Some have argued that we ought to be directing our resources toward humanity’s existing problems, rather than future existential risks, because many of the latter are highly improbable. You have responded by suggesting that existential risk mitigation may in fact be a dominant moral priority over the alleviation of present suffering. Can you explain why?
Well suppose you have a moral view that counts future people as being worth as much as present people. You might say that fundamentally it doesn’t matter whether someone exists at the current time or at some future time, just as many people think that from a fundamental moral point of view, it doesn’t matter where somebody is spatially—somebody isn’t automatically worth less because you move them to the moon or to Africa or something. A human life is a human life. If you have that moral point of view that future generations matter in proportion to their population numbers, then you get this very stark implication that existential risk mitigation has a much higher utility than pretty much anything else that you could do.
I think that’s a very ineffective way to start such an interview. I reject both these moral positions even though demographically I am at the center of their target audience. Maybe I underestimate the average newspaper reader, but I think he or she wouldn’t even understand why would anyone take such positions at all.
I think that’s a very ineffective way to start such an interview. I reject both these moral positions even though demographically I am at the center of their target audience. Maybe I underestimate the average newspaper reader, but I think he or she wouldn’t even understand why would anyone take such positions at all.