I don’t necessarily care about the concept of personal identity over time, but I think there’s a very strong decision-making foundation for considering uncertainty about future states. In one framing, I buy insurance because in some future states it is very valuable, and in other future states it was not. I am effectively transferring money from one future version of myself to another. That’s sticking with a numerical identity view of my self, but it’s critical to consider different futures despite not having a complex view of what makes me “the same person”.
But I think that if you embrace the view you present as obvious for contractualists, where we view future people fundamentally differently than present people, and do not allow consideration of different potential futures, you end up with some very confused notions about how to plan under uncertainty, and can never prioritize any types of investments that pay off primarily in even the intermediate-term future. For example, mitigating emissions for climate change should be ignored, because we can do more good for current people by mitigating harms rather than preventing them, and should emit more and ignore the fact that this will, with certainty, make the future worse, because those people don’t have much of a moral claim. And from a consequentialist viewpoint—which I think is relevant even if we’re not accepting it as a guiding moral principle—we’d all be much, much worse off if this sort of reasoning had been embraced in the past.
I don’t necessarily care about the concept of personal identity over time, but I think there’s a very strong decision-making foundation for considering uncertainty about future states. In one framing, I buy insurance because in some future states it is very valuable, and in other future states it was not. I am effectively transferring money from one future version of myself to another. That’s sticking with a numerical identity view of my self, but it’s critical to consider different futures despite not having a complex view of what makes me “the same person”.
But I think that if you embrace the view you present as obvious for contractualists, where we view future people fundamentally differently than present people, and do not allow consideration of different potential futures, you end up with some very confused notions about how to plan under uncertainty, and can never prioritize any types of investments that pay off primarily in even the intermediate-term future. For example, mitigating emissions for climate change should be ignored, because we can do more good for current people by mitigating harms rather than preventing them, and should emit more and ignore the fact that this will, with certainty, make the future worse, because those people don’t have much of a moral claim. And from a consequentialist viewpoint—which I think is relevant even if we’re not accepting it as a guiding moral principle—we’d all be much, much worse off if this sort of reasoning had been embraced in the past.