Util 🤫🧏‍♂️

Short
Prefer util because

Extend goodin – A – governments have to aggregate since collective actions necessarily

benefit some
people while hurting others either due to resource tradeoffs or scope of effect,
deontic side constraints freeze action.

Extend Pummer 15– extinction comes first, its a lexical pre-requisite to any other framework:
EXtiction outweighs and comes first because extinction is the worst possible thing that could
happen, if were all dead we cant do anything, including begin trying to solve all of the
structural inequities they’re talking about

Extinction saves, everyones lives including the structurally oppressed

dont prefer structural violence because

Its flawed: sturtcal violence is flawed because theres a little brightline to it, how do we weigh
oppression? How do we deiede what is structural violence or not

It Collpases to Util: structural violence COLLAPSES to utiltiarian calcuaus, bc its consequlialist

– and you need actor spec to pass policies
Judge its your lucky day because this is going to be the easiest negative/affiratve ballot of your life
for x reasons
First being the framework debate :
 Actor spec
1. Actor spec First cross apply Goodin 90 on the fw page— Actor specificity:

A – governments have to aggregate since collective actions necessarily benefit some

people while hurting others either due to resource tradeoffs or scope of effect,
deontic side constraints freeze action.
 Extinction first
We can also extend the Pummer 15 card here as well – which went cold conceded/whcih was
misconstrued- which that itself is enough to trigger a negative/aff ballot
Util is a lexical pre-requisite to any other framework: Threats to bodily security and
life preclude the ability for moral actors to effectively utilize and act upon other moral
theories since they are in a constant state of crisis – that inhibits the ideal moral
conditions which other theories presuppose,

EXtiction outweighs and comes first because xecition is the worst possible thign that could
happen, if were all dead we cant do anything, including begin trying to solve all of the
structural inequities theyre talking about,

Preemativley–extiction rhetoric is not exclusionary, ex: when we think about preventing

exctition, for example cliamte change – its not going to be these rich people in the west with
good infrastructure that actually get impacted, its going to the people in the hottest parts of
cape town that get hit first
This logcialyl meaning, we include these bodies in our calcuations, in the end also preventing
stuctual vielnce
 AT: sv
now for the speicfices of structural violence

Its flawed: sturtcal violence is flawed because theres a little brightline to it, how do we weigh
oppression? How do we deiede what is structural violence or not
It Collpases to Util: structural violence COLLAPSES to utiltiarian calcuaus

It Collpases to Util: structural violence COLLAPSES to utiltiarian calcuaus

You need a tool you need, a way of calculation, and that is through util, we use body count-
in order to actually make policy chnage we have to take into account actor specificity, which
in the squo angets use UTIL to make decisions

Prefer util---even if its flawed, alternatives are worse because they justify the same ends but
create decision paralysis, and require saying some lives are more valuable than others, which
turns all their impacts

Also perfer our framing because both debater get equal access to it i can't interact with the
spefcifcities of decreasing a structural disparity, BUT THEY CAN interact with maximizing well
being
Util DUMP
 Note
good v phil positions , allottttt of util cards

Permissibility Negates –

[] Semantics – Ought is defined as expressing obligation[1] which means absent a proactive obligation
you vote neg since there’s a trichotomy between prohibition, obligation, and permissibility and
proving one disproves the other two. Semantics o/w – a) it’s key to predictability since we prep based
on the wording of the res and b) it’s constitutive to the rules of debate since the judge is obligated to
vote on the resolutional text.

[] Safety – It’s ethically safer to presume the squo since we know what the squo is but we can’t know
whether the aff will be good or not if ethics are incoherent.

[] Logic – Propositions require positive justification before being accepted, otherwise one would be
forced to accept the validity of logically contradictory propositions regarding subjects one knows
nothing about, i.e if one knew nothing about P one would have to presume that both the “P” and “~P”
are true.

The meta-ethic is moral naturalism:

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ought

1] Non-natural moral facts are epistemically inaccessible.

Papineau 7 [David, Academic philosopher. He works as Professor of Philosophy of Science at King's

College London, having previously taught for several years at Cambridge University and been a fellow of
Robinson College, Cambridge, “Naturalism”. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/]
Moore took this argument to show that moral facts comprise a distinct species of non-natural fact. However, any such non-naturalist view of morality faces immediate difficulties, deriving

all physical effects are due to a limited range of natural causes,

ultimately from the kind of causal closure thesis discussed above. If

and if moral facts lie outside this range, then it follow that moral facts can never make any difference
to what happens in the physical world (Harman, 1986). At first sight this may seem tolerable (perhaps moral facts indeed don't have any physical effects).
But it has very awkward epistemological consequences. For beings like us, knowledge of the spatiotemporal

world is mediated by physical processes involving our sense organs and cognitive systems. If moral
facts cannot influence the physical world, then it is hard to see how we can have any knowledge of
them.
2] conscious experience is a structural pre-req to any form of knowledge, including moral knowledge.

Sayre-McCord 01 [Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Philosophy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,

"Mill's “Proof” Of The Principle of Utility: A More Than Half-Hearted Defense", Social Philosophy and
Policy, 2001, accessed: 1 April 2020, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-philosophy-and-
policy/article/mills-proof-of-the-principle-of-utility-a-more-than-halfhearted-defense/
FDBE07CBE08D4E17523930BF8C7BBC32, R.S.]

When it comes to visibility, no less than desirability, Mill explicitly denies that a "proof" in the "ordinary acceptation of the term" can be
offered.25 As he notes, "To be incapable of proof by reasoning is com mon to all first principles; to the first premises of our knowledge, as well
as to those of our conduct."26 Nonetheless, support -- that is, evidence, though not proof -- for the first premises of our knowledge is
provided by "our senses, and our internal consciousness." Mill's suggestion is that, when it comes to the first principles of
conduct, desire play the same epistemic role that the senses play, when it comes to the first principles of knowledge.

To understand this role, it is important to distinguish the fact that someone is sensing something from what is sensed, which is a distinction
mirrored in the contrast bet ween the fact that someone is desiring something and what is desired. In the case of our senses, the evidence we
have for our judgments concerning sensible qualities traces back to what is sensed, to the content of our sense-experience. Likewise, Mill is
suggesting, in the case of value, the
evidence we have for our judgments concerning value traces back to what is
desired, to the content of our desires. Ultimately, the grounds we have for holding the principles we do must, he thinks, be traced
back to our experience, to our senses and desires. Yet the evidence we have is not that we are sensing or desiring something but what it is that
is sensed or desired.

When we are having sensations of red, when what we are looking at appears red to us, we have
evidence (albeit overrideable and defeasible evidence) that the thing is red. Moreover, if things never looked red to
us, we could never get evidence that things were red, and would indeed never have developed the
concept of redness. Similarly, when we are desiring things, when what we are considering appears good to us, we have
evidence (albeit overrideable and defeasible evidence) that the thing is good. Moreover, if we never desired things,
we could never get evidence that things were good, and would indeed never have developed the
concept of value.

Recall that desire, for Mill, like taste, touch, sight, and smell, is a "passive sensibility." All of these, he holds, provide us with both the content
that makes thought possible and the evidence we have for the conclusions that thought leads us to embrace. "Desiring a thing" and "thinking of
it as desirable (unless for the sake of its consequences)" are treated by Mill as one an d the same, just as seeing a thing as red and thinking of it
as red are one and the same. Accordingly, a person who desires x is a person who ipso facto sees x as desirable. Desiring something, for Mill, is
a matter of seeing it under the guise of the good. This means that it is important, in the context of Mill's argument, that one not think of desires
as mere preferences or as just any sort of motive. They constitute, according to Mill, a distinctive subclass of our motivational states, and are
distinguished (at least in part) by t heir evaluative content. Thus, Mill is neither assuming nor arguing that something is good because we desire
it; rather, he is depending on our desiring it as establishing that we see it as good.

