but if a charity approaches me and offers to save 500 lives in 500 years for a small donation, that’s definitely a scam! So I think there are really good reasons why people’s intuitions on this don’t always match what mathematicians or philosophers might think.
I would note that the tradeoff question we asked didn’t ask about donating to a charity in order to save lives 500 years in the future, they asked whether it’s “morally better” to save 1 person now or x people in the future. I agree that degree of confidence in outcomes might influence people’s judgements about the charity cases though.
I would note that the tradeoff question we asked didn’t ask about donating to a charity in order to save lives 500 years in the future, they asked whether it’s “morally better” to save 1 person now or x people in the future. I agree that degree of confidence in outcomes might influence people’s judgements about the charity cases though.
I know you didn’t ask about it, and people might not even conciously think about it—I just think people are bad at thought experiments