Caring about the world we leave for the real people, with emotions and needs and experiences as real as our own, who very well may inherit our world but who weâll never meet, is an extraordinary act of empathy and compassion â one thatâs way harder to access than the empathy and warmth we might feel for our neighbors by default. Itâs the ultimate act of care. And itâs definitely concerned with justice.
If we go extinct, they wonât exist, so wonât be real people or have any valid moral claims. I also consider compassion, by definition, to be concerned with suffering, harms or losses. People who donât come to exist donât experience suffering or harm and have lost nothing. They also donât experience injustice.
Longtermists tend to seem focused on ensuring future moral patients exist, i.e. through extinction risk reduction. But, as above, ensuring moral patients come to exist is not a matter of compassion or justice for those moral patients. Still, they may help or (harm!) other moral patients, including other humans who would exist anyway, animals, aliens or artificial sentience.
On the other hand, longtermism is still compatible with a primary concern for compassion or justice, including through asymmetric person-affecting views and wide person-affecting views (e.g. Thomas, 2019, probably focus on s-risks and quality improvements), negative utilitarianism (focus on s-risks) and perhaps even narrow person-affecting views. However, utilitarian versions of most of these views still seem prone, at least in principle, to endorsing killing everyone to replace us and our descendants with better off individuals, even if each of us and our descendants would have had an apparently good life and object. I think some (symmetric and perhaps asymmetric) narrow person-affecting views can avoid this, and maybe these are the ones that fit best with compassion and justice. See my post here.
That being said, empathy could mean more than just compassion or justice and could endorse bringing happy people into existence for their own sake, e.g. Carlsmith, 2021. I disagree that we should create people for their own sake, though, and my intuitions are person-affecting.
Other issues people have with longtermism are fanaticism and ambiguity; the probability that any individual averts an existential catastrophe is usually quite low at best (e.g. 1 in a million), and the numbers are also pretty speculative.
Yeah, I meant to convey this in my post but framing it a bit differently â that they are real people with valid moral claims who may exist. I suppose framing it this way is just moving the hypothetical condition elsewhere to emphasize that, if they do exist, they would be real people with real moral claims, and that matters. Maybe thatâs confusing though.
BTW, my personal views lean towards a suffering-focused ethics that isnât seeking to create happy people for their own sake. But I still think that, in coming to that view, Iâm concerned with the experience of those hypothetical people in the fuzzy, caring way that utilitarians are charged with disregarding. Thatâs my main point here. But maybe I just get off the crazy train at my unique stop. I wouldnât consider tiling the universe with hedonium to be the ultimate act of care/âjustice, but I suppose someone could feel that way, and thereby make an argument along the same lines.
Agreed there are other issues with longtermism â just wanted to respond to the âitâs not about care or empathyâ critique.
If we go extinct, they wonât exist, so wonât be real people or have any valid moral claims. I also consider compassion, by definition, to be concerned with suffering, harms or losses. People who donât come to exist donât experience suffering or harm and have lost nothing. They also donât experience injustice.
Longtermists tend to seem focused on ensuring future moral patients exist, i.e. through extinction risk reduction. But, as above, ensuring moral patients come to exist is not a matter of compassion or justice for those moral patients. Still, they may help or (harm!) other moral patients, including other humans who would exist anyway, animals, aliens or artificial sentience.
On the other hand, longtermism is still compatible with a primary concern for compassion or justice, including through asymmetric person-affecting views and wide person-affecting views (e.g. Thomas, 2019, probably focus on s-risks and quality improvements), negative utilitarianism (focus on s-risks) and perhaps even narrow person-affecting views. However, utilitarian versions of most of these views still seem prone, at least in principle, to endorsing killing everyone to replace us and our descendants with better off individuals, even if each of us and our descendants would have had an apparently good life and object. I think some (symmetric and perhaps asymmetric) narrow person-affecting views can avoid this, and maybe these are the ones that fit best with compassion and justice. See my post here.
That being said, empathy could mean more than just compassion or justice and could endorse bringing happy people into existence for their own sake, e.g. Carlsmith, 2021. I disagree that we should create people for their own sake, though, and my intuitions are person-affecting.
Other issues people have with longtermism are fanaticism and ambiguity; the probability that any individual averts an existential catastrophe is usually quite low at best (e.g. 1 in a million), and the numbers are also pretty speculative.
Yeah, I meant to convey this in my post but framing it a bit differently â that they are real people with valid moral claims who may exist. I suppose framing it this way is just moving the hypothetical condition elsewhere to emphasize that, if they do exist, they would be real people with real moral claims, and that matters. Maybe thatâs confusing though.
BTW, my personal views lean towards a suffering-focused ethics that isnât seeking to create happy people for their own sake. But I still think that, in coming to that view, Iâm concerned with the experience of those hypothetical people in the fuzzy, caring way that utilitarians are charged with disregarding. Thatâs my main point here. But maybe I just get off the crazy train at my unique stop. I wouldnât consider tiling the universe with hedonium to be the ultimate act of care/âjustice, but I suppose someone could feel that way, and thereby make an argument along the same lines.
Agreed there are other issues with longtermism â just wanted to respond to the âitâs not about care or empathyâ critique.