Do you have a reference (or brief summary) of why you care about inequality between non-observable individuals or groups?
I personally do not. But if you take, say, a wide circle of moral concern as seriously, as, say, EA does, and if inequality is something you care about in general, and if you believe that people we cannot communicate with and never will be able to are as real as you are, then your moral considerations would be affected, right?
In general, a lot of people do care about inequality and fairness, but usually as it relates to people they either know (“my neighbor won a lottery, why didn’t I? It’s unfair!”) or can read about (“Everyone is struggling under the lockdowns, so I don’t feel as bad being stuck at home, seems fair”) or even some hypothetical people benefiting more than others (see the horror stories of VaccinateCA). It is not an unusual consideration.
It’s not an unusual consideration in popular disorganized discourse. I’ve only heard ‘inequality’ as a consideration among rationalists in a more instrumental context, affecting aggregate utility in some way.
As such, it’s unusual (and perhaps incoherent) to mix it with technical views like MWI.
Well, Sean Carroll is a professional physicist and philosopher and he took it seriously a couple of times on his podcast, so the view is not obviously incoherent. It seems natural to probe the boundaries of our moral intuitions and see where they fail, and this one seems like a test case worth analyzing.
I personally do not. But if you take, say, a wide circle of moral concern as seriously, as, say, EA does, and if inequality is something you care about in general, and if you believe that people we cannot communicate with and never will be able to are as real as you are, then your moral considerations would be affected, right?
In general, a lot of people do care about inequality and fairness, but usually as it relates to people they either know (“my neighbor won a lottery, why didn’t I? It’s unfair!”) or can read about (“Everyone is struggling under the lockdowns, so I don’t feel as bad being stuck at home, seems fair”) or even some hypothetical people benefiting more than others (see the horror stories of VaccinateCA). It is not an unusual consideration.
It’s not an unusual consideration in popular disorganized discourse. I’ve only heard ‘inequality’ as a consideration among rationalists in a more instrumental context, affecting aggregate utility in some way.
As such, it’s unusual (and perhaps incoherent) to mix it with technical views like MWI.
Well, Sean Carroll is a professional physicist and philosopher and he took it seriously a couple of times on his podcast, so the view is not obviously incoherent. It seems natural to probe the boundaries of our moral intuitions and see where they fail, and this one seems like a test case worth analyzing.