Perhaps you and they are just focusing on different stages of reasoning. The difference in utility that you’ve described is a temporal asymmetry that sure looks at first glance like a flaw. But that’s because it’s an unnecessary complexity to add it as a root principle when explaining morality up to now. Each of us desires not to be a victim of murder sprees (when there are too many people) or to have to care for dozens of babies (when there are too few people), and the simplest way for a group of people to organize to enforce satisfaction of that desire is for them to guarantee the state does not victimize any member of the group. So on desirist grounds I’d expect the temporal asymmetry to tend to emerge strategically as the conventional morality applying only among the ruling social class of a society: only humans and not animals in a modern democracy, only men when women lack suffrage, only whites when blacks are subjugated, only nobles in aristocratic society, and so on. (I can readily think of supporting examples, but I’m not confident in my inability to think of contrary examples, so I do not yet claim that history bears out desirism’s prediction on this matter.)
Of course, if you plan to build an AI capable of aquiring power over all current life, you may have strong reason to incorporate the temporal asymmetry as a root principle. It wouldn’t likely emerge out of unbalanced power relations. And similarly, if you plan on bootstrapping yourself as an em into a powerful optimizer, you have strong reason to precommit to the temporal asymmetry so the rest of us don’t fear you. :D
Perhaps you and they are just focusing on different stages of reasoning. The difference in utility that you’ve described is a temporal asymmetry that sure looks at first glance like a flaw. But that’s because it’s an unnecessary complexity to add it as a root principle when explaining morality up to now. Each of us desires not to be a victim of murder sprees (when there are too many people) or to have to care for dozens of babies (when there are too few people), and the simplest way for a group of people to organize to enforce satisfaction of that desire is for them to guarantee the state does not victimize any member of the group. So on desirist grounds I’d expect the temporal asymmetry to tend to emerge strategically as the conventional morality applying only among the ruling social class of a society: only humans and not animals in a modern democracy, only men when women lack suffrage, only whites when blacks are subjugated, only nobles in aristocratic society, and so on. (I can readily think of supporting examples, but I’m not confident in my inability to think of contrary examples, so I do not yet claim that history bears out desirism’s prediction on this matter.)
Of course, if you plan to build an AI capable of aquiring power over all current life, you may have strong reason to incorporate the temporal asymmetry as a root principle. It wouldn’t likely emerge out of unbalanced power relations. And similarly, if you plan on bootstrapping yourself as an em into a powerful optimizer, you have strong reason to precommit to the temporal asymmetry so the rest of us don’t fear you. :D