Should effective altruism focus on global health or existential threats?
Change on venue; Lecture Theatre, Manor Road Building
Global health interventions have a high probability of making a relatively small impact. Interventions that seek to eliminate or minimize existential threats often have a low probability of making an impact, and the probability of both the threat itself and the impact are hard to estimate; however, if they do make an impact, that impact will be enormous. Given these facts, which types of interventions should we focus on? I explore the difference that risk-aversion and risk-inclination, and ambiguity-aversion and ambiguity-seeking make to this question. Finally, I consider which of these attitudes we should adopt for purposes of ethics.
Date: 23 May 2019, 16:30 (Thursday, 4th week, Trinity 2019)
Venue: Manor Road Building, Manor Road OX1 3UQ
Venue Details: Lecture Theatre
Speaker: Lara Buchak (UC Berkeley)
Organiser contact email address: gpi-office@philosophy.ox.ac.uk
Booking required?: Not required
Booking email: gpi-office@philosophy.ox.ac.uk
Audience: Public
Editor: Alexander Holness-Tofts