I offer an explanation for why certain sequences of decisions strike us as irrational while others do not. I argue that we have a standing desire to tell flattering yet plausible narratives about ourselves, and that cases of diachronic behavior that strike us as irrational are those in which you had the opportunity to hide something unflattering and failed to do so.

Because of accelerating technological progress, humankind may be rapidly approaching a critical phase in its career. In addition to well-known threats such as nuclear holocaust, the propects of radically transforming technologies like nanotech systems and machine intelligence present us with unprecedented opportunities and risks. Our future, and whether we will have a future at all, may well be determined by how we deal with these challenges. In the case of radically transforming technologies, a better understanding of the transition dynamics from (...) a human to a "posthuman" society is needed. Of particular importance is to know where the pitfalls are: the ways in which things could go terminally wrong. While we have had long exposure to various personal, local, and endurable global hazards, this paper analyzes a recently emerging category: that of existential risks. These are threats that could case our extinction or destroy the potential of Earth - originating intelligent life. Some of these threats are relatively well known while others, including some of the gravest, have gone almost unrecognized. Existential risks have a cluster of features that make ordinary risk management ineffective. A final section of this paper discusses several ethical and policy implications. A clearer understanding of the threat picture will enable us to formulate better strategies. (shrink)

There is a widespread feeling that health is special; the rules that are usually used in other policy areas are not applied in health policy. Health economists, for example, tend to be reluctant to offer economists’ usual prescription of competition and consumer choice, even though they have largely failed to justify this reluctance by showing that health economics involves special features such as public goods, externalities, adverse selection, poor consumer information, or unusually severe consequences. Similarly, while some philosophers argue for (...) bioethical conclusions based on very general ethical intuitions,1 many others rely on moral intuitions that are specific to health and medicine to draw conclusions that are meant to apply mainly in health and medicine. For example, many authors appear to start from the strong moral intuition that it typically seems wrong to deny poor people access to health care, and then seek moral principles that can both account for such intuitions and justify the claim that people have some sort of right to health care.2 In metaethics, opinions on moral intuitions range from an extreme intuitionism, which accepts all case-specific moral intuitions at face value as reliable moral guides, to an extreme foundationalism, which rejects such intuitions as evidence regarding correct general moral principles. Between these extremes, opinions vary on how severe the errors in our moral intuitions are. The practice of bioethics seems to favor the extreme intuitionist end of this spectrum, and thus implicitly expects mild errors.3 In contrast, this essay will suggest that common practice in bioethics has seriously underestimated the errors in our moral intuitions. In this essay, I consider the evolutionary origin of our moral intuitions, but avoid the extreme positions of moral skepticism and “whatever evolved must be good,” both of which are commonly associated with evolution-. (shrink)

Because of accelerating technological progress, humankind may be rapidly approaching a critical phase in its career. In addition to well-known threats such as nuclear holocaust, the prospects of radically transforming technologies like nanotech systems and machine intelligence present us with unprecedented opportunities and risks. Our future, and whether we will have a future at all, may well be determined by how we deal with these challenges. In the case of radically transforming technologies, a better understanding of the transition dynamics from (...) a human to a “posthuman” society is needed. Of particular importance is to know where the pitfalls are: the ways in which things could go terminally wrong. While we have had long exposure to various personal, local, and endurable global hazards, this paper analyzes a recently emerging category: that of existential risks. These are threats that could cause our extinction or destroy the potential of Earth-originating intelligent life. Some of these threats are relatively well known while others, including some of the gravest, have gone almost unrecognized. Existential risks have a cluster of features that make ordinary risk management ineffective. A final section of this paper discusses several ethical and policy implications. A clearer understanding of the threat picture will enable us to formulate better strategies. (shrink)

This paper examines and contrasts two closely related evolutionary explanations in human behaviour: signalling theory, and the theory of Credibility Enhancing Displays. Both have been proposed to explain costly, dangerous, or otherwise ‘extravagant’ social behaviours, especially in the context of religious belief and practice, and each have spawned significant lines of empirical research. However, the relationship between these two theoretical frameworks is unclear, and research which engages both of them is largely absent. In this paper we seek to address this (...) gap at the theoretical level, examining the core differences between the two approaches and prospects and conditions for future empirical testing. We clarify the dynamical and mechanistic bases of signalling and CREDs as explanatory models and contrast the previous uses to which they have been put in the human sciences. Because of idiosyncrasies regarding those uses, several commonly supposed differences and comparative advantages are actually misleading and not in fact generalisable. We also show that signalling and CREDs theories as explanatory models are not interchangeable, because of deep structural differences. As we illustrate, the proposed causal networks of each theory are distinct, with important differences in the endogeneity of various phenomena within each model and their explanatory targets. As a result, they can be seen as complementary rather than in competition. We conclude by surveying the current state of the literature and identifying the differential predictions which could underpin more comprehensive empirical comparison in future research. (shrink)