Different goals for the future
People who want to have the best impact on the future can have different goals:
- preventing human extinction;
- preventing suffering;
- preventing early deaths;
- increasing happiness;
- and others.
Someone might want all of them, but to different degrees. How do we decide how much to focus on each one?
Two factors
To decide how much to focus on preventing suffering, the author shows it depends on two factors:
- Weight: how much importance we give to preventing suffering compared to other goals.
- Expectation: how much suffering we think the future could hold.
How they combine
- Someone who's very optimistic about the future has to give a lot of weight to preventing suffering to conclude that it should be the focus.
- Someone who thinks the future could hold a lot of suffering doesn't need to give it as much weight to reach the same conclusion.
The author sums this up in a simple formula:
Degree of focus on suffering = Weight × Expectation
What this shows
Even people with different values can agree that it's worth focusing on preventing future suffering, if they think it could be very large.
In short
- There are several possible goals for the future.
- How much we focus on suffering depends on the weight we give it and how much we think could happen.
- Those who expect a lot of suffering have strong reasons to make it a priority.