1

Improving Quality over Quantity: An Argument Against Aggregative Longtermism

I. Introduction

Imagine you’re faced with two scenarios. In the first, X number of people experience a

trivial decrease in their well-being. For example, a thousand people experience hiccups or get a

pebble stuck in their shoe. In the second scenario, a person dies. Is there any X so high that we

should prevent the minor inconveniences of the group of X people over the death of one person?

A similar choice emerges in the debate surrounding humanity’s approach to its long-term future:

should we prioritize giving certain and significant benefits to a smaller number of people, or

should we invest our resources in the more uncertain benefits of mitigating existential risks for a

much larger future population? Put more concretely, should we donate to a charity like Oxfam

International to build water pumps and increase access to public education, or should we donate

to a charity like the Center for AI Safety to mitigate existential risk by researching AI safety?

While the intuitive and popular answer might be to act now to prevent human extinction,

problems with interpersonal aggregation and insights from psychology suggest we should choose

to improve the quality of human lives in the near term.

Where one stands on the issue of existential risk mitigation depends in part on one’s view

of interpersonal aggregation: a principle that determines collective value by summing up

individual benefits and harms. Fully aggregative views say that we should add up happiness and

subtract suffering to determine value. Non-aggregative views say that we ought to alleviate the

strongest harms, no matter how large the sum of the smaller harms. Partially aggregative views

say that it depends on how similar the harms are to each other; if the harms are far apart in terms

of severity, aggregation is not allowed, and we should save the person suffering the most harm.

On the issue of existential risk mitigation, strong longtermism–the position that the most
 2

valuable choice is one that makes the future of humanity go best–often falls into the fully

aggregative category (Heikkinen 2022, MacAskill 2022).

This essay adopts an anti-aggregative perspective to argue that we should prioritize

creating better futures by improving people’s quality of life instead of focusing on mitigating

existential risks. I defend my position by considering issues with strong longtermism in

population ethics and by drawing on research in psychology to suggest tensions between aspects

of human nature and existential risk mitigation campaigns. The strong longtermist position leads

to undesirable outcomes when applied to larger populations. The argument in favor of

anti-aggregation is based on the following premises: First, a large benefit to a smaller number of

people outweighs a smaller benefit to a far greater number of people. Second, giving a small

number of people a certain benefit takes precedence over giving a large number of people similar

benefits that are uncertain. I conclude that humanity ought to invest in assured benefits to human

quality of life over marginally increasing chances of survival by mitigating existential risks.

II. First Premise

Let’s return to the choice I began with. In the first case, some very large amount of people

X endure some lesser harm Y. In the second case, a single person endures some more grave

harm. According to fully-aggregative views, as long as the number of people X is sufficiently

large, there would be practically no difference in value between the sum of Y harm compared to

the single severe harm. There is a fundamental problem here: this would be like equating the

death of one person to a million people experiencing hiccups. In many scenarios, when

populations get exceptionally large, aggregative views often produce undesirable outcomes.

Non-aggregative and partially aggregative views avoid this problem, saying that we ought to
 3

prioritize more severe harms over lesser harms, no matter how large the sum of smaller harms

may be (Heikkinen 2022). A common objection against non-aggregative and partially

aggregative views is that simply because of the astronomically large possible size of future

generations, even tiny improvements or benefits should take precedence (Bostrom 2013, 2). One

reason for prioritizing more severe harms is the idea that each individual is inviolable and is

entitled to the protection of their fundamental rights such as the right not to be killed (Kant

1993). Every human being has certain basic liberties that should be respected; the rights of some

cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the greater good of the many (Rawls 1971, 27). To return to

my hypothetical, a thousand people getting paper cuts would not breach any basic right or

liberty, but the death of a certain individual certainly would.

III. Second Premise

Building on the idea that we ought to prioritize more severe harms over a large sum of

lesser harms, similar logic can be applied to the probability of harm or benefit happening. For

example, if we decrease an individual’s chances of dying from some severe illness–say they have

a 90 percent chance of death and we decrease it to 10 percent–the expected value of their

well-being has increased significantly. On the other hand, if we decrease the probability of death

for an enormous number of people by a very small percentage–say 0.0001% for several million

people–according to the fully-aggregative view, as long as the number of people is sufficiently

large, the expected value of decreasing their chances of dying could be greater than that of saving

a single person from near-certain death. Just as getting a paper-cut might barely impact one’s

well-being, decreasing the probability of harm by an extremely small percentage yields similarly

minimal impacts on well-being. Much like the first premise, the fully-aggregative views
 4

associated with strong longtermism yield an undesirable outcome: it suggests that we ought to do

something like rescue a vast number of people from getting paper cuts over rescuing one person

from certain death. When applied to the case of existential risk mitigation, it follows that while

marginal improvements in the probability of extinction might yield a large expected value, what

we ought to do is alleviate the graver harms with a higher probability of success. This means we

should focus on eliminating global poverty, improving health outcomes, and other measures to

improve the quality of people’s lives rather than taking a gamble on the much less certain efforts

at mitigating existential risk. Thus, if we first accept that more serious harms, like extreme

poverty or curable diseases, hold greater moral weight than a large sum of less severe harms, it

stands to reason that providing a certain benefit to fewer individuals outweighs having a tiny

chance of benefiting a very large number of future people.