At the same time, while desiring something is a matter of seeing it as good, one could, on Mill's view, believe that something is good without
desiring it, just as one can believe something is red without seeing it as red. While desire is supposed to be the fundamental source of our
concept of, and evidence for, desirability, once the concept is in place there are contexts in which we will have reason to think it applies even
when the corresponding sensible experience is lacking. Indeed, in Chapter IV, Mill is concerned not with generating a desire, but with justifying
the belief that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end, and so concerned with defending the standard for determining
what should be desired.

Mill's aim is to take what people already, and he thinks inevitably, see as desirable and argue that those views commit them to the value of the
general happiness (whet her or not their desires follow the deliverances of t heir reason). Those who, like Mill, desire the general happiness
already hold the view that the general happiness is desirable. They accept the claim that Mill is trying to defend. As Mill knows, however, there
are many who do not have this desire -- many who desire only their own happiness, and some who even desire that others suffer. These are the
people he sets out to persuade, along with others who are more generous and benevolent, but who nonetheless do not see happiness as
desirable, and the only thin g desirable, as an end. Mill's argument is directed at convincing t hem all -- whether their desires follow or not --
that they have grounds for, and are in fact already com mitted to, regarding the happiness of others as valuable as an end.

Mill recognizes that whatever argument he might hope to offer will need to appeal to evaluative claims people already accept (since he takes to
heart Hume's caution concerning inferring an 'ought' from an 'is'). The claim Mill thinks he can appeal to -- that one's own happiness is a good
(i.e. desirable) -- is something licensed as available by people desiring their own happiness. Yet he is not supposing here that the fact that they
desire their own happiness, or anything else, is proof that it is desirable, just as he would not suppose that the fact that someone sees
something as red is proof that it is. Rather, he is supposing that if people desire their own happiness, or see something as red, one can rely on t
hem having available, as a premise for further argument, the claim that their own happiness is desirable or that the thing is red (at least absent
contrary evidence). As he puts it in the third paragraph, "If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in theory and in
practice, acknowledged to be an end nothing could ever convince any person that it was so."

Thus, in appealing to the analogy bet ween judgments of sensible qualities and judgments of value, Mill is not trading on an ambiguity, nor does
his argument here involve identifying being desirable with being desired or assuming that "desirable" means "desired." He is instead relying
consistently on an empiricist account of concepts and their application -- on a view according to which we
have the concepts,
evidence, and knowledge we do only thanks to our having experiences of a certain sort. In the absence
of the relevant experiences, he holds (with other empiricists), we would not only lack the required evidence for
our judgments, we would lack the capacity to make the judgments in the first place. In the presence of
the relevant experiences, though, we have both the concepts and the required evidence -- "not only all the
proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require."

3] Problem of Disagreement- resolving a priori conflicts is impossible because they require credible
processes of moral judgement which doesn’t exist given moral disagreement.

4] No a priori reason—scientific evidence.

Schwartz “A Defense of Naïve Empiricism: It is Neither Self-Refuting Nor Dogmatic.” Stephen P.

Schwartz. Ithaca College. pp.1-14.

experience and experimental psychology offer

The empirical support for the fundamental principle of empiricism is diffuse but salient. Our common empirical

evidence that humans do not have any capacity to garner knowledge except by empirical sources. The fact is
that we believe that there is no source of knowledge, information, or evidence apart from observation, empirical scientific investigations, and our
sensory experience of the world, and we believe this on the basis of our empirical a posteriori experiences and our general empirical view of how things work. For example, we believe on

empirical evidence that humans are continuous with the rest of nature and that we rely like other animals on our senses to
tell us how things are. If humans are more successful than other animals, it is not because we possess special non-experiential ways of knowing, but because we are better at
cooperating, collating, and inferring. In particular we do not have any capacity for substantive a priori knowledge. There is no

known mechanism by which such knowledge would be made possible. This is an empirical claim.

Pleasure and pain are intrinsic value and disvalue – everything else regresses – robust neuroscience.

Blum et al. 18 – Kenneth Blum, 1Department of Psychiatry, Boonshoft School of Medicine, Dayton VA
Medical Center, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA 2Department of Psychiatry, McKnight Brain
Institute, University of Florida College of Medicine, Gainesville, FL, USA 3Department of Psychiatry and
Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA 4Division of
Applied Clinical Research & Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA
5Department of Precision Medicine, Geneus Health LLC, San Antonio, TX, USA 6Department of Addiction
Research & Therapy, Nupathways Inc., Innsbrook, MO, USA 7Department of Clinical Neurology, Path
Foundation, New York, NY, USA 8Division of Neuroscience-Based Addiction Therapy, The Shores
Treatment & Recovery Center, Port Saint Lucie, FL, USA 9Institute of Psychology, Eötvös Loránd
University, Budapest, Hungary 10Division of Addiction Research, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC. North
Kingston, RI, USA 11Victory Nutrition International, Lederach, PA., USA 12National Human Genome
Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA, Marjorie Gondré-Lewis, 12National Human
Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA 13Departments of Anatomy and
Psychiatry, Howard University College of Medicine, Washington, DC US, Bruce Steinberg, 4Division of
Applied Clinical Research & Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA, Igor Elman,
15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, David Baron,
3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los
Angeles, CA, USA, Edward J Modestino, 14Department of Psychology, Curry College, Milton, MA, USA,
Rajendra D Badgaiyan, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ,
USA, Mark S Gold 16Department of Psychiatry, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA, “Our evolved
unique pleasure circuit makes humans different from apes: Reconsideration of data derived from animal
studies”, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 28 February 2018, accessed: 19 August 2020,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6446569/, R.S.

