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> You never account for potential people ... to secure some hypothetical good outcome for some set of hypothetical future people ... this sort of argument shoul
by jefftk 4y ago
> You never account for potential people ... to secure some hypothetical good outcome for some set of hypothetical future people ... this sort of argument should never be compulsory as with government policy.
To extend the analogy I made in my reply to kazinator above [1], imagine that in 1900 someone invented a technology that had some kind of benefits to the users, but would make the earth uninhabitable in 2050. Kind of like an even more extreme version of climate change. I think you're saying it would have been wrong for governments to prohibit using this technology, because the only beneficiaries didn't yet exist?
Alternatively, would a government policy that tried to reduce the incidence of fetal alcohol syndrome be unacceptable on the grounds that the people who are less likely to be born with FAS don't exist yet?
> But more importantly, this impacts all current people and the things they value.
Yes, but it affects prioritization. For example, imagine that $10B could either avert 2M deaths from malaria or reduce the risk of us human extinction in the next 20 years by 0.1 percentage points (averting 8B * 0.1% = 0.8M deaths now). If you only care about currently living people then you'd likely prefer the former, where if you also put some weight on future people you might prefer the latter.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34222098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34222098
- naasking 4y ago> imagine that in 1900 someone invented a technology that had some kind of benefits to the users, but would make the earth uninhabitable in 205 Anything on that short a timescale would have negative effects on the existing population or their immediate descendants, which still falls under looking after the wishes of those who exist. Your thought experiment is asserting that we can separate future negative effects from present negative effects, but I mostly reject that assertion. Take climate change. You might argue that continued fossil fuel use is useful for people now and only really impacts hypothetical future people. However, pollution clearly affects people's health now, not to mention the death toll of the endless wars over oil. I think the closest possible exceptions I can think of are maybe existential threats to humanity that have lots of uncertainty, like an asteroid or maybe AI. But even here, an asteroid could literally, suddenly be a threat in the next few years, and a similar argument can be made that AI could easily become dangerous within our lifetime given the pace of development, so these still impact those who exist now. These are hypothetical threats to existing people, not threats to hypothetical people. > would a government policy that tried to reduce the incidence of fetal alcohol syndrome be unacceptable on the grounds that the people who are less likely to be born with FAS don't exist yet? No, because the parents of those children exist now, and they don't want those outcomes.
- jefftk 4y ago> Anything on that short a timescale would have negative effects on the existing population or their immediate descendants, which still falls under looking after the wishes of those who exist. ... the parents of those children exist now, and they don't want those outcomes. I don't understand your pivot here to include anything that current people prefer. If you're comfortable with work to support the wishes of those who exist, what about the large number of people who want humanity to continue flourishing well after they're dead? Trying to narrow down the hypothetical, I think your asteroid suggestion is a good one. If on 1950-01-01 we had discovered a huge asteroid on course to collide with Earth on 2100-01-01, "let's ignore this until the people who are going to be alive on that day have been born" would have been a (rightly!) unpopular decision.