The person-affecting value of existential risk reduction

Abstract

The standard motivation for the far future cause area in general, and existential risk reduction in particular, is to point to the vast future that is possible providing we do not go extinct (see Astronomical Waste). One crucial assumption made is a ’total’ or ’no-difference’ view of population ethics: in sketch, it is just as good to bring a person into existence with a happy life for 50 years as it is to add fifty years of happy life to someone who already exists. Thus the 10lots of potential people give profound moral weight to the cause of x-risk reduction.Population ethics is infamously recondite, and so disagreement with this assumption commonplace; many find at least some form of person affecting/asymmetrical view plausible: that the value of ‘making happy people’ is either zero, or at least much lower than the value of making people happy. Such a view would remove a lot of the upside of x-risk reduction, as most of its value (by the lights of the total view) is ensuring a great host of happy potential people exist.Yet even if we discount the (forgive me) person-effecting benefit, extinction would still entail vast person-affecting harm. There are 7.6 billion people alive today, and 7.6 billion premature deaths would be deemed a considerable harm by most. Even fairly small (albeit non-pascalian) reductions in the likelihood of extinction could prove highly cost-effective.To my knowledge, no one has ‘crunched the numbers’ on the expected value of x-risk reduction by the lights of person affecting views. So I’ve thrown together a guestimate as a first-pass estimate.