29 - Ethics.

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29 - Ethics.

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29 - Ethics. Value of human life. "Existential risks" are risks that threaten the entire future of humanity, whether by causing human extinction or by otherwise permanently crippling human progress. Multiple scholars have argued, based on the size of the "cosmic endowment," that because of the inconceivably large number of potential future lives that are at stake, even small reductions of existential risk have enormous value. In one of the earliest discussions of the ethics of human extinction, Derek Parfit offers the following thought experiment: I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be much worse than most people think. Compare three outcomes: (1) Peace. (2) A nuclear war that kills 99% of the world's existing population. (3) A nuclear war that kills 100%. (2) would be worse than (1), and (3) would be worse than (2). Which is the greater of these two differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is between (1) and (2). I believe that the difference between (2) and (3) is very much greater. — Derek Parfit. The scale of what is lost in an existential catastrophe is determined by humanity's long-term potential—what humanity could expect to achieve if it survived. From a utilitarian perspective, the value of protecting humanity is the product of its duration (how long humanity survives), its size (how many humans there are over time), and its quality (on average, how good is life for future people). On average, species survive for around a million years before going extinct. Parfit points out that the Earth will remain habitable for around a billion years. And these might be lower bounds on our potential: if humanity is able to expand beyond Earth, it could greatly increase the human population and survive for trillions of years. The size of the foregone potential that would be lost were humanity to become extinct is very large. Therefore, reducing existential risk by even a small amount would have a very significant moral value. Carl Sagan wrote in 1983: If we are required to calibrate extinction in numerical terms, I would be sure to include the number of people in future generations who would not be born.... (By one calculation), the stakes are one million times greater for extinction than for the more modest nuclear wars that kill "only" hundreds of millions of people. There are many other possible measures of the potential loss – including culture and science, the evolutionary history of the planet, and the significance of the lives of all of our ancestors who contributed to the future of their descendants. Extinction is the undoing of the human enterprise. Philosopher Robert Adams in 1989 rejected Parfit's "impersonal" views but spoke instead of a moral imperative for loyalty and commitment to "the future of humanity as a vast project... The aspiration for a better society—more just, more rewarding, and more peaceful... our interest in the lives of our children and grandchildren, and the hopes that they will be able, in turn, to have the lives of their children and grandchildren as projects." Philosopher Nick Bostrom argues in 2013 that preference-satisfactionist, democratic, custodial, and intuitionist arguments all converge on the common-sense view that preventing existential risk is a high moral priority, even if the exact "degree of badness" of human extinction varies between these philosophies. Parfit argues that the size of the "cosmic endowment" can be calculated from the following argument: If Earth remains habitable for a billion more years and can sustainably support a population of more than a billion humans, then there is a potential for 1016 (or 10,000,000,000,000,000) human lives of normal duration. Bostrom goes further, stating that if the universe is empty, then the accessible universe can support at least 1034 biological human life-years and, if some humans were uploaded onto computers, could even support the equivalent of 1054 cybernetic human life-years. Some economists and philosophers have defended views, including exponential discounting and person-affecting views of population ethics, on which future people do not matter (or matter much less), morally speaking. While these views are controversial, they would agree that an existential catastrophe would be among the worst things imaginable. It would cut short the lives of eight billion presently existing people, destroying all of what makes their lives valuable, and most likely subjecting many of them to profound suffering. So even setting aside the value of future generations, there may be strong reasons to reduce existential risk, grounded in concern for presently existing people. Beyond utilitarianism, other moral perspectives lend support to the importance of reducing existential risk. An existential catastrophe would destroy more than just humanity—it would destroy all cultural artifacts, languages, and traditions, and ...

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