My Dissertation

Or: Why I am not a philosopher

I have submitted my undergraduate dissertation. You can read it here.

It was supervised by Wolfgang Schwarz. He has a good blog, which you will enjoy if you’ve ever read my blog, and thought: “This contains insufficiently rigorous discussion of neo-Fregeanism”.

It’s not clear to me whether he knows this, but Wolfgang is probably best known for having rejected Eliezer Yudkowsky’s paper about functional decision theory from a philosophy journal.¹

My paper is about the difficulties philosophers have run into when trying to reason about ethics in worlds containing infinitely many people. In particular, it’s about how the attempts to resolve those difficulties relate to the social discount rate in economics. Quite similar issues to the ones faced by ethicists have arisen in optimal savings theory, growth theory, and attempts to axiomatise intertemporal rational choice. I end up defending the extremely unpopular view that the only way for consequentialism to make sense in infinite worlds is to give up on the idea that it’s possible to be truly impartial between different “locations of value”.

Do I really believe this? Look, for better or worse, a lot of philosophy involves carving out a position so ridiculously niche that nobody has really argued it before. One of my friends once told me about his (atheist) professor who published a book defending the divine command theory of metaethics. No one had properly developed the view that “God does not exist, but, if he did, we would be morally justified in following his commands merely because he said them”. Nevertheless, I think that, at the very least, my paper is the best overview of the relevance of the so-called impossibility theorems for comparing infinite utility. Almost a majority of the total work was just to read all of these papers across different academic disciplines, figure out which theorems were special cases of which others, and standardise the terminology so that consistent language was used for the different assumptions.

This paper is in dialogue with Nick Bostrom, Amanda Askell, and Joe Carlsmith. I argue that the problem is much less general and troubling than the latter two think it is.

Thank you especially to Seán O’Neill McPartlin and Peter McLaughlin for their always mind-expanding discussions about these topics. I found Peter’s history of the concept of existential risk to be extremely helpful, but he’s such a caveman that he doesn’t even have a website. So, I am hosting a shareable PDF.

I handily graduated with a first, although the feedback was somewhat mixed.²

In conclusion, I am not cut out to be a philosopher. That is a useful datapoint, given that I am in the demographic for whom “applying to do a PhD in philosophy” is in the same category as “drunk texting your ex-girlfriend” as something that your sober friends occasionally need to talk you out of.

1. Scott Alexander wrote a response to Wolfgang, which I won’t link, but which felt like the blogosphere equivalent of covering your ears when mum and dad are fighting.

2. For Americans: the British university grading system has remained oddly immune to the pressures of grade inflation. 70% is the cutoff for having done reasonably well, and it’s normal to have classes for which not a single person scores above 80%.