Different moral perspectives on existential risk reduction have different implications for how much to prioritise existential risk reduction in general, as well as for which specific existential risks to prioritise reducing. In the effective altruism community, the moral perspective most associated with existential risk reduction is longtermism: existential risks are often seen as a pressing problem because of the astronomical amounts of value or disvalue potentially at stake over the course of the long-term future. But other moral perspectives could also lead to a focus on existential risk reduction.
For example, in The Precipice (Ord 2020), Toby Ord discusses five different "moral foundations" for the importance of existential risk reduction:
The "present"-focused moral foundation could also be discussed as a "near-termist" or "person-affecting" argument for existential risk reduction (Lewis 2018). In the effective altruism community, this is perhaps the most commonly discussed non-longtermist moral argument for existential risk reduction. Meanwhile, the "cosmic significance" moral foundation has received some attention among cosmologists and physicists concerned about extinction risk.
However, it is important to distinguish between the question of whether a given moral perspective would see existential risk reduction as net positive and the question of whether that moral perspective would prioritise existential risk reduction, and this distinction is not always made (see Daniel 2020). One reason this matters is that existential risk reduction may be much less tractable and perhaps less neglected than some other cause areas (e.g., near-term farmed animal welfare), but with that being made up for by far greater importance from a longtermist perspective. Therefore, if one adopts a moral perspective that just sees existential risk reduction as similarly important to other major global issues, existential risk reduction may no longer seem worth prioritising.
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