Excellent article but it frustrates me a bit that it's necessary.
With this epistemic mistake and the negative utilitarian stuff it seems like there's a decent minority of philosophers who just love the idea of being pro end of the world.
I'd rather not speculate on the motivations. Maybe it is just as you say mostly people taking formal a…
Excellent article but it frustrates me a bit that it's necessary.
With this epistemic mistake and the negative utilitarian stuff it seems like there's a decent minority of philosophers who just love the idea of being pro end of the world.
I'd rather not speculate on the motivations. Maybe it is just as you say mostly people taking formal arguments too far but that doesn't well explain the fairly unrelated negative utilitarian arguments which are often believed by the same people as the risk aversion arguments (in my experience).
And this would be fine as it's not like weird philosophical views like idk Lewisian modal realism don't get defenders but I've seen this "maybe extinction is good actually" get brought up as an argument in debates on AI risk policy or existential risk mitigation.
To be clear: Pettigrew does not endorse the pro-extinctionist implication!
He's officially neutral on what background assumption should be jettisoned to avoid it, but my impression -- at least from an earlier draft of the paper -- was that he thought longtermism might be more to blame. I didn't bother to discuss that here because I think it's so clear that the problem stems entirely from his interpretation of risk aversion. Taking the interests of future generations into account shouldn't lead us to wish them not to exist at all, at least when their expected well-being is positive -- or so I'd insist. (And it would be bizarre to say that it's only morally OK to allow future generations to exist insofar as we can morally ignore their interests!) But Pettigrew might not agree with my background judgments here.
More generally, I don't think there's more than a small handful of academic philosophers who are explicitly pro-extinction. Many more endorse views (e.g. the procreation asymmetry) that push in that direction, but my sense is that they usually at least try (perhaps unsuccessfully) to resist the implication. I suspect that pro-extinctionism is actually much more common amongst non-academics (e.g. folks at S-risk think tanks, along with trendy (non-EA) misanthropic environmentalist types). I could be wrong, though. It certainly is an appalling view, whoever holds it.
Excellent article but it frustrates me a bit that it's necessary.
With this epistemic mistake and the negative utilitarian stuff it seems like there's a decent minority of philosophers who just love the idea of being pro end of the world.
I'd rather not speculate on the motivations. Maybe it is just as you say mostly people taking formal arguments too far but that doesn't well explain the fairly unrelated negative utilitarian arguments which are often believed by the same people as the risk aversion arguments (in my experience).
And this would be fine as it's not like weird philosophical views like idk Lewisian modal realism don't get defenders but I've seen this "maybe extinction is good actually" get brought up as an argument in debates on AI risk policy or existential risk mitigation.
To be clear: Pettigrew does not endorse the pro-extinctionist implication!
He's officially neutral on what background assumption should be jettisoned to avoid it, but my impression -- at least from an earlier draft of the paper -- was that he thought longtermism might be more to blame. I didn't bother to discuss that here because I think it's so clear that the problem stems entirely from his interpretation of risk aversion. Taking the interests of future generations into account shouldn't lead us to wish them not to exist at all, at least when their expected well-being is positive -- or so I'd insist. (And it would be bizarre to say that it's only morally OK to allow future generations to exist insofar as we can morally ignore their interests!) But Pettigrew might not agree with my background judgments here.
More generally, I don't think there's more than a small handful of academic philosophers who are explicitly pro-extinction. Many more endorse views (e.g. the procreation asymmetry) that push in that direction, but my sense is that they usually at least try (perhaps unsuccessfully) to resist the implication. I suspect that pro-extinctionism is actually much more common amongst non-academics (e.g. folks at S-risk think tanks, along with trendy (non-EA) misanthropic environmentalist types). I could be wrong, though. It certainly is an appalling view, whoever holds it.