Effective altruism 1: QALYs, longtermism, Jeremy Bentham’s embalmed corpse, and ethical elitism
Matters of Life and Death
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The Problem With Utilitarianism
Nick Bostrom famously argued that if you could reduce the probability of an existential risk for something which might kill all of humanity occurring within a generation, that's actually equivalent to saving 60 million lives today. And then he believes that at some point in the future, maybe in 100, you know, 200, 1000 a million years time, humankind will eventually colonize the rest of the galaxy and nearby ones as well. Even a 1% reduction over 100 or a million years is the equivalent of saving essentially incalculable lives, trillions, quadrillions, quintillions of lives. That kind of reasoning has led to philanthropists to pour in millions of dollars into precisely those kind of calculations
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