Jacob Lohmar: 'Non-Aggregation, Risk, and Longtermism'
According to longtermism we ought to perform actions that have in expectation particularly good effects on the far future. Since the standard argument for this view relies on the aggregation of numerous benefits to people in the far future, non-aggregative moral views that limit (or completely rule out) aggregation pose a challenge to longtermism. In this talk, I discuss whether longtermism is compatible with plausible ways of restricting aggregation under risk. In the first part, I argue that the standard views on how to extend non-aggregation to decisions under risk, which are usually labelled “ex ante” and “ex post”, are not well compatible with longtermism. However, they are also highly implausible and should be rejected or amended in ways that (it turns out) make them compatible with longtermism. In the second part of the talk, I defend an alternative way of extending non-aggregation to decisions under risk that has been largely overlooked in the literature. I argue that this alternative non-aggregative view is more plausible than the standard views and, moreover, compatible with longtermism. I conclude that rejecting full aggregation does not significantly reduce the plausibility of longtermism.
