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This is a really interesting topic but I'm offput by the verbosity of this essay. For example: > And whatever our credences here, we should be clear-eyed about

This is a really interesting topic but I'm offput by the verbosity of this essay. For example: > And whatever our credences here, we should be clear-eyed about the fact that helping or harming an infinite number of people would be an extremely big deal. Saving a hundred lives, for example, is a deeply significant act. But saving a thousand lives is even more so; a million, even more so; and so on. For any finite number of lives, though, saving an infinite number would save more than that. So saving an infinite number of lives matters at least as much as saving any finite number – and very plausibly, it matters more (see Beckstead and Thomas (2021) for more). Is it really necessary to have a whole paragraph explaining that saving infinite lives would be a big deal? I don't think a single person would believe otherwise, which means this paragraph is zero entropy. Most philosophical essays seem to have a similar issue.

paganel 5y ago
> I don't think a single person would believe otherwise, It depends. Saving "a hundred" or a "a thousand" lives seems "doable" by a normal person as a result of a conscious, "moral" act, saving "millions" devolves into messianism, and as such it's not the job of essays or of simple, logical human thinking to talk/write about it. I know that the author doesn't insist on that aspect but in real life quantitate differences turn into qualitative differences most of the time.
- Kim_Bruning 5y ago
  With growing populations, I'm not sure trying to save a million lives is THAT special anymore. Definitely still fairly awesome, but not Messiah level awesome. I think eg. President Zelensky (the buck stops with him for >40M souls) would be very surprised to learn of his sudden deification. There are actually probably quite a number of rather less spectacular (eg. bureaucratic, military, logistics, sysop, ...) jobs where you might routinely touch 1M+ people these days, in some narrow but nevertheless (up to) life-critical ways. This does mean one might need to take ethics into account in situations that seem far removed from the coal face, typically whilst pushing dusty papers around; lest you end up creating catch 22's for the people in the trenches. Everyone has stories about things like unethical corporate behavior. At that kind of scale, it makes more sense to build systems (governments/corporations/foundations/smart mobs/...) that are somehow intrinsically ethical or at very least inspire ethical behavior in their members.

paganel 5y ago

> I don't think a single person would believe otherwise, It depends. Saving "a hundred" or a "a thousand" lives seems "doable" by a normal person as a result of a conscious, "moral" act, saving "millions" devolves into messianism, and as such it's not the job of essays or of simple, logical human thinking to talk/write about it. I know that the author doesn't insist on that aspect but in real life quantitate differences turn into qualitative differences most of the time.

Kim_Bruning 5y ago
With growing populations, I'm not sure trying to save a million lives is THAT special anymore. Definitely still fairly awesome, but not Messiah level awesome. I think eg. President Zelensky (the buck stops with him for >40M souls) would be very surprised to learn of his sudden deification. There are actually probably quite a number of rather less spectacular (eg. bureaucratic, military, logistics, sysop, ...) jobs where you might routinely touch 1M+ people these days, in some narrow but nevertheless (up to) life-critical ways. This does mean one might need to take ethics into account in situations that seem far removed from the coal face, typically whilst pushing dusty papers around; lest you end up creating catch 22's for the people in the trenches. Everyone has stories about things like unethical corporate behavior. At that kind of scale, it makes more sense to build systems (governments/corporations/foundations/smart mobs/...) that are somehow intrinsically ethical or at very least inspire ethical behavior in their members.