# Contested concept: moral urgency

_**What you are reading**: one contested-concept page in Deliberus's deliberation graph. Deliberus maps human reasoning — including claims that are contested, mistaken, or extreme — so that disagreement can be examined precisely. A claim's presence here is not an endorsement: the graph records that someone argued it, how it connects to other reasoning, and how far scrutiny has gotten. The metadata on this page describes the state of that scrutiny, not the truth of the claim._

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- **Contestedness**: criterion
- **Diagnosis**: This drives the disagreement over whether to fund immediate poverty relief (direct aid) or long-term AI safety research. It masks a deeper conflict between deontological/present-focused duties and long-termist utilitarianism.
- **Canonical**: `/concept/moral urgency` (data: `/concept/moral urgency.json`)

## Senses in use
- **The priority assigned to actions based on their potential to prevent the greatest aggregate harm or achieve the greatest utility over time.** — used in 3 claim(s)
- **The immediate pressure to address current, visible suffering and rights violations.** — used in 2 claim(s)

## Claims using this term
- [Individuals committed to reducing global poverty ought to be willing to accept 30 years of continued current poverty if doing so is necessa…](/claim/claim_2d7bb9fa291a.md) _(sense: The priority assigned to actions based on their potential to prevent the greatest aggregate harm or achieve the greatest utility over time.)_
- [Permanently ending a systemic source of harm [such as global poverty or a metaphorical infant-killing machine] is a moral outcome that just…](/claim/claim_7923093302b4.md) _(sense: The priority assigned to actions based on their potential to prevent the greatest aggregate harm or achieve the greatest utility over time.)_
- [Eliminating global poverty possesses at least the same level of moral urgency as the effort to stop abortion.](/claim/claim_c603e4cb7008.md) _(sense: The immediate pressure to address current, visible suffering and rights violations.)_
- [Individuals who identify as anti-abortion activists should, according to their own moral frameworks, prioritize the elimination of global p…](/claim/claim_c8f5051a8b26.md) _(sense: The immediate pressure to address current, visible suffering and rights violations.)_
- [In philanthropic decision-making, the potential effectiveness of a low-probability but high-payoff future solution to global poverty can be…](/claim/claim_f2ba4d857348.md) _(sense: The priority assigned to actions based on their potential to prevent the greatest aggregate harm or achieve the greatest utility over time.)_