2020 End-of-Year Fundraiser

29.11.2020
Posted in Uncategorized.

2020 has been an exciting year for us. We officially set up the Center for Reducing Suffering (CRS) as an organisation, launched this website, and published articles on suffering–focused ethics, s-risks, and cause prioritisation. We are now raising money to consolidate our financial situation.

We believe that CRS’s open-ended research programme on how to best reduce suffering fills an important gap. To help donors make informed choices, we are fully transparent about our values and our strategy — for more details on why we do what we do, see our Strategic Plan.  [...] 

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On fat-tailed distributions and s-risks

25.11.2020
Posted in Cause prioritisation, s-risks.

Summary

It is sometimes suggested that since the severity of many kinds of moral catastrophes (e.g. wars and natural disasters) fall along a power-law distribution, efforts to reduce suffering should focus on “a few rare scenarios where things go very wrong”. While this argument appears quite plausible on its face, it is in fact a lot less obvious than it seems at first sight. Specifically, a fat-tailed distribution need not imply that a single or even a few sources of suffering account for most future suffering in expectation, let alone that we should mostly prioritize a single or a few sources of suffering.

Introduction

In his post Is most expected suffering due to worst-case outcomes?, Tobias Baumann explores how skewed the distribution of future sources of suffering might be. His conclusion, in short, is that worst-case outcomes may well dominate, but that it is unclear to what degree we should expect future suffering to be concentrated in worst-case outcomes. [...] 

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Longtermism and animal advocacy

11.11.2020
Posted in Cause prioritisation.

There is a common tendency among effective altruists to think of animal advocacy as having little value for improving the long-term future. Similarly, animal advocates often assume that longtermism has little relevance to their work. Yet this seems misguided: sufficient concern for nonhuman sentient beings is a key ingredient in how well the long-term future will go.

In this post, I will discuss whether animal advocacy – or, more generally, expanding the moral circle – should be a priority for longtermists, and outline implications of a longtermist perspective on animal advocacy. My starting point is a moral view that rejects speciesism and gives equal weight to the interests and well-being of future individuals.  [...] 

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Note on Pummer’s “Worseness of nonexistence”

25.09.2020
Posted in Suffering-Focused Ethics. Tagged , , .

Summary

In “The Worseness of Nonexistence”, Theron Pummer makes an interesting argument that suggests that a failure to create new people can be as bad as cutting an existing person’s life short. I here briefly sketch out a reply to Pummer that can be made, in some version, from a variety of different views.

Outline of Pummer’s argument

The primary aim of Pummer’s essay is to defend comparativism, the view that things can be better or worse for merely possible persons. I agree with Pummer that we should accept some version of comparativism — for example, it seems obvious to me that a state of affairs in which a single person is brought into existence only to be tortured for their entire life is worse than a state of affairs in which no individual is brought into existence (non-comparativists cannot say this, as they hold that the two states of affairs are not comparable). [...] 

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