Pleasure is not only one of the three primary reward functions but it also defines reward. As homeostasis explains the
functions of only a limited number of rewards, the principal reason why particular stimuli, objects, events,
situations, and activities are rewarding may be due to pleasure. This applies first of all to sex and to the primary
homeostatic rewards of food and liquid and extends to money, taste, beauty, social encounters and nonmaterial, internally set, and intrinsic
rewards. Pleasure, as the primary effect of rewards, drives the prime reward functions of learning, approach behavior, and
decision making and provides the basis for hedonic theories of reward function. We are attracted by most
rewards and exert intense efforts to obtain them, just because they are enjoyable [10]. Pleasure is a passive
reaction that derives from the experience or prediction of reward and may lead to a long-lasting state of happiness. The word happiness is
difficult to define. In fact, just obtaining physical pleasure may not be enough. One key to happiness involves a network of good friends.
However, it is not obvious how the higher forms of satisfaction and pleasure are related to an ice cream cone, or to your team winning a
sporting event. Recent multidisciplinary research, using
both humans and detailed invasive brain analysis of animals
has discovered some critical ways that the brain processes pleasure [14]. Pleasure as a hallmark of reward
is sufficient for defining a reward, but it may not be necessary. A reward may generate positive learning and approach
behavior simply because it contains substances that are essential for body function. When we are hungry, we may
eat bad and unpleasant meals. A monkey who receives hundreds of small drops of water every morning in the laboratory is unlikely to feel a
rush of pleasure every time it gets the 0.1 ml. Nevertheless, with these precautions in mind, we may define any stimulus, object, event, activity,
or situation that has the potential to produce pleasure as a reward. In the context of reward deficiency or for disorders of addiction,
homeostasis pursues pharmacological treatments: drugs to treat drug addiction, obesity, and other compulsive behaviors. The theory of
allostasis suggests broader approaches - such as re-expanding the range of possible pleasures and providing opportunities to expend effort in
their pursuit. [15]. It is noteworthy, the first animal studies eliciting approach behavior by electrical brain stimulation interpreted their findings
as a discovery of the brain’s pleasure centers [16] which were later partly associated with midbrain dopamine neurons [17–19] despite the
notorious difficulties of identifying emotions in animals. Evolutionary theories of pleasure: The love connection BO:D Charles Darwin and other
biological scientists that have examined the biological evolution and its basic principles found various mechanisms that
steer behavior and biological development. Besides their theory on natural selection, it was particularly the sexual selection
process that gained significance in the latter context over the last century, especially when it comes to the question of what makes us “what we
are,” i.e., human. However, the capacity to sexually select and evolve is not at all a human accomplishment alone or a sign of our uniqueness;
yet, we humans, as it seems, are ingenious in fooling ourselves and others–when we are in love or desperately search for it. It is well
established that modern biological theory conjectures that organisms are the result of evolutionary competition. In fact,
Richard Dawkins stresses gene survival and propagation as the basic mechanism of life [20]. Only genes that lead
to the fittest phenotype will make it. It is noteworthy that the phenotype is selected based on behavior that maximizes gene
propagation. To do so, the phenotype must survive and generate offspring, and be better at it than its competitors. Thus, the ultimate,
distal function of rewards is to increase evolutionary fitness by ensuring the survival of the organism and reproduction. It
is agreed that learning, approach, economic decisions, and positive emotions are the proximal functions through which phenotypes obtain
other necessary nutrients for survival, mating, and care for offspring. Behavioral
reward functions have evolved to help
individuals to survive and propagate their genes. Apparently, people need to live well and long enough to
reproduce. Most would agree that homo-sapiens do so by ingesting the substances that make their bodies function properly. For this
reason, foods and drinks are rewards. Additional rewards, including those used for economic exchanges, ensure sufficient palatable food and
drink supply. Mating and gene propagation is supported by powerful sexual attraction. Additional properties, like body form, augment the
chance to mate and nourish and defend offspring and are therefore also rewards. Care for offspring until they can reproduce themselves helps
gene propagation and is rewarding; otherwise, many believe mating is useless. According to David E Comings, as any small edge will
ultimately result in evolutionary advantage [21], additional reward mechanisms like novelty seeking and exploration widen the
spectrum of available rewards and thus enhance the chance for survival, reproduction, and ultimate gene propagation. These functions may
help us to obtain the benefits of distant rewards that are determined by our own interests and not immediately available in the environment.
Thus the distal reward function in gene propagation and evolutionary fitness defines the proximal
reward functions that we see in everyday behavior. That is why foods, drinks, mates, and offspring are
rewarding. There have been theories linking pleasure as a required component of health benefits salutogenesis, (salugenesis). In essence,
under these terms, pleasure is described as a state or feeling of happiness and satisfaction resulting from an
experience that one enjoys. Regarding pleasure, it is a double-edged sword, on the one hand, it promotes positive feelings (like
mindfulness) and even better cognition, possibly through the release of dopamine [22]. But on the other hand, pleasure simultaneously
encourages addiction and other negative behaviors, i.e., motivational toxicity. It is a complex neurobiological phenomenon, relying on reward
circuitry or limbic activity. It is important to realize that through the “Brain Reward Cascade” (BRC) endorphin and endogenous morphinergic
mechanisms may play a role [23]. While natural rewards are essential for survival and appetitive motivation leading to beneficial biological
behaviors like eating, sex, and reproduction, crucial social interactions seem to further facilitate the positive effects exerted by pleasurable
experiences. Indeed, experimentation with addictive drugs is capable of directly acting on reward pathways and causing deterioration of these
systems promoting hypodopaminergia [24]. Most would agree that pleasurable activities can stimulate personal growth and may help to induce
healthy behavioral changes, including stress management [25]. The work of Esch and Stefano [26] concerning the link between compassion and
love implicate the brain reward system, and pleasure induction suggests that social contact in general, i.e., love, attachment, and compassion,
can be highly effective in stress reduction, survival, and overall health. Understanding the role of neurotransmission and pleasurable states both
positive and negative have been adequately studied over many decades [26–37], but comparative anatomical and neurobiological function
between animals and homo sapiens appear to be required and seem to be in an infancy stage. Finding happiness is different between apes and
humans As stated earlier in this expert opinion one key to happiness involves a network of good friends [38]. However, it is not entirely clear
exactly how the higher forms of satisfaction and pleasure are related to a sugar rush, winning a sports event or even sky diving, all of which
augment dopamine release at the reward brain site. Recent multidisciplinary research, using both humans and detailed invasive brain analysis
of animals has discovered some critical ways that the brain processes pleasure. Remarkably, there are pathways for ordinary liking
and pleasure, which are limited in scope as described above in this commentary. However, there are many brain
regions, often termed hot and cold spots, that significantly modulate (increase or decrease) our pleasure or even
produce the opposite of pleasure— that is disgust and fear [39]. One specific region of the nucleus accumbens is
organized like a computer keyboard, with particular stimulus triggers in rows— producing an increase and
decrease of pleasure and disgust. Moreover, the cortex has unique roles in the cognitive evaluation of our feelings of
pleasure [40]. Importantly, the interplay of these multiple triggers and the higher brain centers in the prefrontal cortex are very intricate and
are just being uncovered. Desire and reward centers It is surprising that many different sources of pleasure activate the same circuits between
the mesocorticolimbic regions (Figure 1). Reward and desire are two aspects pleasure induction and have a very widespread, large circuit. Some
part of this circuit distinguishes between desire and dread. The so-called pleasure circuitry called “REWARD” involves a well-known dopamine
pathway in the mesolimbic system that can influence both pleasure and motivation. In simplest terms, the well-established mesolimbic system
is a dopamine circuit for reward. It starts in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the midbrain and travels to the nucleus accumbens (Figure 2). It
is the cornerstone target to all addictions. The VTA is encompassed with neurons using glutamate, GABA, and dopamine. The nucleus
accumbens (NAc) is located within the ventral striatum and is divided into two sub-regions—the motor and limbic regions associated with its
core and shell, respectively. The NAc has spiny neurons that receive dopamine from the VTA and glutamate (a dopamine driver) from the
hippocampus, amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex. Subsequently, the NAc projects GABA signals to an area termed the ventral pallidum
(VP). The region is a relay station in the limbic loop of the basal ganglia, critical for motivation, behavior, emotions and the “Feel Good”
response. This defined system of the brain is involved in all addictions –substance, and non –substance related. In 1995, our laboratory coined
the term “Reward Deficiency Syndrome” (RDS) to describe genetic and epigenetic induced hypodopaminergia in the “Brain Reward Cascade”
that contribute to addiction and compulsive behaviors [3,6,41]. Furthermore, ordinary “liking” of something, or pure pleasure, is
represented by small regions mainly in the limbic system (old reptilian part of the brain). These may be part of larger
neural circuits. In Latin, hedus is the term for “sweet”; and in Greek, hodone is the term for “pleasure.” Thus, the word Hedonic is now
referring to various subcomponents of pleasure: some associated with purely sensory and others with more complex emotions involving
morals, aesthetics, and social interactions. The capacity to have pleasure is part of being healthy and may even extend life, especially if linked to
optimism as a dopaminergic response [42]. Psychiatric illness often includes symptoms of an abnormal inability to experience pleasure, referred
to as anhedonia. A negative feeling state is called dysphoria, which can consist of many emotions such as pain, depression, anxiety, fear, and
disgust. Previously many scientists used animal research to uncover the complex mechanisms of pleasure, liking, motivation and even emotions
like panic and fear, as discussed above [43]. However, as a significant amount of related research about the specific brain regions of
pleasure/reward circuitry has been derived from invasive studies of animals, these cannot be directly compared with subjective states
experienced by humans. In an attempt to resolve the controversy regarding the causal contributions of mesolimbic dopamine systems to
reward, we have previously evaluated the three-main competing explanatory categories: “liking,” “learning,” and “wanting” [3]. That is,
dopamine may mediate (a) liking: the hedonic impact of reward, (b) learning: learned predictions about rewarding effects, or (c) wanting: the
pursuit of rewards by attributing incentive salience to reward-related stimuli [44]. We have evaluated these hypotheses, especially as they
relate to the RDS, and we find that the incentive salience or “wanting” hypothesis of dopaminergic functioning is supported by a majority of the
scientific evidence. Various neuroimaging studies have shown that anticipated behaviors such as sex and gaming, delicious foods and drugs of
abuse all affect brain regions associated with reward networks, and may not be unidirectional. Drugs of abuse enhance dopamine signaling
which sensitizes mesolimbic brain mechanisms that apparently evolved explicitly to attribute incentive salience to various rewards [45].
Addictive substances are voluntarily self-administered, and they enhance (directly or indirectly) dopaminergic synaptic function in the NAc. This
activation of the brain reward networks (producing the ecstatic “high” that users seek). Although these circuits were initially thought to encode
a set point of hedonic tone, it is now being considered to be far more complicated in function, also encoding attention, reward expectancy,
disconfirmation of reward expectancy, and incentive motivation [46]. The argument about addiction as a disease may be confused with a
predisposition to substance and nonsubstance rewards relative to the extreme effect of drugs of abuse on brain neurochemistry. The former
sets up an individual to be at high risk through both genetic polymorphisms in reward genes as well as harmful epigenetic insult. Some
Psychologists, even with all the data, still infer that addiction is not a disease [47]. Elevated stress levels, together with polymorphisms (genetic
variations) of various dopaminergic genes and the genes related to other neurotransmitters (and their genetic variants), and may have an
additive effect on vulnerability to various addictions [48]. In this regard, Vanyukov, et al. [48] suggested based on review that whereas the
gateway hypothesis does not specify mechanistic connections between “stages,” and does not extend to the risks for addictions the concept of
common liability to addictions may be more parsimonious. The latter theory is grounded in genetic theory and supported by data identifying
common sources of variation in the risk for specific addictions (e.g., RDS). This commonality has identifiable neurobiological substrate and
plausible evolutionary explanations. Over many years the controversy of dopamine involvement in especially “pleasure” has led to confusion
concerning separating motivation from actual pleasure (wanting versus liking) [49]. We take the position that animal studies cannot provide
real clinical information as described by self-reports in humans. As mentioned earlier and in the abstract, on November 23rd, 2017, evidence
for our concerns was discovered [50] In essence, although nonhuman primate brains are similar to our own, the disparity between other
primates and those of human cognitive abilities tells us that surface similarity is not the whole story. Sousa
et al. [50] small case found
various differentially expressed genes, to associate with pleasure related systems. Furthermore, the
dopaminergic interneurons located in the human neocortex were absent from the neocortex of nonhuman African apes. Such differences in
neuronal transcriptional programs may underlie a variety of neurodevelopmental disorders. In simpler terms, the system controls the
production of dopamine, a chemical messenger that plays a significant role in pleasure and rewards. The senior author, Dr. Nenad Sestan from
Yale, stated: “Humans have evolved a dopamine system that is different than the one in chimpanzees.” This may explain why the behavior of
humans is so unique from that of non-human primates, even though our brains are so surprisingly similar, Sestan said: “It might also shed light
on why people are vulnerable to mental disorders such as autism (possibly even addiction).” Remarkably, this research finding emerged from an
extensive, multicenter collaboration to compare the brains across several species. These researchers
examined 247 specimens of
neural tissue from six humans, five chimpanzees, and five macaque monkeys. Moreover, these investigators
analyzed which genes were turned on or off in 16 regions of the brain. While the differences among
species were subtle, there was a remarkable contrast in the neocortices, specifically in an area of the brain
that is much more developed in humans than in chimpanzees. In fact, these researchers found that a gene called
tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) for the enzyme, responsible for the production of dopamine, was expressed in
the neocortex of humans, but not chimpanzees. As discussed earlier, dopamine is best known for its essential role
within the brain’s reward system; the very system that responds to everything from sex, to gambling, to
food, and to addictive drugs. However, dopamine also assists in regulating emotional responses, memory, and movement. Notably,
abnormal dopamine levels have been linked to disorders including Parkinson’s, schizophrenia and spectrum disorders such as autism and
addiction or RDS. Nora Volkow, the director of NIDA, pointed out that one alluring possibility is that the neurotransmitter dopamine plays
a substantial role in humans’ ability to pursue various rewards that are perhaps months or even years
away in the future. This same idea has been suggested by Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University. Dr.
Sapolsky cited evidence that dopamine levels rise dramatically in humans when we anticipate potential rewards that are uncertain and even far
off in our futures, such as retirement or even the possible alterlife. This may explain what often motivates people to work
for things that have no apparent short-term benefit [51]. In similar work, Volkow and Bale [52] proposed a model in which
dopamine can favor NOW processes through phasic signaling in reward circuits or LATER processes through tonic signaling in control circuits.
Specifically, they suggest that through its modulation of the orbitofrontal cortex, which processes salience attribution, dopamine also enables
shilting from NOW to LATER, while its modulation of the insula, which processes interoceptive information, influences the probability of
selecting NOW versus LATER actions based on an individual’s physiological state. This hypothesis further supports the concept that disruptions
along these circuits contribute to diverse pathologies, including obesity and addiction or RDS.

