“Infinity and Incompleteness (with Jeremy Goodman)” by Prof. Harvey Lederman

Hybrid Research Seminar

Infinite populations provide a sandbox for testing theories of distributional ethics developed for finite populations. According to some theories of the physical universe, the questions that arise here are not just theoretical, but also practical: the universe may contain infinitely many sentient beings. In this paper, we study ethics in this infinite setting. We first present an argument for the incompleteness of betterness in this setting, which differs significantly from a more familiar argument associated with the work of Raz and Chang. A serious worry for such theories of incomplete betterness is that they will be unacceptably weak, supporting too few comparisons and leaving too many open questions. In response to this worry, we establish that a certain natural betterness relation is the strongest relation that is both (i) qualitative and (ii) obeys a weak Pareto condition, along with some assumptions connecting the goodness of outcomes to the betterness relation on lotteries.

Venue: LKK302 & Zoom Seminar
Zoom link: lingnan.zoom.us/j/98319515823?pwd=Q9Qa5HadK0gFWfVEm1flTmQnBY31w8.1 

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