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You've put your finger on a very important point. It's a point that some of the most important ethicists (Parfit, Singer) in recent history have focused on, nam

You've put your finger on a very important point. It's a point that some of the most important ethicists (Parfit, Singer) in recent history have focused on, namely the deficit in empathy we have for individuals who are distant from us whether it be in space or time. Progressing beyond this is one of the important moral challenges faced by humanity.

default-kramer 9y ago
But trying to empathize with someone who is going to live thousands of years from now seems like designing software based on speculative requirements changes. You end up with a custom DSL for a custom rules engine and only 2 rules ever got written with it. Except that predicting what humanity will be like in 1000 years is harder than predicting what your software will be like in 10 years.
- glenstein 9y ago
  True, we can't make predictions in the form of hyperparticularizations. But we can make predictions in broad strokes about industrialization and ecology and how our current behaviors will serve the welfare of future generations in those respects.
- HillRat 9y ago
  A rule I would consider would be that any decision should, all else being equal, maximize the degrees of freedom available to other persons relative to other exclusionary options. Obviously, this would require quite a bit of further discussion and fleshing out as to its precise meaning, but I'd take it as a starting point for philosophical analysis.
dharma1 9y ago
Empathy, thinking about the near-term future or past, worrying - all products of evolution, traits that have helped us enough in the past to have been selected for. There has been no evolutionary pressure to develop much of a concern beyond one or two generations. And evolution hasn't equipped us with reward pathways or cognitive capacity to solve many of the problems now facing us and our surroundings - because those problems are new

default-kramer 9y ago

But trying to empathize with someone who is going to live thousands of years from now seems like designing software based on speculative requirements changes. You end up with a custom DSL for a custom rules engine and only 2 rules ever got written with it. Except that predicting what humanity will be like in 1000 years is harder than predicting what your software will be like in 10 years.

glenstein 9y ago
True, we can't make predictions in the form of hyperparticularizations. But we can make predictions in broad strokes about industrialization and ecology and how our current behaviors will serve the welfare of future generations in those respects.
HillRat 9y ago
A rule I would consider would be that any decision should, all else being equal, maximize the degrees of freedom available to other persons relative to other exclusionary options. Obviously, this would require quite a bit of further discussion and fleshing out as to its precise meaning, but I'd take it as a starting point for philosophical analysis.

dharma1 9y ago

Empathy, thinking about the near-term future or past, worrying - all products of evolution, traits that have helped us enough in the past to have been selected for. There has been no evolutionary pressure to develop much of a concern beyond one or two generations. And evolution hasn't equipped us with reward pathways or cognitive capacity to solve many of the problems now facing us and our surroundings - because those problems are new