Next week for the 80,000 Hours Podcast I'll be interviewing Andreas Mogensen — Oxford philosopher, All Souls College Fellow and Assistant Director at the Global Priorities Institute.
He's the author of, among other papers:
- Against Large Number Scepticism
- The Paralysis Argument
- Giving Isn’t Demanding
- Do Evolutionary Debunking Arguments Rest on a Mistake About Evolutionary Explanations?
- Is Identity Illusory?
- Maximal Cluelessness
- Moral Demands and the Far Future
- Do not go gentle: why the Asymmetry does not support anti-natalism
- The only ethical argument for positive d? Partiality and pure time preference
- Tough enough? Robust satisficing as a decision norm for long-term policy analysis
- Staking our future: deontic long-termism and the non-identity problem
Somewhat unusually among philosophers working on effective altruist ideas, Andreas leans towards deontological approaches to ethics.
What should I ask him?
Does he think the maximality rule from Maximal Cluelessness is hopelessly too permissive, e.g. between any two options, it will practically never tell us which is better?
I have a few ideas on ways you might be able to get more out of it that I'd be interested in his thoughts on, although this may be too technical for an interview: