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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: On infinite ethics, published by Joe Carlsmith on January 31, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. (Cross-posted from Hands and Cities) And for all this, nature is never spent. Gerard Manley Hopkins Summary: Infinite ethics (i.e., ethical theory that considers infinite worlds) is important – both in theory and in practice. Infinite ethics puts serious pressure on various otherwise-plausible ethical principles (including some that underlie common arguments for “longtermism”). We know, from impossibility results, that some of these will have to go. A willingness to be “fanatical” about infinities doesn’t help very much. The hard problem is figuring out how to value different infinite outcomes – and in particular, lotteries over infinite outcomes. Proposals for how to do this tend to be some combination of: silent about tons of choices; in conflict with principles like “if you can help an infinity of people and harm no one, do it”; sensitive to arbitrary and/or intuitively irrelevant things; and otherwise unattractive/horrifying. Also, the discourse thus far has focused almost entirely on countable infinities. If we have to deal with larger infinities, they seem likely to break whatever principles we settle on for the countable case. I think infinite ethics punctures the dream of a simple, bullet-biting utilitarianism. But ultimately, it’s everyone’s problem. My current guess is that the best thing to do from an infinite ethics perspective is to make sure that our civilization reaches a wise and technologically mature future – one of superior theoretical and empirical understanding, and superior ability to put that understanding into practice. But reflection on infinite ethics can also inform our sense of how strange such a future’s ethical priorities might be. Thanks to Leopold Aschenbrenner, Amanda Askell, Paul Christiano, Katja Grace, Cate Hall, Evan Hubinger, Ketan Ramakrishnan, Carl Shulman, and Hayden Wilkinson for discussion. And thanks to Cate Hall for some poetry suggestions. I. The importance of the infinite Most of ethics ignores infinities. They’re confusing. They break stuff. Hopefully, they’re irrelevant. And anyway, finite ethics is hard enough. Infinite ethics is just ethics without these blinders. And ditching the blinders is good. We have to deal with infinites in practice. And they are deeply revealing in theory. Why do we have to deal with infinities in practice? Because maybe we can do infinite things. More specifically, we might be able to influence what happens to an infinite number of “value-bearing locations” – for example, people. This could happen in two ways: causal, or acausal. The causal way requires funkier science. It’s not that infinite universes are funky: to the contrary, the hypothesis that we share the universe with an infinite number of observers is very live, and various people seem to think it’s the leading cosmology on offer (see footnote). But current science suggests that our causal influence is made finite by things like lightspeed and entropy (though see footnote for some subtlety). So causing infinite stuff probably needs new science. Maybe we learn to make hypercomputers, or baby universes with infinite space-times. Maybe we’re in a simulation housed in a more infinite-causal-influence-friendly universe. Maybe something about wormholes? You know, sci-fi stuff. The acausal way can get away with more mainstream science. But it requires funkier decision theory. Suppose you’re deciding whether to make a $5000 donation that will save a life, or to spend the money on a vacation with your family. And suppose, per various respectable cosmologies, that the universe is filled with an infinite number of people very much like you, faced with choices very much like yours. If you donate, this is strong evidence that they all donate, to...