Thus, the standard is consistency with hedonic act utilitarianism.

1] No intent-foresight distinction for states.

Enoch 07 Enoch, D [The Faculty of Law, The Hebrew Unviersity, Mount Scopus Campus, Jersusalem].
(2007). INTENDING, FORESEEING, AND THE STATE. Legal Theory, 13(02).
doi:10.1017/s1352325207070048
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/legal-theory/article/intending-foreseeing-and-the-state/
76B18896B94D5490ED0512D8E8DC54B2

The general difficulty of the intending-foreseeing distinction here stemmed, you will recall, from the
feeling that attempting to pick and choose among the foreseen consequences of one’s actions those one
is more and those one is less responsible for looks more like the preparation of a defense than like a
genuine attempt to determine what is to be done. Hiding behind the intending-foreseeing distinction
seems like an attempt to evade responsibility, and so thinking about the distinction in terms of
responsibility serves 39. Anderson & Pildes, supra note 38. I will use this text as my example of an
expressive theory here. 40. See id. at 1554, 1564. 41. For a general critique, see Mathew D. Adler,
Expressive Theories of Law: A Skeptical Overview, 148 U. PA. L. REV. 1363 (1999–2000). 42. As Adler
repeatedly notes, the understanding of expression Anderson & Pildes work with is amazingly broad, so
that “To express an attitude through action is to act on the reasons the attitude gives us”; Anderson &
Pildes, supra note 38, at 1510. If this is so, it seems that expression drops out of the picture and
everything done with it can be done directly in terms of reasons. 43. This may be true of what Anderson
and Pildes have in mind when they say that “expressive norms regulate actions by regulating the
acceptable justifications for doing them”; id. at 1511. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 03
Aug 2014 IP address: 134.153.184.170 Intending, Foreseeing, and the State 91 to reduce even further
the plausibility of attributing to it intrinsic moral significance. This consideration—however weighty in
general—seems to me very weighty when applied to state action and to the decisions of state officials.
For perhaps it may be argued that individuals are not required to undertake a global perspective, one
that equally takes into account all foreseen consequences of their actions. Perhaps, in other words,
individuals are entitled to (roughly) settle for having a good will, and beyond that let chips fall where
they may. But this is precisely what stateswomen and statesmen—and certainly states—are not entitled
to settle for.44 In making policy decisions, it is precisely the global (or at least statewide, or nationwide,
or something of this sort) perspective that must be undertaken. Perhaps, for instance, an individual
doctor is entitled to give her patient a scarce drug without thinking about tomorrow’s patients (I say
“perhaps” because I am genuinely not sure about this), but surely when a state committee tries to
formulate rules for the allocation of scarce medical drugs and treatments, it cannot hide behind the
intending-foreseeing distinction, arguing that if it allows45 the doctor to give the drug to today’s patient,
the dxeath of tomorrow’s patient is merely foreseen and not intended. When making a policy-decision,
this is clearly unacceptable. Or think about it this way (I follow Daryl Levinson here):46 perhaps
restrictions on the responsibility of individuals are justified because individuals are autonomous,
because much of the value in their lives comes from personal pursuits and relationships that are
possible only if their responsibility for what goes on in the (more impersonal) world is restricted. But
none of this is true of states and governments. They have no special relationships and pursuits, no
personal interests, no autonomous lives to lead in anything like the sense in which these ideas are
plausible when applied to individuals persons. So there is no reason to restrict the responsibility of
states in anything like the way the responsibility of individuals is arguably restricted.47 States and state
officials have much more comprehensive responsibilities than individuals do. Hiding behind the
intending-foreseeing distinction thus more clearly constitutes an evasion of responsibility in the case of
the former. So the evading-responsibility worry has much more force against the intending-foreseeing
distinction when applied to state action than elsewhere.

[2] Util is a lexical pre-requisite to any other framework: Threats to bodily security and
life preclude the ability for moral actors to effectively utilize and act upon other moral
theories since they are in a constant state of crisis that inhibit the ideal moral
conditions which other theories presuppose – so, util comes first and my offense
outweighs theirs under their own framework.

3] Theory –

a) Ground – util cares about all impacts which ensures link and impact turn ground for both sides. Util
impacts are easy to contextualize and allows for all types of ground with work debaters have to do

b) Accessibility – Util is more better for novice debaters since contention/LARP ground is what they
learn. You crowd out novice debaters by debating up and gut accessibility

c) Topic lit – most articles are written through the lens of util because they’re crafted for policymakers
and the general public who take consequences to be important.

3] Only Util solves substitutability---all other frameworks fail

Sinnott-Armstrong 92 [Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, Duke University, “An Argument for

Consequentialism.” Philosophical Perspectives Vol. 6 (1992): 399–421.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2214254., https://www.jstor.org/stable/2214254?seq=1 HKR-MK] *Italics in
original

A moral reason to do an act is consequential if and only if the reason depends only on the consequences
of either doing the act or not doing the act. For example, a moral reason not to hit someone is that this
will hurt her or him. A moral reason to turn your car to the left might be that, if you do not do so, you will run over and kill
someone. A moral reason to feed a starving child is that the child will lose important mental or physical abilities if you do
not feed it. All such reasons are consequential reasons.

All other moral reasons are non-consequential. Thus, a moral reason to do an act is non-consequential if and only if the
reason depends even partly on some property that the act has independently of its consequences. For
example, an act can be a lie regardless of what happens as a result of the lie (since some lies are not believed), and some moral theories
claim that that property of being a lie provides a moral reason not to tell a lie regardless of the
consequences of this lie. Similarly, the fact that an act fulfills a promise is often seen as a moral reason
to do the act, even though the act has that property of fulfilling a promise independently of its
consequences. All such moral reasons are non-consequential. In order to avoid so many negations, I will also call
them 'deontological'.

This distinction would not make sense if we did not restrict the notion of consequences. If I promise to mow the lawn, then one consequence of
my mowing might seem to be that my promise is fulfilled. One way to avoid this problem is to specify that the consequences of an act must be
distinct from the act itself. My act of fulfilling my promise and my act of mowing are not distinct, because they are done by the same bodily
movements.10 Thus, my fulfilling my promise is not a consequence of my mowing. A consequence of an act need not
be later in time than the act, since causation can be simultaneous, but the consequence must at least be different from the act. Even with this
clarification, it is still hard to classify some moral reasons as consequential or deontological,11 but I will stick to examples that are clear.

In accordance with this distinction between kinds of moral reasons, I can now distinguish different kinds of moral theories. I will say that a
moral theory is consequentialist if and only if it implies that all basic moral reasons are consequential. A
moral theory is then non-consequentialist or deontological if it includes any basic moral reasons which
are not consequential.

5. Against Deontology

So defined, the class of deontological moral theories is very large and diverse. This makes it hard to say anything in general about it.
Nonetheless, I will argue that no
deontological moral theory can explain why moral substitutability holds. My
argument applies to all deontological theories because it depends only on what is common to them all,
namely, the claim that some basic moral reasons are not consequential. Some deontological theories allow very
many weighty moral reasons that are consequential, and these theories might be able to explain why moral substitutability holds for some of
their moral reasons: the consequential ones. But even these
theories cannot explain why moral substitutability holds
for all moral reasons, including the non-consequential reasons that make the theory deontological. The failure of
deontological moral theories to explain moral substitutability in the very cases that make them
deontological is a reason to reject all deontological moral theories.

I cannot discuss every deontological moral theory, so I will discuss only a few paradigm examples and show why they cannot explain moral
substitutability. After
this, I will argue that similar problems are bound to arise for all other deontological
theories by their very nature.

The simplest deontological theory is the pluralistic intuitionism of Prichard and Ross. Ross writes that, when someone promises to do
something, 'This we consider obligatory in its own nature, just because it is a fulfillment of a promise, and not because of its consequences.'12
Such deontologists claim in effect that, if I promise to mow the grass, there is a moral reason for me to
mow the grass, and this moral reason is constituted by the fact that mowing the grass fulfills my
promise. This reason exists regardless of the consequences

of mowing the grass, even though it might be overridden by certain bad consequences. However, if this
is why I have a moral reason to mow the grass, then, even if I cannot mow the grass without starting my
mower, and starting the mower would enable me to mow the grass, it still would not follow that I have
any moral reason to start my mower, since I did not promise to start my mower, and starting my mower
does not fulfill my promise. Thus, a moral theory cannot explain moral substitutability if it claims that
properties like this provide moral reasons.

