The parliamentary approach to moral uncertainty

We introduce a novel approach to the problem of decision-making under moral uncertainty, based on an analogy to a parliament. The appropriate choice under moral uncertainty is the one that would be reached by a parliament comprised of delegates representing the interests of each moral theory, who number in proportion to your credence in that theory. We present what we see as the best specific approach of this kind (based on proportional chances voting), and also show how the parliamentary approach can be used as a general framework for thinking about moral uncertainty, where extant approaches to addressing moral uncertainty correspond to parliaments with different rules and procedures

The Lindy Effect

The Lindy effect is a statistical tendency for things with longer pasts behind them to have longer futures ahead. It has been experimentally confirmed to apply to some categories, but not others, raising questions about when it is applicable and why. I shed some light on these questions by examining the mathematical properties required for the effect and generating mechanisms that can produce them. While the Lindy effect is often thought to require a declining hazard rate, I show that it arises very naturally even in cases with constant (or increasing) hazard rates -- so long as there is a probability distribution over the size of that rate. One implication is that even things which are becoming less robust over time can display the Lindy effect.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure

Proposal for a new ‘three lines of defence’ approach to UK risk management

The coronavirus pandemic highlights the devastating impact that extreme risks can have on our health and economy. Extreme risks—high-impact threats that have a potentially global reach—need our urgent attention. We do not know which extreme risk will come next, but we do know what many of the most extreme risks are, and that our preparation needs to be much better. This paper proposes a new Three Lines of Defence system to ensure that extreme risks are sufficiently captured in UK risk management. It suggests going beyond simply ‘fighting the last war’ and focusing solely on better pandemic preparedness, instead of transforming the UK’s resilience to extreme risks across the board. There is no better time for the UK to give extreme risks the attention they deserve, but rarely receive. Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute hopes that this time-critical opportunity to put in place lasting protections for UK citizens will be taken. We welcome discussion and feedback about this paper

Beyond action: applying consequentialism to decision making and motivation

It is often said that there are three great traditions of normative ethics: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. Each is based around a compelling intuition about the nature of ethics: that what is ultimately important is that we produce the best possible outcome, that ethics is a system of rules which govern our behaviour, and that ethics is about living a life that instantiates the virtues, such as honesty, compassion and loyalty. This essay is about how best to interpret consequentialism. I show that if we take consequentialism beyond the assessment of acts, using a consequentialist criterion to assess decision making, motivation, and character, then the resulting theory can also capture many of the intuitions about systems of moral rules and excellences of character that lead people to deontology and virtue ethics. I begin by considering the argument that consequentialism is self-defeating because its adoption would produce bad outcomes. I take up the response offered by the classical utilitarians: when properly construed, consequentialism does not require us to make our decisions by a form of naïve calculation, or to be motivated purely by universal benevolence. Instead it requires us to use the decision procedure that will produce the best outcome and to have the motives that lead to the best outcome. I take this idea as my starting point, and spend the thesis developing it and considering its implications. I demonstrate that neither act-consequentialism nor rule-consequentialism has the resources to adequately assess decision making and motivation. I therefore turn to the idea of global consequentialism, which assesses everything in terms of its consequences. I then spend the greater part of the essay exploring how best to set up such a theory and how best to apply it to decision making and motivation. I overcome some important objections to the approach, and conclude by showing how the resulting approach to consequentialism helps to bridge the divide between the three traditions

Probing the Improbable: Methodological Challenges for Risks with Low Probabilities and High Stakes

Some risks have extremely high stakes. For example, a worldwide pandemic or asteroid impact could potentially kill more than a billion people. Comfortingly, scientific calculations often put very low probabilities on the occurrence of such catastrophes. In this paper, we argue that there are important new methodological problems which arise when assessing global catastrophic risks and we focus on a problem regarding probability estimation. When an expert provides a calculation of the probability of an outcome, they are really providing the probability of the outcome occurring, given that their argument is watertight. However, their argument may fail for a number of reasons such as a flaw in the underlying theory, a flaw in the modeling of the problem, or a mistake in the calculations. If the probability estimate given by an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then the estimate is suspect. We develop this idea formally, explaining how it differs from the related distinctions of model and parameter uncertainty. Using the risk estimates from the Large Hadron Collider as a test case, we show how serious the problem can be when it comes to catastrophic risks and how best to address it

Existential risk and existential hope: definitions

We look at the strengths and weaknesses of two existing definitions of existential risk, and suggest a new definition based on expected value. This leads to a parallel concept: ‘existential hope’, the chance of something extremely good happening.