IIUC, you say “people always died --> therefore dying is not the object of our caring”. as an intuition pump, that’s fine. but it’s not a robust argument; observing a moral harm shouldn’t update us that it’s not a moral harm (that’s the just world bias). it might be that finite lives are meaningless. (also, I’ll just assume the 100% is a high probability rounded up)
“premature death” entangles both beliefs and values, but those are orthogonal. I think people only “want” to live for how long they expect to live in a superficial way (just world bias). I doubt anyone’s morality for how much life is good is linked with how much life they expect.
the concept of “premature death” is only useful to evaluate interventions to know how much life they would add counterfactually
IIUC, you say “people always died --> therefore dying is not the object of our caring”. as an intuition pump, that’s fine. but it’s not a robust argument; observing a moral harm shouldn’t update us that it’s not a moral harm (that’s the just world bias). it might be that finite lives are meaningless. (also, I’ll just assume the 100% is a high probability rounded up)
“premature death” entangles both beliefs and values, but those are orthogonal. I think people only “want” to live for how long they expect to live in a superficial way (just world bias). I doubt anyone’s morality for how much life is good is linked with how much life they expect.
the concept of “premature death” is only useful to evaluate interventions to know how much life they would add counterfactually
Thanks, good points.