Foundational academic research on how to do the most good.

How should we weigh suffering against happiness? This paper highlights the existence of an argument from intuitively plausible axiological principles to the striking conclusion that in comparing different populations, there exists some depth of suffering that cannot be compensated for by any measure of well-being. In addition to a number of structural principles, the argument relies on two key premises. The first is the contrary of the so-called Reverse Repugnant Conclusion. The second is a principle according to which the addition of any population of lives with positive welfare levels makes the outcome worse if accompanied by sufficiently many lives that are not worth living. I consider whether we should accept the conclusion of the argument and what we may end up committed to if we do not, illustrating the implications of the conclusions for the question of whether suffering in aggregate outweighs happiness among human and non-human animals, now and in future.

A future in which humanity does not go extinct from something like a meteor strike or nuclear war might contain vast quantities of great happiness and human flourishing. But it might also contain vast quantities of great misery and wasted potential. Any effort to ensure a long happy future will have to strive both to ensure a long future, by reducing extinction risks, and to ensure it is a happy one, by improving the quality of life. Such an effort might succeed at the former goal without succeeding at the latter….

Recent authors have argued that it is overwhelmingly important to mitigate existential risks: risks that threaten the survival or development of humanity. This position is often supported by pessimistically high estimates of existential risk. In this paper, I extend a model by Toby Ord and Thomas Adamczewski to do two things. First, I argue, across a range of modeling assumptions pessimism tends to hamper rather than strengthen the case for existential risk mitigation….