The argument
The wrong is not that the bet might be lost. It is that it was placed at all, by people who had no right to place it.
The parable
A man drives home drunk on empty roads and harms no one. We still say he did wrong, because the wrong was in the driving, not in the crashing, and the safe arrival does not undo it.
So this book asks the same question of a far larger wager: not whether the gamble is wise, but who gave anyone the right to place it for the rest of us. The case never leans on the catastrophe arriving. Grant the optimists their brightest future, and the wrong still stands exactly where the driver's does on the night no one is hurt.
A third thing
It is not the hype and not the apocalypse, but a third thing: a moral case about authority, consent, and legitimacy. Its verdict is one the major traditions of ethical thought reach together, from the consequentialist to the Kantian to the contractualist.
And it ends not on fear but on responsibility: the future not as a chip a few may spend, but as a trust the whole of us are bound to keep.
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