Week 5 -Institutional Change and Better Politics
Chapter 8 – Moral Advocacy
Fundamental Determinant of Future: Values of relevant decision-makers
Progress/Change requires sufficient people to care about them, thus creating the necessary political will to tackle these issues
Value: Moral Considerations of all Sentient Beings
Sentient beings inhabiting earth today
Possible novel forms of sentience e.g., artificial sentience
Possibilities of Backfire
Care for Wild Life sentience + Environmentalist Value
Increased efforts to preserve nature in its current state, in spite of the immense amounts of animal suffering in nature
Care for Sentience + Optimism
creation of more (potentially suffering) sentient beings when combined with highly optimistic moral views according to which suffering can readily be outweighed by other goods
Avoiding uniquely bad values > Attaining of 'optimal' values
Moral advocacy could further entrench bad values or antagonistic dynamics
Suggestions for Animal Advocacy
Insufficient consideration to wild life suffering and possible sentience of artificial entities
Friendliness
Research suggests that a main driver of the backlash and hostility of some meat eaters towards vegans and vegetarians is a perception of being judged as morally inferior
e.g., by primarily framing the issue of animal suffering in institutional or political terms, rather than in terms of individual food choices
Focus on longterm > shortterm
Value: Suffering Focused
Value: Actualization
close the gap between their ideals and their actions — e.g., by overcoming defence mechanisms such as denial or wishful thinking
Chapter 9 – Identifying Plausible Proxies
Values of Proxies
Difficult to assess how a given policy will affect future suffering
Evaluating policies by trying to measure their direct effects on suffering is unlikely to be the best approach
Suggesting Proxies: Factors that are easier to measure or estimate — factors that can serve as proxies for future suffering
Proxies are criteria that policies should ideally satisfy
The more of these criteria that a given policy satisfies, the more confident we should generally be that the policy is good and worth pursuing
Fundamental Value - The Importance of Avoiding Worst-Case Outcomes
expected value calculations suggest that it can be particularly important to prevent future outcomes with especially large amounts of suffering
Proxies
Cooperation > Hostility
Negative: political polarization, international conflicts, and arms races
Positive: conflict resolution, compromise, and mutual understanding
Better Values
Value of Values
decisions are in a sense downstream from our fundamental values, which renders our values a significant determinant of future outcomes.
Positive
norms of open-mindedness, reflection, and charitable interpretation
Moral Circle Expansion
avoidance of worse values — i.e. a deterioration of values that leads agents to have outright malevolent attitudes and goals, such as vindictiveness and sadism, or a regression of the political process that leads people with such traits to rise to (even more) power
Capacity/Power
tools
resources
insights into social science and practical ethics
Chapter 9 – Better Politics
Relevance of Political institutions and discourse relate directly to s-risk
Polarisation
thwart efforts to prevent s-risks
increase the risk of malevolent actors rising to positions of power
Totalitarianism
Two-step ideal
Normative step ('Philosopher')
clarify the aims and values that underlie our policymaking
e.g., open-minded conversation and moral argument to discuss and refine the values that (should) form the bedrock of our collective decision-making
Empirical Step ('Scientist')
Once we have identified a set of carefully reflected values
To ask which policies are optimal for achieving our aims
e.g., usually a complex factual question, which requires us to draw on the best available evidence and to engage in an open-ended scientific investigation and discussion
Awareness of Biases
Overconfident political views
complexity of most policy questions
most voters are not well-informed about politics
Motivated reasoning
Confirmation bias
Tribalism
Suggestions
Charitable and Respectful engagement
e.g., Steelmaning
Degrees of Credence > rigid certainties
avoid us-versus-them and black-or-white thinking
Benefit
serve as an antidote to the risk factor of (excessive) polarisation
reduces the likelihood that populist demagogues with malevolent traits are able to rise to power
Limiting the influence of biased intuitions and dogmatic partisan loyalties helps avoid excessive political polarisation
Note! there are actually only limited disagreements in terms of policy substance
Extensive loyalty signalling frequently creates the appearance of major disagreements when
Democracy
provide checks and balances to ensure that any single individual can never gain too much power, thus reducing the influence of malevolent actors
Suggestions for Improvement
Parliamentarism
power is more decentralised and the head of government can be dismissed fairly easily, whereas the President is usually elected for a fixed term in a presidential system.
Voting Reform
Issue: majoritarian voting systems
e.g., plurality voting or “First past the post” system, which determines a single winner per district
Everyone gets a vote, and the candidate with the most votes wins.
Zsed in many major democracies, including the United Kingdom, the United States, and India.
Suggestion: proportional voting systems
translate the share of votes into a roughly equal share of seats
usually result in a multi-party system i.e., usually parties have to work together and compromise
Benefit
Generally feature less political polarisation, higher voter turnout, higher satisfaction with democratic institutions, less economic inequality
Research also suggests that democracies that use a proportional voting system have significantly lower war involvement compared to democracies that use a majoritarian system
Political Representation of all sentient beings
institute commissioners on their behalf who are solely tasked with defending the interests of e.g., sentient beings, future beings
How to promote democracy?
advancing liberal democracy in currently non-democratic nations
on safeguarding existing democracies against democratic backsliding
strengthening democracy in semi-democratic states
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