4] Reductionism implies util specifically – alternative theories break down

MacAskill and Wilbin 18 – (Will MacAskill, Associate Professor in Philosophy at Oxford University,
author of Doing Good Better, and one of the co-founders of the effective altruism community,
interviewed by Robert Wilbin, studied both genetics and economics at the Australian National University
(ANU), graduating top of his class and being named Young Alumnus of the Year in 2015. He worked as a
research economist in various Australian Government agencies, and then moved to the UK to work at
the Centre for Effective Altruism, first as Research Director, then Executive Director, then Research
Director for 80,000 Hours, “Our descendants will probably see us as moral monsters. What should we do
about that?”, 80,000 Hours, 1-19-18, Available Online at https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/will-
macaskill-moral-philosophy/#top, accessed 8-26-18, HKR-AM)

Imagine that you’re in a car accident with 2 of your siblings. In this car accident your body is completely
destroyed, and the brains of your 2 siblings are completely destroyed, but they still have functioning
bodies, are preserved. As you’ll see, this is a very philosophical thought experiment. Robert Wiblin: One day maybe we can do this. Will
MacAskill: Maybe. Finally, let’s also suppose that it’s possible to take someone’s brain and split it in 2, and
implant it into 2 other people’s skulls such that the brain will grow back fully and will have all the same
memories as that first person did originally. In the same way I think it’s the case that you can split up a liver and
the 2 separate livers will grow back, or you can split up an earthworm – I don’t know if this is true – split up an earth worm and
they’ll both wiggle off. Robert Wiblin: Maybe you could. Will MacAskill: Maybe you could. You’ve got to imagine these somewhat
outlandish possibilities, but that’s okay because we’re illustrating a philosophical point. Now you’ve got
these 2 bodies that wake up and have all the same memories of you. From their perspective they were
just in this car crash and then woke up in a different… The question is, who’s you? Supposing we think there’s this
Cartesian soul that exists within one of us, the question would be into which body does the soul go? Or, even if you don’t think there’s a soul
but you think, no, there’s something really fundamental about me. Who’s the me? There’s 4 possible answers. One is that it’s
one sibling. Second is it’s the other sibling. Third is it’s both. Fourth is it’s neither. It couldn’t be one
brother or one sibling over the other because there’s a parity argument. Any argument you give for saying it’s the
youngest sibling would also give an argument to the oldest sibling. That can’t be the case. It can’t be that it’s both people because,
well, now I’ve got this person that consists of 2 other entities walking around? That seems very absurd indeed. It can’t be neither
either. Now imagine the case where you’re in a car crash and your brain just gets transplanted to one
person. Then you would think, well, we continue. I was in this terrible car crash, I woke up with a
different body, but it’s still me. I still have all the same memories. But, if it’s the case that I can survive in
the case of my brain being transplanted into one other person, surely I can survive if my brain is
transplanted into 2 people. It would seem weird that a double win, double success, is actually a failure. And so, tons more
philosophical argument goes into this. The conclusion that Derek Parfit ultimately makes is, there’s just no fact of
the matter here. This actually shows that what we think of as this continued personal identity over time
is just a kind of fiction. It’s like saying when the French Socialist party split into two, are there now two? Which one is really the French
Socialist party? This is just a meaningless questions. Robert Wiblin: What’s actually going on is that there are different parties, and some of
them are more similar than others. Will MacAskill: Exactly. That’s right. But, once
you reject this idea that there’s any
fundamental moral difference between persons, then the fact that it’s permissible for me to make a
trade off where I inflict harm on myself now, or benefit myself now in order to perhaps harm Will age 70…
Let’s suppose that that’s actually good for me overall. Well, I should make just the same trade offs within my own life as I
make across lives. It would be okay to harm one person to benefit others. If you grant that, then, you
end up with something that’s starting to look pretty similar to utilitarianism. Robert Wiblin: Okay, so the basic idea is we have
strong reasons to think that identity doesn’t exist in the way that we instinctively think it does, that in
fact it’s just a continuum. Will MacAskill: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Robert Wiblin: This is exactly what utilitarianism
always thought and was acting as though it was true. Will MacAskill: Yes. Robert Wiblin: But for deontological
theories or virtue ethics theories, they really need a sense of identity and personhood to make sense to
begin with.

5] The Darwinian dilemma bridges the is-ought gap and takes out their theory. Constant moral
disagreement over internal concepts such as race, gender, etc. prove the fallibility of non-
observational ethics because they produced error - moral shifts over time means either a] moral facts
have changed which takes out moral realism or b] evolution led to moral truth which is statistically
impossible since evolution only tracks survival incentives not morality. Alternative moral theories
must prove a] an evolutionary reliable background and b] a reliable process for formation of it’s
belief. Hedonism escapes this dilemma through the byproduct hypothesis. When introspecting for
survival on data from our eyes or ears, such as whether one sees food or a predator, we use the same
part of the brain that introspects on hedonic tones and identifies their moral relevance which makes it
a reliable mechanism. The ability to correctly identify moral truths is evolutionarily advantageous if
and only if that ability is a byproduct of a different trait that enables survival and reproduction.
6] Only consequentialism explains degrees of wrongness—if I break a promise to meet
up for lunch, that is not as bad as breaking a promise to take a dying person to the
hospital. Only the consequences of breaking the promise explain why the second one
is much worse than the first which is the most intuitive.
Outweighs- A] Parsimony- metaphysics relies on long chains of questionable claims
that make conclusions less likely. B] Hijacks- intuitions are inevitable since even every
framework must take some unjustified assumption as a starting point.

7] All frameworks collapse – if we followed the rules of another framework and were unhappy with
the results of that fwk we would change the fwk which means everything devolves to
consequentialism

8] Every framework cares abt consequences because the consequence would be intrinsically bad – if
kant retroactively saw that following his moral theory killed a bunch of people he would say that’s a
bad idea i.e. because killing is bad if something causes death it would also be bad.

9] Arbitrariness – util solves by making sure everyones pain and pleasure is evaluated the same
whereas frameworks like kant would allow for inequalities based on principle, therefore allowing us
to favor some people over others i.e. taxes bad would allow rich people to hoard weath and therefore
result in the preference of rich over poor because the poor would have nothing

10] Collapses – you only can know the intent of something based on the consequence i.e. if I randomly
shoot a gun and it kills someone I only knew the intent was to kill because that’s what happened. We
evaluate the consequences of killing someone even if you didn’t mean to

Reject calc indicts and util triggers permissibility arguments:

A] Empirically denied—both individuals and policymakers carry out effective cost-benefit analysis
which means even if decisions aren’t always perfect it’s still better than not acting at all
B] Theory—they’re functionally NIBs that everyone knows are silly but skew the aff and move the
debate away from the topic and actual philosophical debate, killing valuable education

C] Morally abhorrent – it would say we have no obligation to prevent genocide and that slavery was
permissible which is morally abhorrent and makes debate unsafe for minority debaters

Impact calc –

Extinction outweighs.

MacAskill 14 [William, Oxford Philosopher and youngest tenured philosopher in the world, Normative
Uncertainty, 2014]

The human race might go extinct from a number of causes: asteroids, supervolcanoes, runaway climate change, pandemics, nuclear war, and the
development and use of dangerous new technologies such as synthetic biology, all pose risks (even if very small) to the continued survival of the human race.184
And different moral views give opposing answers to question of whether this would be a good or a bad thing.
It might seem obvious that human extinction would be a very bad thing, both because of the loss of potential future lives, and because of the loss of the scientific
and artistic progress that we would make in the future. But the issue is at least unclear. The continuation of the human race would be a mixed bag: inevitably, it
would involve both upsides and downsides. And if one regards it as much more important to avoid bad things happening than to promote good things happening
then one could plausibly regard human extinction as a good thing.For example, one might regard the prevention of bads as being in general more important that the
promotion of goods, as defended historically by G. E. Moore,185 and more recently by Thomas Hurka.186 One could weight the prevention of suffering as being
much more important that the promotion of happiness. Or one could weight the prevention of objective bads, such as war and genocide, as being much more
important than the promotion of objective goods, such as scientific and artistic progress. If the human race continues its future will inevitably involve suffering as
well as happiness, and objective bads as well as objective goods. So, if one weights the bads sufficiently heavily against the goods, or if one is sufficiently pessimistic
about humanity’s ability to achieve good outcomes, then one will regard human extinction as a good thing.187 However,
even if we believe in a
moral view according to which human extinction would be a good thing, we still have strong reason to
prevent near-term human extinction. To see this, we must note three points. First, we should note that the extinction of the human
race is an extremely high stakes moral issue. Humanity could be around for a very long time: if humans survive as long as the median mammal species,

