Longtermists have argued that humanity should significantly increase its efforts to prevent catastrophes like nuclear wars, pandemics, and AI disasters. But one prominent longtermist argument overshoots this conclusion: the argument also implies that humanity should reduce the risk of existential catastrophe even at extreme cost to the present generation. This overshoot means that democratic governments cannot use the longtermist argument to guide their catastrophe policy. In this paper, we show that the case for preventing catastrophe does not depend on longtermism. (...) Standard cost-benefit analysis implies that governments should spend much more on reducing catastrophic risk. We argue that a government catastrophe policy guided by cost-benefit analysis should be the goal of longtermists in the political sphere. This policy would be democratically acceptable, and it would reduce existential risk by almost as much as a strong longtermist policy. (shrink)

Effective Altruism is a social movement which encourages people to do as much good as they can when helping others, given limited money, time, effort, and other resources. This paper first identifies a minimal philosophical view that underpins this movement, and then argues that there is an analogous minimal philosophical view which might underpin Effective Justice, a possible social movement that would encourage promoting justice most effectively, given limited resources. The latter minimal view reflects an insight about justice, and our (...) non-diminishing moral reason to promote more of it, that surprisingly has gone largely unnoticed and undiscussed. The Effective Altruism movement has led many to reconsider how best to help others, but relatively little attention has been paid to the differences in degrees of cost-effectiveness of activities designed to decrease injustice. This paper therefore not only furthers philosophical understanding of justice, but has potentially major practical implications. (shrink)

Effective altruism is a growing philosophical and social movement, whose members design their lives in ways aligned with doing the most good that they can do. The main focus of this paper is to explore what effective altruism has to say about the moral obligations people have to do good with their organs, in the face of an organ-shortage problem. It is argued that an effective altruism framework offers a number of valuable theoretical and practical insights relevant to ongoing debate (...) about how to resolve the organ-shortage problem. Its recommendations constitute a plausible and promising strategy for increasing the supply of, and decreasing the demand for, human organs, in a way that protects the global poor. And, many of its recommendations can be implemented into policy without requiring that citizens actually become effective altruists themselves. (shrink)

Este artículo realiza una defensa de las axiologías centradas en el sufrimiento, que sostienen la prioridad de evitar el sufrimiento frente a la promoción de otros valores. Para ello, explica en primer lugar cómo ciertas cuestiones relativas a la creación de individuos sugieren la existencia de una asimetría entre el sufrimiento y la felicidad. Continúa describiendo un conjunto de argumentos a favor de la prioridad del sufrimiento relativos a individuos ya existentes. Asimismo, señala y responde a distintas objeciones que podrían (...) ser dirigidas contra estas axiologías. Finalmente, concluye que las posiciones centradas en el sufrimiento no están todavía lo bastante exploradas y pueden tener un gran potencial. (shrink)