In a previous post, I discussed population ethics and perhaps its foremost unsolved problem, the repugnant conclusion. To recap, the basic idea is that if you believe a small loss in quality of life for a population can be compensated by adding some number of people with lives worth living, then applying the same reasoning repeatedly leads to the conclusion that there is some enormous number of people all leading lives barely worth living that would be preferable to e.g. one billion people all living superlative lives. That seems rather unpalatable to most people.
Population ethics is a subfield of philosophy that attempts to sensibly compare two populations that may differ in size and material circumstances, and decide which state of the world is better. That is, if we had the choice between one of these states being a reality, which should we choose?
It is a social movement that broadly aims to do the ‘most good’ in the world with limited resources. They advocate for making career choices and charitable donations that maximise altruistic impact. Their activities include writing research papers on ethics, analysing effectiveness of charitable organisations, giving career advice, and promoting pledges to donate a proportion of one’s income to charity. The main individuals who are credited with starting the movement are Will MacAskill and Toby Ord, both at the University of Oxford, and Australian moral philospher Peter Singer, at Princeton university.
I have decided to take a philosophical turn with this blog, because why the Dickens not. Philosphers love doing useless crap (just kidding, I heart you guys), so in that spirit I have converged upon the ultimate philosophical waste of time: Does god exist?