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‘prehistory’.
the $2 a day poverty line
100 billion
potential moral achievements.
Humanity contains the potential to forge a truly just world, and realising this dream would be a profound achievement.
‘There are many other possible measures of the potential loss—including culture and science, the evolutionary history of the planet, and the significance of the lives of all of our ancestors who contributed to the future of their descendants. Extinction is the undoing of the human enterprise.’
custodial duties to preserve the inheritance of humanity passed on to us by our ancestors and convey it safely to our descendants.
‘If we are the only rational beings in the Universe, as some recent evidence suggests, it matters even more whether we shall have descendants or successors during the billions of years in which that would be possible. Some of our successors might live lives and create worlds that, though failing to justify past suffering, would have given us all, including those who suffered most, reasons to be glad that the Universe exists.’
humans are the only moral agents.
The theory of how to make decisions when we are uncertain about the moral value of outcomes was almost completely neglected in moral philosophy until very recently—despite the fact that it is precisely our uncertainty about moral matters that leads people to ask for moral advice and, indeed, to do research on moral philosophy at all. Remedying this situation has been one of the major themes of my work so far
‘Our present understanding of axiology might well be confused.
protecting our future has immense option value.
the path that preserves our ability to choose whatever turns out to be best when new information comes in.
Williams (2015), who generalises this idea: ‘. . . we should regard intellectual progress, of the sort that will allow us to find and correct our moral mistakes as soon as possible, as an urgent moral priority rather than as a mere luxury;
non-excludability
non-rivalry
‘As I write, I learn that a second bomb has been dropped on Nagasaki. The prospect for the human race is sombre beyond all precedent. Mankind are faced with a clear-cut alternative: either we shall all perish, or we shall have to acquire some slight degree of common sense. A great deal of new political thinking will be necessary if utter disaster is to be averted.’
Mankind must put an end to war—or war will put an end to mankind . . . Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at
any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.’
environmental Kuznets curve,
a balancing act between getting sustainable longterm protections in place and fighting fires
Our leverage on the future is high just now.’
a discount rate that depends on the interest rate rather than the growth rate.
