Apologies if I gave the impression that “a selfish person should love all humans equally”; while I’m sympathetic to arguments from e.g. Parfit’s book Reasons and Persons[1], I don’t go anywhere that far. I was making a weaker and (I think) uncontroversial claim, something closer to Adam Smith’s invisible hand: that aggregating over every individual’s selfish focus on close family ties, overall results in moral concerns becoming relatively more spread out, because the close circles of your close circle aren’t exactly identical to your own.
Like that distances in time and space are similar. So if you imagine people in the distant past having the choice for a better life at their current time, in exchange for there being no people in the far future, then you wish they’d care about more than just their own present time. A similar logic argues against applying a very high discount rate to your moral concern for beings that are very distant to you in e.g. space, close ties, etc.
Apologies if I gave the impression that “a selfish person should love all humans equally”; while I’m sympathetic to arguments from e.g. Parfit’s book Reasons and Persons[1], I don’t go anywhere that far. I was making a weaker and (I think) uncontroversial claim, something closer to Adam Smith’s invisible hand: that aggregating over every individual’s selfish focus on close family ties, overall results in moral concerns becoming relatively more spread out, because the close circles of your close circle aren’t exactly identical to your own.
Like that distances in time and space are similar. So if you imagine people in the distant past having the choice for a better life at their current time, in exchange for there being no people in the far future, then you wish they’d care about more than just their own present time. A similar logic argues against applying a very high discount rate to your moral concern for beings that are very distant to you in e.g. space, close ties, etc.