I think any human with time-consistent preferences prefers A to B for some margin? The question is how much margin.
Don’t understand your abortion analogy at all I’m afraid.
I did introduce myself as ‘apparent moral alien’! - though for the reasons in the rest of my comment I don’t think I’m all that rare. Until quite recently I’d have been confident I was in a supermajority, but I’m less sure of that now, and I weakly entertain the hypothesis it’s a minority.
Yet human routinely sacrifice their own lives for the good of other (see : firefighters, soldiers, high mountain emergency rescuers, etc.). The X-risk argument is more abstract but basically the same.
A lot of our moral frameworks breakdown once immortality is a real choice. Sacrificing your own life for the own good can be reframed as dying a little earlier.
Many of these people go in knowing there’s a small chance of death. A lot of them would probably change their minds if it was a suicide mission (except a minority).
If the 5 year mortality rate of firefighting was 100%, how many would still do that job?
Many humans, given a choice between
A) they and their loved ones (actually everyone on earth) will live forever with an X-risk p
B) this happens after they and everyone they love dies with an X-risk less than p
Would choose A.
Abortion has a sort of similar parallel but with economic risk instead of X risk, and obviously no immortality yet many are pro choice.
I think valuing the lives of future humans you don’t know of over the lives of yourselves and your loved ones is the alien choice here.
I think any human with time-consistent preferences prefers A to B for some margin? The question is how much margin.
Don’t understand your abortion analogy at all I’m afraid.
I did introduce myself as ‘apparent moral alien’! - though for the reasons in the rest of my comment I don’t think I’m all that rare. Until quite recently I’d have been confident I was in a supermajority, but I’m less sure of that now, and I weakly entertain the hypothesis it’s a minority.
You are ending a potential future life in exchange for preserving a quality of present life.
Yet human routinely sacrifice their own lives for the good of other (see : firefighters, soldiers, high mountain emergency rescuers, etc.). The X-risk argument is more abstract but basically the same.
A lot of our moral frameworks breakdown once immortality is a real choice. Sacrificing your own life for the own good can be reframed as dying a little earlier.
Many of these people go in knowing there’s a small chance of death. A lot of them would probably change their minds if it was a suicide mission (except a minority).
If the 5 year mortality rate of firefighting was 100%, how many would still do that job?