Steve, I'd hoped to explore the idea that we can use our existing judgement faculties to make decisions about the future of mankind. I thought to explore applying the traditional notion of 'judgement'. So here goes.

Human judgement takes several forms, for example
 1.1) Judgement of fact in the present environment (is it the case that X is F?)
 1.2) Judgement of likely consequences of an action (would action A produce state X or Y?)
 1.3) Judgement of relative value of two potential states (would I like to be in state X or Y?)
 1.4) Judgement of relative value of two objects themselves (would I like to have item X or Y?)

It is because all these judgements have qualitative similarities, that it hasn't always been easy to see differences between judgements of fact and value judgements. But we ought to break down any non-elementary judgement in this way into its components, which may be sequential or parallel, interdependent or independent.

Judgements, as elementary operations, chain together to make decisions. In general, information from many sources is combined to give a single judgement - "I shall do X" - which attains the status of a decision. There are several ways in which we could apply our faculty of judgement to a 'how to act' problem:
Mode
 2.1) 'Gut' judgement, where the various judgements operate automatically in an appropriate sequence
 2.2) Reason - a controlled conscious organising of the order, inputs and outputs of each judgement into an argument
 2.3) In the abstract - where each step of judgement is restricted in its scope to the bare minimum, where all assumptions are made conscious, in addition to the contents of the judgements themselves.
 2.4) Other modes of employing judgement which are higher order, non-human, and therefore as yet indescribable.

Most arguments I have heard for saving the world rely on modes 2.1 and 2.2. This would not be an issue if we were making decisions about tomorrow's lunch. Although my choice for tomorrow's lunch could have an effect upon the survival of the world, that's not why I'm making the decision. The criteria are entirely different, justifying a simplified decision. But let us consider the case where we actually want to decide about the future of the world.
 3.1) "Would I like to be in state X?" where X is 30 years in the future?    (type 1.3 judgement)
 3.2) "Would I like to be in state X?" where X is 2000 years in the future?
 3.3) "Is action A likely to lead to state X?" where the action is now, and the state is in 30 years time (Type 1.2)
 3.4) "Is action A likely to lead to state X?" where the action is now, and the state is in the distant future
 3.5) multiply probabilities with state-value-judgements, generate action likely to put myself in state X

Although I have previously criticised 3.4, I would like to show the difficulties with 3.2. Here we have the usual scenario where one projects onesself into a possible world. Let us consider the following scenarios from these points of view:
 4.1) every living organism on the planet dies, and the world is permanently uninhabitable forever.
 4.2) every living organism dies, leaving a temporarily uninhabitable world (eg for 10,000 years)
 4.3) every human being dies, with a temporarily uninhabitable world
 4.4) every human dies, but the world is temporarily uninhabitable to humans but still inhabitable by many other organisms.
 4.5) a large proportion of human beings die, leaving a small number of people in a temporarily inhospitable world
 4.6) very few people die, leaving a large number of people in a permanently inhospitable (unpleasant compared to now) world
 4.7) very few people die, but the world is temporarily inhospitable for a period
 4.8) no death, but the world is permanently less inhabitable and the maximum world population is reduced forever
 4.9) everyone on earth permanently forgoes some amount of pleasure to avoid one of the above situations, and otherwise the environment is the same.
 4.10) we reduce the world population voluntarily (without death) to avoid one of the above situations, and environment is the same pleasantness
 4.11) nothing in the world changes, including population, happiness, environment - nobody forgoes anything.
 4.12) we reduce the world population so much to make the world more pleasant to live in
I've obviously left out lots of intermediate states, but you get the picture.


I think you will see, with our application of judgement in modes 2.1 and 2.2, it is actually not possible to choose the best of any particular given subset of the above scenarios. Clearly we need to do at least 3 things
 5.1) judge the probability of each of these scenarios independently by using factual judgements, contingent on actions
 5.2) judge whether I would like to be in each state
 5.3) convolve these to decide on action

Let's assume 5.1 and 5.3 can be performed, with care. We should, I grant, be using our 'best guess' human knowledge from fact, experiment and experience to make those judgements. But - What is the status of step 5.2?
 6.1) what constitutes a pleasant place to live in?
 6.2) will pleasantness judgements change with time?
 6.3) can subjective pleasantness be compared from person to person?
 6.4) is the absolute subsistence level relevant as a standard?
 6.5) will humans evolve so that what is 'hospitable' and 'inhospitable' now could reverse?
 6.6) will human technology improve in one situation and not another (mother of invention etc)
 6.7) will humans' minds evolve to higher levels, and attain an entirely different perspective on the situation?
 6.8) will another organism evolve to have an intelligence and society richer than humans have now?
 6.9) is it better to have fewer and happier people?
 6.10) how much happiness compensates for how much unplesantness/hardship?
 6.11) how can we move from 'would I like X?' to 'would one like X?'

This moves, of course, in the opposite direction to duty ethics, but it does point to where the normativity originates.
Clearly such judgements as 6.x need to be made, and I'm making things difficult for a good reason. Judgements of this kind, I argue, concern such a part of what it is to be human, that to render them with our faculties in modes 2.1 and 2.2 is ridiculous, and that what is needed here is further abstraction and dissection of assumptions (mode 2.3). The point is that, to the best of our scientific knowledge, the human mind as an organ of judgement will change over timescales of thousands of years. I believe that the most phylogenetically evolved mode is mode 2.3, and therefore it is closest to the mode of judgement that will be used by humans in the most distant conceivable future e.g. mode 2.4. (I use conceivability here in the common sense, not in the technical sense of my other conceivability arguments. In fact the conceivability of higher logic or judgement systems should probably be suspended until we have a more technical solution.)


My next post will go on to apply these 'difficult' judgements to subsets of scenarios, with a view to drawing a table of dependencies. I want to show how each fundamental assumption about the nature of evolution, pleasure as a brain faculty, additivity of utility, value of life etc. , impinge upon each type of scenario. As you will notice, I have phrased some of these questions as to sound empirical, and I will attempt to treat them as such using the tools of neuroeconomics.

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