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Paper short abstract

Nick Bostrom has famously advanced utilitarian arguments to claim that achieving transhuman futures overrides other planetary concerns. His work is both duly critiqued and highly successful. What about the "spirit" of planetary care comes to light when his arguments are analysed as "loopholes"?

Paper long abstract

Making choices concerning shared interests and scarce resources is called the problem of public choice. It’s encountered at many scales, from sharing a birthday cake to designing social policy. In the Anthropocene, these questions take on a transcendental scale: what happens to public choice when the very planetary system itself is under threat? Utilitarianism, as a meta-ethical stance, promises to orient matters of public choice towards collective reason: it reduces them to calculating outcomes from a seemingly position-neutral rationality. This kind of rationality has been critiqued for ignoring structural injustices, such as exploitation, alienation, and systemic oppression. Nonetheless, as a system of reasoning, utilitarianism has become dominant, if not dominating.

In this presentation, I explore utilitarian rationality at transcendental scales through an example: the utilitarian arguments for a transhumanistic response to planetary threats proposed by philosopher Nick Bostrom. Bostrom’s arguments are fairly famous and have been leveraged to mobilise significant movements, such as Effective Altruism, AI Safety, and Existential Risk Studies. They have also been duly and thoroughly critiqued, and rather than rehashing those critiques as-is, this presentation asks: what can we learn about the dominating force of utilitarian rationality by analysing Bostrom’s arguments specifically as loopholes? What is the “spirit of the law” that his arguments seem to subvert through a technicality of scale? Then again, what makes the loophole so successful, and what alternative ways to conceptualise care for planetary futures does its success override?