Thanks for explaining that, really appreciate it! One thing I notice I’d been assuming: that “8B-only” people would have a policy like “care about the 8B people who are living today, but also the people in say 20 years who’ve been born in the intervening time period.” But that’s basically just a policy of caring about future people! Because there’s not really a difference between “future people at the point that they’ve actually been born” and “future people generally”
I have different intuitions about “causing someone not to be born” versus “waiting for someone to be born, and then killing them”. So I do think that if someone sets in motion today events that reliably end in the human race dying out in 2035, the moral cost of this might be any of
“the people alive in both 2025 and 2035”
“everyone alive in 2035”
“everyone alive in 2035, plus (perhaps with some discounting) all the kids they would have had, and the kids they would have had...”
according to different sets of intuitions. And actually I guess (1) would be rarest, so even though both (2) and (3) involve “caring about future people” in some sense, I do think they’re important to distinguish. (Caring about “future-present” versus “future-future” people?)
Thanks for explaining that, really appreciate it! One thing I notice I’d been assuming: that “8B-only” people would have a policy like “care about the 8B people who are living today, but also the people in say 20 years who’ve been born in the intervening time period.” But that’s basically just a policy of caring about future people! Because there’s not really a difference between “future people at the point that they’ve actually been born” and “future people generally”
I have different intuitions about “causing someone not to be born” versus “waiting for someone to be born, and then killing them”. So I do think that if someone sets in motion today events that reliably end in the human race dying out in 2035, the moral cost of this might be any of
“the people alive in both 2025 and 2035”
“everyone alive in 2035”
“everyone alive in 2035, plus (perhaps with some discounting) all the kids they would have had, and the kids they would have had...”
according to different sets of intuitions. And actually I guess (1) would be rarest, so even though both (2) and (3) involve “caring about future people” in some sense, I do think they’re important to distinguish. (Caring about “future-present” versus “future-future” people?)