IV. Problems with strong longtermism in population ethics

A pattern among many of the hypotheticals I have given is that aggregative views lead to

undesirable outcomes when applied to increasingly large populations. Building on this, the

Repugnant Conclusion, which Derek Parfit identified in his seminal work Reasons and Persons,

suggests that, according to aggregative views, a very large population whose lives are just barely

worth living could be seen as preferable to a smaller population living higher quality lives. The

issue with simply aggregating happiness in this case is that it leads to a morally counterintuitive

outcome of people living barely positive lives. Another longtermist view is the critical-level view,

which postulates that there is a certain “critical level” of well-being below which adding more

lives, even if they are barely happy, would be detrimental. Similarly, the critical-level view runs

into the Sadistic Conclusion, which implies that bringing in a few unhappy lives could be better
 5

than bringing in many slightly happy lives that are still below the “critical level” threshold. Many

proponents of aggregative views simply accept these conclusions (MacAskill 2022, 184).

According to aggregative views, it matters less how happy future generations are; instead, it is

the immense number of possible people that gives the future astronomical value (Thorstad 2023).

At the center of these ethical debates lies a fundamental human truth: the value of human life

does not lie in maximizing the sheer quantity of human existence, but rather in improving the

quality of happiness and the richness of each individual’s existence.

V. The practical and psychological benefits of prioritizing quality over quantity

Because of our human nature, a campaign for prioritizing the quality of human futures

would be more emotionally compelling than a campaign for prioritizing existential risks. Given

that our psychological predispositions amplify the effects of adverse events over positive ones

and steer us towards donating to identifiable victims, we should prioritize channeling resources to

enhance the quality of life of individuals over mitigating existential risks. Consider negativity

bias: a tendency for negative experiences to have greater psychological impact than positive ones.

Negativity bias compels us to prevent more immediate suffering and improve individuals’

well-being (Baumeister et al., 2001). Prioritizing the improvement of quality of life directly

addresses suffering, which, in light of negativity bias, has a stronger negative influence than the

positive effects of happiness. As the level of suffering increases, its impact increases significantly

more than happiness increasing at an equal rate, demonstrating the urgency of suffering.

Therefore, focusing on enhancing the quality of humanity’s future by alleviating agony will

appeal to human nature to a higher degree than mitigating existential risks.

 6

Another psychological phenomenon–the “identifiable victim effect”–refers to the

tendency of individuals to aid identified people rather than large anonymous statistics about

people (Small and Loeweenstein, 2003). Take the example of Alan Kurdi in 2015: a photograph

of the three-year-old Syrian boy’s body washed ashore on a Turkish beach after a failed attempt

to flee to Europe during the Syrian refugee crisis. The photograph of Kurdi drew global attention,

motivating many people to respond with donations. The UK-based charity Save the Children

reportedly received six times its usual amount of donations in the days following the

photograph’s circulation (Heizler and Israeli, 2021). This effect also extends to temporal

identifiability: people are often more motivated to support immediate, tangible causes rather than

those that target more obscure causes. It follows that a campaign to combat issues such as global

poverty or water contamination would likely garner more financial and political support than a

campaign to help mitigate the extinction of anonymous individuals who do not yet exist.

Research from the field of psychology about what motivates human beings offers practical

reasons for prioritizing campaigns to improve the quality of people’s lives over mitigating

existential risks in the distant future.

VI. Conclusion

I have critically assessed the pitfalls of the strong longtermist position that humanity

ought to prioritize existential risk mitigation. I set forth two premises in support of my

anti-aggregative position: firstly, that profound benefits to a few people outweigh minor benefits

to a vast majority, and secondly, that assured benefits of substantial impact take precedence over

distant and uncertain benefits to innumerable future generations. Additionally, research in

psychology about negativity bias and the “identifiable victim effect” affirms that donating to
 7

increase the quality of human life in the long run yields greater psychological benefits than

donating to reduce existential risk and is therefore likely to elicit greater giving. For all of these

reasons, humanity ought to focus on improving the quality of human lives now and in the future

instead of targeting existential risks. The substance and depth of lives must be weighted more

than the sheer number of lives. Simply put, we must prioritize the quality over the quantity of our

future generations.

Works Cited

Baumeister, Roy F., et al. 2001. “Bad is Stronger than Good.” Review of General Psychology 5,

no. 4: 323-370.

Bostrom, Nick. 2013. “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority.” Global Policy 4, no.1

(February), 15–31.

Heikkinen, Karri. 2022. “Strong Longtermism and the Challenge from Anti-Aggregative Moral

Views.” Global Priorities Institute Working Paper 5-2022. Global Priorities Institute.

Heizler, Odelia, and Osnat Israeli. 2021. “The Identifiable Victim Effect and Public Opinion

toward Immigration; A Natural Experiment Study.” Journal of Behavioral and

Experimental Economics 93.

Kant, Immanuel. 1993. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Hackett.

MacAskill, William. 2022. What We Owe the Future. Basic Books.

Parfit, Derek. 1987. Reasons and Persons. Clarendon Press.

Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Belknap Press.

 8

Small, D. A., & Loewenstein, G. 2003. “Helping a Victim or Helping the Victim: Altruism and

Identifiability.” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 26, no. 1: 5-16.

Thorstad, David. 2023. “High risk, Low Reward: A Challenge to the Astronomical Value of

Existential Risk Mitigation.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 51, no. 4: 373–412.