Some things I liked about What We Owe the Future, despite my disagreements with the treatment of value asymmetries:
The thought experiment of imagining that you live one big super-life composed of all sentient beings’ experiences is cool, as a way of probing moral intuitions. (I’d say this kind of thought experiment is the core of ethics.)
It seems better than e.g. Rawls’ veil of ignorance because living all lives (1) makes it more salient that the possibly rare extreme experiences of some lives still exist even if you’re (un)lucky enough not to go through them, and (2) avoids favoring average-utilitarian intuitions.
Although the devil is very much in the details of what measure of (dis)value the total view totals up, the critiques of average, critical level, and symmetric person-affecting views are spot-on.
There’s some good discussion of avoiding lock-in of bad (/not-reflected-upon) values as a priority that most longtermists can get behind.
I was already inclined to think dominant values can be very contingent on factors that don’t seem ethically relevant, like differences in reproduction rates (biological or otherwise) or flukes of power imbalances. So I didn’t update much from reading about this. But I have the impression that many longtermists are a bit too complacent about future people converging to the values we’d endorse with proper reflection (strangely, even when they’re less sympathetic to moral realism than I am). And the vignettes about e.g. Benjamin Lay were pretty inspiring.
Relatedly, it’s great that premature space settlement is acknowledged as a source of lock-in / reduction of option value. Lots of discourse on longtermism seems to gloss over this.
Some things I liked about What We Owe the Future, despite my disagreements with the treatment of value asymmetries:
The thought experiment of imagining that you live one big super-life composed of all sentient beings’ experiences is cool, as a way of probing moral intuitions. (I’d say this kind of thought experiment is the core of ethics.)
It seems better than e.g. Rawls’ veil of ignorance because living all lives (1) makes it more salient that the possibly rare extreme experiences of some lives still exist even if you’re (un)lucky enough not to go through them, and (2) avoids favoring average-utilitarian intuitions.
Although the devil is very much in the details of what measure of (dis)value the total view totals up, the critiques of average, critical level, and symmetric person-affecting views are spot-on.
There’s some good discussion of avoiding lock-in of bad (/not-reflected-upon) values as a priority that most longtermists can get behind.
I was already inclined to think dominant values can be very contingent on factors that don’t seem ethically relevant, like differences in reproduction rates (biological or otherwise) or flukes of power imbalances. So I didn’t update much from reading about this. But I have the impression that many longtermists are a bit too complacent about future people converging to the values we’d endorse with proper reflection (strangely, even when they’re less sympathetic to moral realism than I am). And the vignettes about e.g. Benjamin Lay were pretty inspiring.
Relatedly, it’s great that premature space settlement is acknowledged as a source of lock-in / reduction of option value. Lots of discourse on longtermism seems to gloss over this.