I sympathize with this. It seems likely that the accessible population of our actions is finite, so I’m not sure one need to necessarily worried about what happens in the infinite case. I’m unworried if my impact on earth across its future is significantly positive, yet the answer of whether I’ve made the (possibly infinite) universe better is undefined.
However, one frustration to this tactic is that infinitarian concerns can ‘slip in’ whenever afforded a non-zero credence. So although given our best physics it is overwhelmingly likely the morally relevant domain of our actions will be constrained by a lightcone only finitely extended in the later-than direction (because of heat death, proton decay, etc.), we should assign some non-zero credence our best physics will be mistaken: perhaps life-permitting conditions could continue indefinitely, or we could wring out life asymptotically faster than the second law, etc. These ‘infinite outcomes’ swamp the expected value calculation, and so infinitarian worries loom large.
Putting to one side my bias towards aggregative consequentialism, someone has to say that to anyone except a radical consequentialist, the classic ‘hope physics is broken’ example does make you seem crazy and consequentialism seem wrong! :p
I sympathize with this. It seems likely that the accessible population of our actions is finite, so I’m not sure one need to necessarily worried about what happens in the infinite case. I’m unworried if my impact on earth across its future is significantly positive, yet the answer of whether I’ve made the (possibly infinite) universe better is undefined.
However, one frustration to this tactic is that infinitarian concerns can ‘slip in’ whenever afforded a non-zero credence. So although given our best physics it is overwhelmingly likely the morally relevant domain of our actions will be constrained by a lightcone only finitely extended in the later-than direction (because of heat death, proton decay, etc.), we should assign some non-zero credence our best physics will be mistaken: perhaps life-permitting conditions could continue indefinitely, or we could wring out life asymptotically faster than the second law, etc. These ‘infinite outcomes’ swamp the expected value calculation, and so infinitarian worries loom large.
Putting to one side my bias towards aggregative consequentialism, someone has to say that to anyone except a radical consequentialist, the classic ‘hope physics is broken’ example does make you seem crazy and consequentialism seem wrong! :p
Or perhaps uncertainty to the size of the universe might lead to similar worries, if we merely know it is finite, but do not have a bound.