* 25 Feb 2021 * The New York Review of Books * Jim Holt ********************************** The Power of Catastrophic Thinking **********************************
>From page 3 The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord. Hachette, 468 pp., $30.00; $18.99 (paper; to be published in March) T. S. Eliot, in his 1944 essay “What Is a Classic?,” complained that a new kind of provincialism was becoming apparent in our culture: “a provincialism, not of space, but of time.” What Eliot had in mind was provincialism about the past: a failure to think of dead generations as fully real. But one can also be guilty of provincialism about the future: a failure to imagine the generations that will come after us, to take seriously our responsibilities toward them. In 1945, not long after Eliot wrote that essay, the first atomic bomb was exploded. This made the matter of provincialism about the future all the more acute. Now, seemingly, humanity had acquired the power to abolish its own future. A decade later Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein issued a joint manifesto warning that nuclear weaponry posed the risk of imminent human extinction, of “universal death.” (In a letter to Einstein, Russell also predicted that the same threat would eventually be posed by biological warfare.) By the early 1980s, more precise ideas were being put forward about how this could occur. In 1982 Jonathan Schell, in a much-discussed series of articles in The New Yorker (later published as a book, The Fate of the Earth), argued that nuclear war might well result in the destruction of the ozone layer, making it impossible for human life to survive on earth. In 1983 Carl Sagan and four scientific colleagues introduced the “nuclear winter” hypothesis, according to which firestorms created by a nuclear exchange, even a limited one, would darken the upper atmosphere for years, causing global crop failures, universal famine, and human extinction—an alarming scenario that helped move Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to negotiate reductions in their countries’ nuclear arsenals. Neither Schell nor Sagan was a philosopher. Yet each raised a philosophical point: with the advent of nuclear weapons and other dangerous new technologies, we ran the risk not only of killing off all humans alive today, but also of depriving innumerable generations of the chance to exist. Humanity’s past has been relatively brief: some 300,000 years as a species, a few thousand years of civilization. Its potential future, by contrast, could extend for millions or billions of years, encompassing many trillions of sentient, rational beings yet to be born. It was this future—the adulthood of humanity— that was now in jeopardy. “If our species does destroy itself,” Schell wrote, “it will be a death in the cradle—a case of infant mortality.” The idea that potential future lives as well as actual ones must be weighed in our moral calculus was soon taken up by professional philosophers. In 1984 Derek Parfit published his immensely influential treatise Reasons and Persons, which, in addition to exploring issues of rationality and personal identity with consummate subtlety, also launched a new (and currently flourishing) field of moral philosophy known as “population ethics.”1 At its core is this question: How ought we to act when the consequences of our actions will affect not only the well-being of future people but their very existence? It was on the final pages of Reasons and Persons that Parfit posed an arresting hypothetical. Consider, he said, three scenarios: (1) World peace. (2) A nuclear war that kills 99 percent of the world’s population. (3) A nuclear war that kills 100 percent of the world’s population. Clearly, he observed, (2) is worse than (1), and (3) is worse than (2). But which is the greater of the two moral differences? Most people, Parfit guessed, would say the difference between (1) and (2) is greater than the difference between (2) and (3). He disagreed. “I believe that the difference between (2) and (3) is very much greater,” he wrote. Killing off that last one percent, he observed, would mean destroying the entire future of humanity—an inconceivably vast reduction in the sum of possible human happiness. Toby Ord, the author of The Precipice, studied at Oxford under Parfit (who died in 2017) and calls him his “mentor.” Today Ord too is a philosopher at Oxford and among the most prominent figures who think deeply and systematically about existential risks to humanity.2 Ord is a model of the engaged thinker. In addition to his academic work in applied ethics, he has advised the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the British government on issues of global health and poverty. He helped start the “effective altruism” movement and founded the organization Giving What We Can, whose members have pledged more than $2 billion to “effective charities.” (Their donations to charities that distribute malaria nets have already saved more than two thousand lives.) The society’s members are governed by a pledge to dedicate at least a tenth of what they earn to the relief of human suffering, which grew out of a personal commitment that Ord had made. He has now made a further pledge to limit his personal spending to £18,000 a year and give away the rest. And he tells us that he has “signed over the entire advance and royalties from this book to 2Others include Nick Bostrom, who directs the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford (and who was profiled in The New Yorker in 2015); Martin Rees, Britain’s astronomer royal and the author of Our Final Hour (2003); and John Leslie, a Canadian philosopher whose book The End of the World (1996) furnished the first analytical survey of the full range of humanextinction possibilities. charities helping protect the longterm future of humanity.” Ord is, in short, an admirable man. And The Precipice is in many ways an admirable book. In some 250 brisk pages, followed by another 200 or so pages of notes and technical appendices, he gives a comprehensive and highly readable account of the evidence bearing on various human extinction scenarios. He tells harrowing stories of how humanity has courted catastrophe in the past—nuclear close calls, deadly pathogens escaping labs, and so forth. He wields probabilities in a cogent and often counterintuitive manner. He surveys current philosophical thinking about the future of humanity and addresses issues of “cosmic significance” with a light touch. And he lays out an ambitious three-step “grand strategy” for ensuring humanity’s flourishing into the deep future—a future that, he thinks, may see our descendants colonizing entire galaxies and exploring “possible experiences and modes of thought beyond our present understanding.” These are among the virtues of The Precipice. Against them, however, must be set two weaknesses, one philosophical, the other analytical. The philosophical one has to do with the case Ord makes for why we should care about the long-term future of humanity—a case that strikes me as incomplete. Ord confesses that as a younger man he “sometimes took comfort in the idea that perhaps the outright destruction of humanity would not be bad at all,” since merely possible people cannot suffer if they never come into existence. His reasons for changing his mind—for deciding that safeguarding humanity’s future “could well be our most important duty”—turn out to be a mixture of classical utilitarian and “ideal goods”–based considerations that will be familiar to philosophers. But he fails to take full account of why the future disappearance of humanity should matter to us, the living, in the here and now; why we should be motivated to make sacrifices today for potential future people who, if we don’t make those sacrifices, won’t even exist. From this philosophical weakness, which involves a why question, stems an analytical weakness, which involves a how much question: How much should we be willing to sacrifice today in order to ensure humanity’s longterm future? Ord is ethically opposed to the economic practice of “discounting,” which is a way of quantitatively shrinking the importance of the far future. I’m with him there. But this leaves him with a difficulty that he does not quite acknowledge. If we are obliged to weigh the full (undiscounted) value of humanity’s potential future in making our decisions today, we are threatened with becoming moral slaves to that future. We will find it our duty to make enormous sacrifices for merely potential people who might exist millions of years from now, while scanting the welfare of actual people over the next few centuries. And the mathematics of this, as we shall see, turn out to be perverse: the more we sacrifice, the more we become obliged to sacrifice. [...] 1This field is sometimes also called “population axiology,” from the Greek word for “value,” axía. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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