of the social discount rate, with a particular focus on climate change. The majority of the material surveyed is from the economics rather than from the philosophy literature, but the emphasis of the survey itself is on foundations in ethical and other normative theory rather than highly technical details. I begin by locating the standard approach to discounting within the overall landscape of ethical theory, and explaining the assumptions and simplifications that are needed in order to arrive at the model that is standard in the discounting literature. The article then covers the general theory of the Ramsey equation and its relationship to observed interest rates, arguments for and against a positive rate of pure time preference, the consumption elasticity of utility, and the effect of various sorts of uncertainty on the discount rate. Finally, it turns specifically to the application of this debate to the case of climate change, focussing on the recent controversy over the low discount rate used in the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change.

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“…Questions of population ethics, however, are beyond the scope of this article (for surveys, see e.g. Arrhenius n.d. and Greaves 2017).…”

Section: The Standard Framework For Discountingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discounting for Public Policy: A Survey

Greaves¹

2017

Economics and Philosophy

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“…In the next paragraph, we briefly introduce a known problem in population ethics that exhibits similar patterns and which might be of interest for the design of utility functions for advanced AI systems in certain safety-relevant application areas [15]. Population ethics [21] is an issue in philosophy concerning decision-making that potentially leads to populations with varying numbers or/and identities of their members. One interesting element of a population ethics theory is the derived population axiology which represents the total order of different population states according to their ethical desirability.…”

Section: Deconstructing Perverse Instantiationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Intuitively, most people would rank the policy measure leading to population A as higher than the one leading to population Z. However, given the population axiology of total utilitarianism [21], Z might well be ranked higher than A if the number of people multiplied by their welfare is bigger for population Z in comparison to population A. This type of violation of human ethical intuitions when applying total utilitarianism to population ethics has been termed "Repugnant Conclusion" by Derik Parfit [35].…”

Section: Deconstructing Perverse Instantiationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Augmented Utilitarianism for AGI Safety

Aliman

Kester

2019

Artificial General Intelligence

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In the light of ongoing progresses of research on artificial intelligent systems exhibiting a steadily increasing problem-solving ability, the identification of practicable solutions to the value alignment problem in AGI Safety is becoming a matter of urgency. In this context, one preeminent challenge that has been addressed by multiple researchers is the adequate formulation of utility functions or equivalents reliably capturing human ethical conceptions. However, the specification of suitable utility functions harbors the risk of "perverse instantiation" for which no final consensus on responsible proactive countermeasures has been achieved so far. Amidst this background, we propose a novel socio-technological ethical framework denoted Augmented Utilitarianism which directly alleviates the perverse instantiation problem. We elaborate on how augmented by AI and more generally science and technology, it might allow a society to craft and update ethical utility functions while jointly undergoing a dynamical ethical enhancement. Further, we elucidate the need to consider embodied simulations in the design of utility functions for AGIs aligned with human values. Finally, we discuss future prospects regarding the usage of the presented scientifically grounded ethical framework and mention possible challenges.

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“…Sometimes we refer to such Asymmetry-rejecting outcomes as 'utilitarian'. Here 'utilitarian' is used in Blackorby et al's (2005) 'generalized utilitarian' sense, which includes many welfarist axiologies, including prioritarianism, versions of egalitarianism, variablevalue axiologies, and more, alongside total and average utilitarianism (Greaves 2017).…”

Section: Dependent Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Asymmetry of population ethics: experimental social choice and dual-process moral reasoning

Spears

2019

Economics and Philosophy

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte.Population ethics is widely considered to be exceptionally important and exceptionally difficult. One key source of difficulty is the conflict between certain moral intuitions and analytical results identifying requirements for rational (in the sense of complete and transitive) social choice over possible populations. One prominent such intuition is the Asymmetry, which jointly proposes that the fact that a possible child's quality of life would be bad is a normative reason not to create the child, but the fact that a child's quality of life would be good is not a reason to create the child. This paper reports a set of questionnaire experiments about the Asymmetry in the spirit of economists' empirical social choice. Few survey respondents show support for the Asymmetry; instead respondents report that expectations of a good quality of life are relevant. Each experiment shows evidence (among at least some participants) of dual-process moral reasoning, in which cognitive reflection is statistically associated with reporting expected good quality of life to be normatively relevant. The paper discusses possible implications of these results for the economics of population-sensitive social welfare and for the conflict between moral mathematics and population intuition. JEL Classification:J10, J13, J18, D63

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Population axiology

Cited by 68 publications

References 49 publications

Discounting for Public Policy: A Survey

Discounting for Public Policy: A Survey

Augmented Utilitarianism for AGI Safety

The Asymmetry of population ethics: experimental social choice and dual-process moral reasoning

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