Week 2 -Why Focus on S-Risks?

Explore longtermism, suffering-focused ethics, and the idea of prioritising worst-case outcomes.

Introduction to suffering-focused ethics

Moral Frameworks of Suffering-focused Ethics

Fundamental
- Foremost priority to the reduction of suffering
Variables of Suffering Focused Ethics
- how strongly suffering is prioritised
- which considerations besides suffering
Only moral obligation: Reduce suffering
- ? what about pleasure?
Strong Negative utilitarianism
- Only concerned with minimizing suffering
- Not concerned with positivity
Weak Negative Utilitarianism
- Other names
  - ‘negative-leaning’, ‘partially asymmetric’, or ‘partially suffering-focused’
- Suffering primarily, Positivity secondarily
  - Exchange rate e.g., Suffering:Happiness 10:1
Negative consequentialism
- includes suffering (experience) as well as injustice
Categorical Norm: Unacceptable Tradeoffs
- Unacceptable to purchase positivity in exchange for negativity
  - To which degree?
    Positivity for acceptable quality of life
    Negativity from minor to intense (death, unbearable)
How other views imply supporting suffering-focused ethics
- Focus on well being: Implies preventing that which prevents it i.e., suffering
- Population Ethics with view that increasing population does not increase welfare: Implies preventing suffering

Pro Suffering

Intensity
- Severe Suffering > Non-Severe Suffering
  - e.g,. tortured vs feeling cold
Consent
- Active Disapproval
- Non-Approval

Suffering vs Positive Value (e.g,. happiness)

Urgency
- Suffering has urgency
  - 'Emergency'
    Is about reducing suffering
    Not about adding positivity
  - Moral Monster & Evil Actions
    always about suffering not about failing to create positive values
  - Situation: Extreme Suffering + Extreme Good = Overall-bad
    Should prevent whole situation even though it includes extreme good
    Impossible to counterbalance with good
- Good has no urgency
  - Not increase seems wholly fine & unproblematic
  - e.g. Opportunity to enable someone with a problem-free life to experience more intense pleasure
  - e.g., Opportunity to create more beings with purportedly positive welfare
There is no Final Positive Value
- Good: Flawless
  - Definition
    No need to change anything
    Cannot make it better
  - No spectrum
  - Moral Implication
    No moral imperative to add anything/improve
    Only to take away which hinders it i.e., suffering
  - Reality
    rarely or never reach it
    Has anyone reached it?
- Bad: Flawed
  - Spectrum i.e., varies in degree

Misunderstandings about suffering-focused ethics

World Destruction
- It might be morally wrong to destroy
Death
- Contra Death
  - Virtue (capacity to reduce suffering) would be decreased
  - Death is a harm in itself
  - individual prefers to stay alive
  - Positive Value would be decreased
- Pro Death
  - agonising terminal illness and wants to die, and their death would not harm others

Priorities from a suffering-focused perspective

Reducing risks of worst-case outcomes (s-risks)
Reducing suffering of non-human sentience
- e.g., Animal Farming
Reducing the suffering of the worst-off humans
- e.g., violence, accidents, disease
Reducing suffering in everyday life
- e.g., people in distress, avoiding harming insects, consumption choices like veganism

Chapter 3 – Should we focus on the long-term future?

Time impartiality - Irrelevance of Time for Moral Status

Suffering matters equally regardless of when it is experienced
Disregarding the suffering (or other interests) of an individual because of the time they live in would be akin to denying them equal moral status because of other contingent factors, such as the place they live in

Practical long-term focus

long-term consequences of our actions should, in practice, guide our decisions
Due to the potentially vast number of future beings
- Long e.g., Sun will probably last for 5 billion years
- Vast e.g., space colonisation

Solvability

We should optimise for long-term impact, rather than short- or medium-term impact, only makes sense if we can actually do something now to reliably improve the long-term future
Contra
- Less Predictability
  - Our impact on the distant future is less predictable than our shorter-term impact
- Lack of Information
  - The world is vast, our knowledge base is limited, and the lack of reliable feedback loops hampers a trial-and-error approach
- Future Changes against our present choices
  - Another challenge is that most of what we can hope to affect now can, and likely will, be changed by later decisions
- Future might be better suited
  - Future decision-makers may be in a better position to solve future problems than we are.
    future people will likely know better which s-risks are most serious, which might give them the upper hand in finding effective interventions
Pro
- Too late
  - Too late to start thinking about s-risks when they already start to materialise.
    Without sufficient foresight and caution, society may already be on a trajectory that ultimately leads to a worst-case outcome
- Lack of Care
  - And even if future actors are able to prevent s-risks, it is not clear whether they will care enough to do so
Leverage - Are we in a good position for long-term influence?
- pivotal event could occur in the foreseeable future
  - such as the aforementioned development of smarter-than-human AI
  - Lock-in of certain values and power structures, resulting in a steady state that determines everything that happens afterwards.
- Early
  - The observation that we are still on a single planet that could potentially originate a vast cosmic civilisation suggests that we might indeed be in a unique position.
  - If a long or big future happens, then almost all individuals will live in the future, which means that we can influence them but they cannot influence us.

Action

Research Field
Community
Middle Ground (Near & Longterm)
- Improving the state of civilisation one or two centuries from now, which will also likely translate to better outcomes in the very long term.

Chapter 5 – Should we focus on worst-case outcomes?

Heavytailed

Extreme outliers are common
Example
- Most casualties of war are concentrated in a relatively small number of the bloodiest wars
- Most of the overall damage from earthquakes is due to the most extreme ones
S-Risk heavy-tail
- that a large fraction of (expected) suffering might be concentrated in the most extreme s-risks
Focus on worst 10% of outcomes rather than the worst 0.1%
- almost never extremely skewed i.e. heavy tail on 0.1%