Ethics

Featured GCRI Publications on Ethics

Full List of GCRI Publications on Ethics

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Introduction

Featured Publications

Full List of Publications

An Introduction to Ethics

Ethics is the study of right and wrong and good and bad. It is about what we should do and how we should live our lives. It is fundamental to the choices that each of us makes as individuals and to the collective choices that we make as a society, the directions we choose to go in. The study of ethics can help us refine our own thinking and provide us with guidance on our activities and the issues we face. This holds true for all issues, and it certainly holds true for global catastrophic risk.

A major argument for prioritizing global catastrophic risk reduction derives from the ethics of equality. It starts with the view that we should value everyone equally, regardless of where or when they live. It then notes the potential for global catastrophe to cause harm at an extreme scale, potentially even into the distant future. If one truly does care about everyone equally, then even a small reduction in the probability of global catastrophe holds massive value for the world. From this perspective, reducing global catastrophic risk should be a top priority for individuals and society.

A different perspective on ethics points to a strategic approach to reducing global catastrophic risk. This perspective recognizes that people hold a wide range of ethical views, and while almost everyone agrees that global catastrophe is bad, many people are not as motivated to reduce the risk. Therefore, efforts to reduce the risk should consider what people do care about and relate that to global catastrophic risk. For example, someone concerned about the cost of living in their local community may support housing policies that also reduce risks from climate change.

Some aspects of global catastrophic risk involve other challenging ethics issues. For example, artificial intelligence technology raises issues of how the technology should be designed, by whom, and to what ends. Global catastrophic risk is part of this, but it is only one part. An appreciation of the broader landscape of AI ethics is valuable for understanding the full range of AI issues and figuring out how global catastrophic risk fits in.

An essential ethical question is what kind of world do we want to live in. Disagreement over this can be a driver of global catastrophic risk. Throughout the Cold War, disagreement between societies favoring communism or capitalism brought a risk of nuclear war. Similar disagreements continue to underlie nuclear war risk and also thwart progress on other risks such as climate change and AI. There is more to these disagreements than just ethics, but ethics is a major part of it.

Finally, there are profound ethical issues in what could happen if humanity manages to avoid global catastrophe. If catastrophe is avoided, then humanity can pursue good outcomes at potentially massive scales, into the distant future and even into outer space. This raises questions of which outcomes should be pursued. Rapid technological change lends a potential urgency to these questions even while posing new risks. The stakes are immense and the issues merit careful scrutiny.

Image credits: fork in the road: Curtis Gregory Perry; apartment construction: Xnatedawgx; Soviet military parade: US Department of Defense

Featured GCRI Publications on Ethics

On the Intrinsic Value of Diversity

Diversity is a major ethics concept, but it is remarkably understudied. This paper, published in the journal Inquiry, presents a foundational study of the ethics of diversity. It adapts ideas about biodiversity and sociodiversity to the overall category of diversity. It also presents three new thought experiments, with implications for AI ethics.

Nonhuman Value: A Survey of the Intrinsic Valuation of Natural and Artificial Nonhuman Entities

The concept of global catastrophe is almost always regarded as something bad that happens to humans, but moral philosophy often considers that bad things can also happen to nonhumans. This paper, published in the journal Science and Engineering Ethics, surveys the wide range of ideas about the intrinsic moral value of nonhumans.

Social Choice Ethics in Artificial Intelligence

A major approach in AI ethics is to use social choice, in which the AI is designed to act according to the aggregate views of society. This paper, published in the journal AI & Society, shows that the normative basis of AI social choice ethics is weak due to the fact that there is no one single aggregate ethical view of society.

Full List of GCRI Publications on Ethics