From one piece Introducing Better Futures 7 beliefs · forethought.org
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From my point of view, the key priority in the world today is to get us closer to viatopia, not to some particular narrow end-state.
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But I don’t claim you should always maximize the good, no matter the self-sacrifice, and no matter what means are involved.
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Given how much moral progress we should hope to make in the future, and how much we’ll learn about what’s even empirically possible, we should act on the assumption that we have almost no idea what the best feasible futures would look like. Committing today to some particular vision would be a great mistake.
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I see this as the strongest argument against the better futures perspective, and the reason why I don’t feel confident that work on Flourishing is higher-priority than work on Surviving, rather than merely in the same ballpark.
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korrents.com
A common-sense utopia is much closer to the present day than it is to the best futures actually available to us.Their words
But the difference in value between the world today and that common-sense utopia might be very small compared to the difference between that common-sense utopia and the best futures we could feasibly achieve.
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On this view, it’s not enough to avoid near-term catastrophe, because the future could still fall far short of what’s possible.
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This essay series will argue that work on Flourishing is in the same ballpark of priority as work on Surviving.