The winners of the ‘Essays on Longtermism’ competition are:

First place:

• Aaron Bergman, for Utilitarians Should Accept that Some Suffering Cannot be “Offset” - $1000 prize.

Joint second place[1]:

• Arepo, for Fruit-picking as an existential risk — EA Forum - $500 prize
• David Goodman, for Information Preservation as a Longtermist Intervention - $500 prize

We had 67 entries, many of which are underrated. You can read all of the entries here.

Summary: @Aaron Bergman's essay argues against the idea that welfare can be understood as a simple real number scale, where suffering can be traded off with pleasure.

The essay argues two points. First, standard utilitarian commitments do not logically require the view that any suffering can be compensated by enough happiness. Second, once that premise is questioned, it becomes plausible that some extreme suffering is morally non-offsetable — no amount of happiness elsewhere can justify creating it.

He suggests that near a threshold of extreme suffering, the “compensation curve” may rise without bound, making lexicality a natural limit rather than an arbitrary jump.

If so, longtermists should shift from maximizing future happiness to preventing [...]

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Outline:

(00:55) Summaries

(00:58) Utilitarians Should Accept that Some Suffering Cannot be Offset

(02:04) Fruit-picking as an existential risk

(03:10) Information Preservation as a Longtermist Intervention

(04:00) Gratitude

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First published:

Source:

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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