we will last another two million years. On this estimate, the number of humans in existence in the The future, given that we don’t

go extinct any time soon, would be 2×10^14. So if it is good to bring new people into existence, then it’s very
good to prevent human extinction. Second, human extinction is by its nature an irreversible scenario. If we continue
to exist, then we always have the option of letting ourselves go extinct in the future (or, perhaps more realistically, of considerably reducing population size). But if
we go extinct, then we can’t magically bring ourselves back into existence at a later date. Third,
we should expect ourselves to progress,
morally, over the next few centuries, as we have progressed in the past. So we should expect that in a few centuries’ time we will
have better evidence about how to evaluate human extinction than we currently have. Given these three factors, it would be
better to prevent the near-term extinction of the human race, even if we thought that the extinction of the human race would actually be a very good thing. To
make this concrete, I’ll give the following simple but illustrative model. Suppose
that we have 0.8 credence that it is a bad thing to produce new people,
and 0.2 certain that it’s a good thing to produce new people; and the degree to which it is good to produce new people, if it is good,
is the same as the degree to which it is bad to produce new people, if it is bad. That is, I’m supposing, for simplicity, that we know that one new life has one unit of
value; we just don’t know whether that unit is positive or negative. And let’s use our estimate of 2×10^14 people who would exist in the future, if we avoid near-
term human extinction. Given our stipulated credences, the expected benefit of letting the human race go extinct now would be (.8-.2)×(2×10^14) = 1.2×(10^14).
if we let the human race continue and did research for 300 years, we would know for certain whether or
Suppose that,

not additional people are of positive or negative value. If so, then with the credences above we should think it 80% likely that we will
find out that it is a bad thing to produce new people, and 20% likely that we will find out that it’s a good thing to produce new people. So there’s an 80% chance of a
loss of 3×(10^10) (because of the delay of letting the human race go extinct), the expected value of which is 2.4×(10^10). But there’s also a
20% chance
of a gain of 2×(10^14), the expected value of which is 4×(10^13). That is, in expected value terms, the cost
of waiting for a few hundred years is vanishingly small compared with the benefit of keeping one’s options open
while one gains new information.

You still weigh expected value even if we lose consequentialism---be modest.

MacAskill 18 – [Will MacAskill, Associate Professor in Philosophy at Oxford University, interviewed by
Robert Wilbin, “Our descendants will probably see us as moral monsters. What should we do about
that?” 80000 Hours, 1-19-18, https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/will-macaskill-moral-
philosophy/#top]

Will MacAskill: Terrific. Introducing the core idea is that we

make decisions about under empirical uncertainty all the
time. There’s been decades of research on how you ought to make those decisions. The standard view is
to use expected utility reasoning or expected value reasoning, which is where you look at the probability of
different outcomes and the value it would obtain. Given those outcomes, all dependent on which action you choose, then you
take the sum product and you choose the action with the highest expected value. That sounds all kind of abstract and mathematical, but the
core idea is very simple where if I give you a beer you think 99% likely that beer is going to be delicious,
give you a little bit happiness. There’s a 1 in 100 chance that it will kill you because I’ve poisoned it. Then it
would seem like it’s irrational for you to drink the beer. Even though there’s a 99% chance of a slightly
good outcome, there’s a 1 in 100 chance of an extremely bad outcome. In fact, that outcome’s 100 times worse than
the pleasure of the beer is good.

Robert Wiblin: Probably more than 100 times. At least.

Will MacAskill: At least, yeah. That’s all you need. In which case the action with greater expected value is to not drink the beer. We
think
about this under empirical uncertainty all the time. We look at both the probability of different outcomes
and how good or bad those outcomes would be. Then, when you look at people’s moral reasoning, it seems like very often
people reason in a very different way. I call this the football fan model of decision making given model uncertainty. People say, “I’m a
libertarian, or I’m a utilitarian, or I’m a contractualist.” At least, moral philosophers speak this way. Then they
just say, “Well, given that, this is what I think I ought to do.” They’re no longer thinking about
uncertainty about what matters morally. Instead they’re just picking their favorite view and then acting on that
assumption. That seems irrational given all we’ve learned about how to make decisions under empirical uncertainty. The question I
address is: supposing we really do want to take moral uncertainty under account, how should we do that?

In particular, it
seems like given the obvious analogy with decision making under empirical uncertainty, we should do something like
expected value reasoning where we look
at a probability that we assign to all sorts of different moral views, and
then we look at how good or bad would this action be under all of those different moral views. Then, we
take the best compromise among them, which seem to be given by the expected value under those
different moral views.

Existential risks outweigh---behavioral psychology means they are systemically underestimated.

Farquhar et al. 17 – Sebastian Farquhar, Computer Science DPhil Student at the University of Oxford.
John Halstead, Political Philosophy DPhil at the University of Oxford. Dr. Owen Cotton-Barratt, Pure
Math DPhil at the University of Oxford. Dr. Stefan Schubert, Philosophy PhD at Lund University. Haydn
Belfield, a BA. Andrew Snyder-Beattie, Philosophy PhD Student at the University of Oxford. [Existential
Risk: Diplomacy and Governance, Global Priorities Project, 1-23-17, https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-
content/uploads/Existential-Risks-2017-01-23.pdf]//BPS

In this argument, it seems that Parfit is assuming that the survivors of a nuclear war that kills 99% of the population would eventually be able to
recover civilisation without long-term effect. As we have seen, this may not be a safe assumption – but for the purposes of this thought
experiment, the point stands. What makes existential catastrophes especially bad is that they would “destroy the future,” as
another Oxford philosopher, Nick Bostrom, puts it.66 This future could potentially be extremely long and full of flourishing,
and would therefore have extremely large value. In standard risk analysis, when working out how to respond to risk, we
work out the expected value of risk reduction, by weighing the probability that an action will prevent an
adverse event against the severity of the event. Because the value of preventing existential catastrophe is so
vast, even a tiny probability of prevention has huge expected value.67

Of course, there is persisting reasonable disagreement about ethics and there are a number of ways one might resist this conclusion.68
Therefore, it would be unjustified to be overconfident in Parfit and Bostrom’s argument.

In some areas, government policy does give significant weight to future generations. For example, in assessing the risks of nuclear waste
storage, governments have considered timeframes of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even a million years.69 Justifications for this
policy usually appeal
to principles of intergenerational equity according to which future generations ought
to get as much protection as current generations.70 Similarly, widely accepted norms of sustainable development require
development that meets the needs of the current generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own
needs.71

However, when it comes to existential risk, it would seem that we fail to live up to principles of intergenerational
equity. Existential catastrophe would not only give future generations less than the current generations;
it would give them nothing. Indeed, reducing existential risk plausibly has a quite low cost for us in
comparison with the huge expected value it has for future generations. In spite of this, relatively little is
done to reduce existential risk. Unless we give up on norms of intergenerational equity, they give us a strong
case for significantly increasing our efforts to reduce existential risks.

1.3. WHY EXISTENTIAL RISKS MAY BE SYSTEMATICALLY UNDERINVESTED IN, AND THE ROLE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY

In spite of the importance of existential risk reduction, it probably receives less attention than is warranted. As a result,
concerted international cooperation is required if we are to receive adequate protection from existential risks.

