People do care about having children, and they care especially strongly about their living children. But their concern for future unborn descendants, particularly in the distant future, is typically weaker than their concern for everyone who is currently alive.
I am certainly not saying people’s behavior is well-approximated by people caring about future people as much as they care about people today! Indeed, I would be very surprised if people’s caring factors much through welfare considerations at all. Mostly people have some concern about “the future of humanity”, and that concern is really quite strong. I don’t think it’s particularly coherent (as practically no ethical behavior exhibited by broad populations is), but it clearly is quite strong.
Mostly people have some concern about “the future of humanity”, and that concern is really quite strong. I don’t think it’s particularly coherent (as practically no ethical behavior exhibited by broad populations is), but it clearly is quite strong.
How would we test the claim that people have a strong concern about the long-term future of humanity? Almost every way I can think of measuring this seems to falsify it.
The literature on time discounting and personal finance behavior doesn’t support it. Across the world people are having fewer children than ever, suggesting they are placing less and less priority on having a posterity at all. Virtually all political debate concerns the lives of currently living people rather than abstract questions about humanity’s distant future. The notable exceptions, such as climate change, seem to reinforce my point: climate concern has been consistently overshadowed by our material interest in cheap fossil fuels, as evidenced by the fact that emissions and temperatures keep rising every year despite decades of debate.
One might argue that in each of these cases people are acting irrationally, and that we should look at their stated values rather than their revealed behavior. But the survey data doesn’t clearly demonstrate that people are longtermists either. Schubert et al. asked people directly about existential risk, and one of their primary findings was: “Thus, when asked in the most straightforward and unqualified way, participants do not find human extinction uniquely bad. This could partly explain why we currently invest relatively small resources in reducing existential risk.” We could also look at moral philosophers, who have spent thousands of years debating what we should ultimately value, and among whom explicit support for longtermism remains a minority position. This fact is acknowledged by longtermist philosophers like Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill, who generally emphasize that longtermist priorities are “neglected”, both within their field and by society at large.
I acknowledge that most people have some concern for the future of humanity. But “some concern” is not what we’re arguing about here. This concern would need to be very strong to override people’s interests in their own lives, such as whether they will develop Alzheimer’s or whether their parents will die. Even if people do have strong feelings about the future of humanity upon reflection, that concern is not “clear” but rather speculative. How could we actually know what people ultimately value upon reflection? In any case, the strong concern people have for their actual, living family is already pretty clear given the ordinary behavior that they engage in: how they spend their money, how many children they have, etc.
That, I suppose, depends strongly on whether one has or has not been fortunate. Threshold by my intuitive view is located around having accumulated enough resources to safeguard one’s AND one’s children future wellbeing/striving. Which is sooooooo stupid and sad to be happening on LW of all places. The asymmetry of mutual understanding between two groups goes again common sense though—i mean most fortunate ones should’ve had been the unfortunate ones in the past. Not so for us unfortunates. Fs should understand UFs mindsets better, but they seem not to. Like it’s the main thing of being LW—noticing our own biases, but Fs seem to have fallen victims of this self-directed warfare… I probably won’t be allowed to comment again this year—karma here bites—just in case anybody wonders))))
People do care about having children, and they care especially strongly about their living children. But their concern for future unborn descendants, particularly in the distant future, is typically weaker than their concern for everyone who is currently alive.
I am certainly not saying people’s behavior is well-approximated by people caring about future people as much as they care about people today! Indeed, I would be very surprised if people’s caring factors much through welfare considerations at all. Mostly people have some concern about “the future of humanity”, and that concern is really quite strong. I don’t think it’s particularly coherent (as practically no ethical behavior exhibited by broad populations is), but it clearly is quite strong.
How would we test the claim that people have a strong concern about the long-term future of humanity? Almost every way I can think of measuring this seems to falsify it.
The literature on time discounting and personal finance behavior doesn’t support it. Across the world people are having fewer children than ever, suggesting they are placing less and less priority on having a posterity at all. Virtually all political debate concerns the lives of currently living people rather than abstract questions about humanity’s distant future. The notable exceptions, such as climate change, seem to reinforce my point: climate concern has been consistently overshadowed by our material interest in cheap fossil fuels, as evidenced by the fact that emissions and temperatures keep rising every year despite decades of debate.
One might argue that in each of these cases people are acting irrationally, and that we should look at their stated values rather than their revealed behavior. But the survey data doesn’t clearly demonstrate that people are longtermists either. Schubert et al. asked people directly about existential risk, and one of their primary findings was: “Thus, when asked in the most straightforward and unqualified way, participants do not find human extinction uniquely bad. This could partly explain why we currently invest relatively small resources in reducing existential risk.” We could also look at moral philosophers, who have spent thousands of years debating what we should ultimately value, and among whom explicit support for longtermism remains a minority position. This fact is acknowledged by longtermist philosophers like Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill, who generally emphasize that longtermist priorities are “neglected”, both within their field and by society at large.
I acknowledge that most people have some concern for the future of humanity. But “some concern” is not what we’re arguing about here. This concern would need to be very strong to override people’s interests in their own lives, such as whether they will develop Alzheimer’s or whether their parents will die. Even if people do have strong feelings about the future of humanity upon reflection, that concern is not “clear” but rather speculative. How could we actually know what people ultimately value upon reflection? In any case, the strong concern people have for their actual, living family is already pretty clear given the ordinary behavior that they engage in: how they spend their money, how many children they have, etc.
That, I suppose, depends strongly on whether one has or has not been fortunate. Threshold by my intuitive view is located around having accumulated enough resources to safeguard one’s AND one’s children future wellbeing/striving. Which is sooooooo stupid and sad to be happening on LW of all places. The asymmetry of mutual understanding between two groups goes again common sense though—i mean most fortunate ones should’ve had been the unfortunate ones in the past. Not so for us unfortunates. Fs should understand UFs mindsets better, but they seem not to. Like it’s the main thing of being LW—noticing our own biases, but Fs seem to have fallen victims of this self-directed warfare… I probably won’t be allowed to comment again this year—karma here bites—just in case anybody wonders))))