the level of selfishness required to seek immortality at the cost of risking all of humanity
If only you got immortality (or even you and a small handful of your loved ones), okay, yeah, that would be selfish. But if the expectation is that it soon becomes cheap and widely accessible, that’s just straight-up heroic.
I would not describe it as heroic. I think it’s approximately morally equivalent to choosing an 80% chance of making all Americans immortal (but not non-Americans) and a 20% chance of killing everyone in the world.
This is not a perfect analogy because the philosophical arguments for discounting future generations are stronger than the arguments for discounting non-Americans.
(Also my P(doom) is higher than 20%, that’s just an example)
An important difference between the analogy you gave and our real situation is that non-Americans actually exist right now, whereas future human generations do not yet exist and they may never actually come into existence—they are merely potential. Their existence depends on the choices we make today. A closer analogy would be choosing an 80% chance of making all humans immortal and a 20% chance of eliminating the possibility of future space colonization. Framed this way, I don’t think the choice to take such a gamble should be considered selfish or even short-sighted, though I understand that many people would still not want to take that gamble.
If only you got immortality (or even you and a small handful of your loved ones), okay, yeah, that would be selfish. But if the expectation is that it soon becomes cheap and widely accessible, that’s just straight-up heroic.
I would not describe it as heroic. I think it’s approximately morally equivalent to choosing an 80% chance of making all Americans immortal (but not non-Americans) and a 20% chance of killing everyone in the world.
This is not a perfect analogy because the philosophical arguments for discounting future generations are stronger than the arguments for discounting non-Americans.
(Also my P(doom) is higher than 20%, that’s just an example)
An important difference between the analogy you gave and our real situation is that non-Americans actually exist right now, whereas future human generations do not yet exist and they may never actually come into existence—they are merely potential. Their existence depends on the choices we make today. A closer analogy would be choosing an 80% chance of making all humans immortal and a 20% chance of eliminating the possibility of future space colonization. Framed this way, I don’t think the choice to take such a gamble should be considered selfish or even short-sighted, though I understand that many people would still not want to take that gamble.