1.3.1. Why existential risks are likely to be underinvested in

There are several reasons why existential risk reduction is likely to be underinvested in. Firstly, it is a global public good. Economic theory
predicts that such goods tend to be underprovided. The benefits of existential risk reduction are widely and indivisibly dispersed around the
globe from the countries responsible for taking action. Consequently, a country which reduces existential risk gains only a
small portion of the benefits but bears the full brunt of the costs. Countries thus have strong incentives to
free ride, receiving the benefits of risk reduction without contributing. As a result, too few do what is in the common interest.

Secondly, as already suggested above, existential

risk reduction is an intergenerational public good: most of the
benefits are enjoyed by future generations who have no say in the political process. For these goods, the
problem is temporal free riding: the current generation enjoys the benefits of inaction while future
generations bear the costs.

Thirdly, many existential risks, such as machine superintelligence, engineered pandemics, and solar geoengineering, pose an unprecedented
and uncertain future threat. Consequently, it is hard to develop a satisfactory governance regime for them: there are few existing governance
instruments which can be applied to these risks, and it is unclear what shape new instruments should take. In this way, our position with regard
to these emerging risks is comparable to the one we faced when nuclear weapons first became available.

Cognitive biases also lead people to underestimate existential risks. Since there have not been any
catastrophes of this magnitude, these risks are not salient to politicians and the public.72 This is an example of the
misapplication of the availability heuristic, a mental shortcut which assumes that something is important only
if it can be readily recalled.
Another cognitive bias affecting perceptions of existential risk is scope neglect. In a seminal 1992 study, three
groups were asked how much they would be willing to pay to save 2,000, 20,000 or 200,000 birds from
drowning in uncovered oil ponds. The groups answered $80, $78, and $88, respectively.73 In this case, the size of the benefits had
little effect on the scale of the preferred response. People become numbed to the effect of saving lives
when the numbers get too large. 74 Scope neglect is a particularly acute problem for existential risk
because the numbers at stake are so large. Due to scope neglect, decision-makers are prone to treat existential
risks in a similar way to problems which are less severe by many orders of magnitude. A wide range of other cognitive biases
are likely to affect the evaluation of existential risks.75

Extinction is a distinct phenomenon that requires prior consideration

Burke et al 16 Associate Professor of International and Political Studies @ UNSW, Australia, 2016
(Anthony, Stefanie Fishel is Assistant Professor, Department of Gender and Race Studies at the
University of Alabama, Audra Mitchell is CIGI Chair in Global Governance and Ethics at the Balsillie
School of International Affairs, Simon Dalby is CIGI Chair in the Political Economy of Climate Change at
the Balsillie School of International Affairs, and, Daniel J. Levine is Assistant Professor of Political Science
at the University of Alabama, “Planet Politics: Manifesto from the End of IR,” Millennium: Journal of
International Studies 1–25)

8. Global ethics must respond to mass extinction. In late 2014, the Worldwide Fund for Nature reported
a startling statistic: according to their global study, 52% of species had gone extinct between 1970 and
2010.60 This is not news: for three decades, conservation biologists have been warning of a ‘sixth mass
extinction’, which, by definition, could eliminate more than three quarters of currently existing life forms
in just a few centuries.61 In other words, it could threaten the practical possibility of the survival of
earthly life. Mass extinction is not simply extinction (or death) writ large: it is a qualitatively different
phenomena that demands its own ethical categories. It cannot be grasped by aggregating species
extinctions, let alone the deaths of individual organisms. Not only does it erase diverse, irreplaceable life
forms, their unique histories and open-ended possibilities, but it threatens the ontological conditions
of Earthly life.

IR is one of few disciplines that is explicitly devoted to the pursuit of survival, yet it has almost nothing
to say in the face of a possible mass extinction event.62 It utterly lacks the conceptual and ethical
frameworks necessary to foster diverse, meaningful responses to this phenomenon. As mentioned
above, Cold-War era concepts such as ‘nuclear winter’ and ‘omnicide’ gesture towards harms massive in
their scale and moral horror. However, they are asymptotic: they imagine nightmares of a severely
denuded planet, yet they do not contemplate the comprehensive negation that a mass extinction event
entails. In contemporary IR discourses, where it appears at all, extinction is treated as a problem of
scientific management and biopolitical control aimed at securing existing human lifestyles.63 Once
again, this approach fails to recognise the reality of extinction, which is a matter of being and nonbeing,
not one of life and death processes.

Confronting the enormity of a possible mass extinction event requires a total overhaul of human
perceptions of what is at stake in the disruption of the conditions of Earthly life. The question of what is
‘lost’ in extinction has, since the inception of the concept of ‘conservation’, been addressed in terms of
financial cost and economic liabilities.64 Beyond reducing life to forms to capital, currencies and
financial instruments, the dominant neoliberal political economy of conservation imposes a
homogenising, Western secular worldview on a planetary phenomenon. Yet the enormity, complexity,
and scale of mass extinction is so huge that humans need to draw on every possible resource in order
to find ways of responding. This means that they need to mobilise multiple worldviews and lifeways –
including those emerging from indigenous and marginalised cosmologies. Above all, it is crucial and
urgent to realise that extinction is a matter of global ethics. It is not simply an issue of management or
security, or even of particular visions of the good life. Instead, it is about staking a claim as to the
goodness of life itself. If it does not fit within the existing parameters of global ethics, then it is these
boundaries that need to change.

9. An Earth-worldly politics. Humans are worldly – that is, we are fundamentally worldforming and
embedded in multiple worlds that traverse the Earth. However, the Earth is not ‘our’ world, as the grand
theories of IR, and some accounts of the Anthropocene have it – an object and possession to be
appropriated, circumnavigated, instrumentalised and englobed.65 Rather, it is a complex of worlds that
we share, co-constitute, create, destroy and inhabit with countless other life forms and beings.

The formation of the Anthropocene reflects a particular type of worlding, one in which the Earth is
treated as raw material for the creation of a world tailored to human needs. Heidegger famously framed
‘earth’ and ‘world’ as two countervailing, conflicting forces that constrain and shape one another. We
contend that existing political, economic and social conditions have pushed human worlding so far to
one extreme that it has become almost entirely detached from the conditions of the Earth. Planet
Politics calls, instead, for a mode of worlding that is responsive to, and grounded in, the Earth. One of
these ways of being Earth-worldly is to embrace the condition of being entangled. We can interpret this
term in the way that Heidegger66 did, as the condition of being mired in everyday human concerns,
worries, and anxiety, to prolong existence. But, in contrast, we can and should reframe it as authors like
Karen Barad67 and Donna Haraway68 have done. To them and many others, ‘entanglement’ is a radical,
indeed fundamental condition of being-with, or, as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, ‘being singular plural’.69 This
means that no being is truly autonomous or separate, whether at the scale of international politics or of
quantum physics. World itself is singular plural: what humans tend to refer to as ‘the’ world is actually a
multiplicity of worlds at various scales that intersect, overlap, conflict, emerge as they surge across the
Earth. World emerges from the poetics of existence, the collision of energy and matter, the tumult of
agencies, the fusion and diffusion of bonds.

Worlds erupt from, and consist in, the intersection of diverse forms of being – material and intangible,
organic and inorganic, ‘living’ and ‘nonliving’. Because of the tumultuousness of the Earth with which
they are entangled, ‘worlds’ are not static, rigid or permanent. They are permeable and fluid. They can
be created, modified – and, of course, destroyed. Concepts of violence, harm and (in)security that focus
only on humans ignore at their peril the destruction and severance of worlds,70 which undermines the
conditions of plurality that enables life on Earth to thrive.