Thanks for the follow up, Matthew! Strongly upvoted.
My best guess is also that additional GHG emissions are bad for wild animals, but it has very low resilience, so I do not want to advocate for conservationism. My views on the badness of the factory-farming of birds are much more resilient, so I am happy with people switching from poultry to beef, although I would rather have them switch to plant-based alternatives. Personally, I have been eating plant-based for 5 years.
Sorry! It sounded so much like you were referring to Weitzman 1998 that I actually did not open the link. My bad! I have now changed “That paper says one should discount” to “One should discount”.
a traditional justification for discounting is that if we didn’t, we’d be obliged to invest nearly all our income, since the number of future people could be so great.
I do not think this is a good argument for discounting. If it turns out we should invest nearly all our income to maximise welfare, then I would support it. In reality, I think the possibility of the number of future people being so great is more than offset by the rapid decay of how much we could affect such people, such that investing nearly all our income is not advisable.
I argue for discounting damages to those who would be much better off than we are at conventional rates, but giving sizable—even if not equal—weight to damages that would be suffered by everyone else, regardless of how far into the future they exist.
This rejects (perfect) impartiality, right? I strongly endorse expectedtotalhedonisticutilitarianism, so I would rather maintain impartiality. At the same time, the above seems like a good heuristic for better outcomes even under fully impartial views.
Thanks, Vasco! That’s odd—the Clare Palmer link is working for me. It’s her paper ‘Does Nature Matter? The Place of the Nonhuman in the Ethics of Climate Change’—what looks like a page proof is posted on www.academia.edu.
One of the arguments in my paper is that we’re not morally obliged to do the expectably best thing of our own free will, even if we reliably can, when it would benefit others who will be much better off than we are whatever we do. So I think we disagree on that point. That said, I entirely endorse your argument about heuristics, and have argued elsewhere that even act utilitarians will do better if they reject extreme savings rates.
Thanks for the follow up, Matthew! Strongly upvoted.
My best guess is also that additional GHG emissions are bad for wild animals, but it has very low resilience, so I do not want to advocate for conservationism. My views on the badness of the factory-farming of birds are much more resilient, so I am happy with people switching from poultry to beef, although I would rather have them switch to plant-based alternatives. Personally, I have been eating plant-based for 5 years.
Just flagging this link seems broken.
Sorry! It sounded so much like you were referring to Weitzman 1998 that I actually did not open the link. My bad! I have now changed “That paper says one should discount” to “One should discount”.
I do not think this is a good argument for discounting. If it turns out we should invest nearly all our income to maximise welfare, then I would support it. In reality, I think the possibility of the number of future people being so great is more than offset by the rapid decay of how much we could affect such people, such that investing nearly all our income is not advisable.
This rejects (perfect) impartiality, right? I strongly endorse expected total hedonistic utilitarianism, so I would rather maintain impartiality. At the same time, the above seems like a good heuristic for better outcomes even under fully impartial views.
Thanks, Vasco! That’s odd—the Clare Palmer link is working for me. It’s her paper ‘Does Nature Matter? The Place of the Nonhuman in the Ethics of Climate Change’—what looks like a page proof is posted on www.academia.edu.
One of the arguments in my paper is that we’re not morally obliged to do the expectably best thing of our own free will, even if we reliably can, when it would benefit others who will be much better off than we are whatever we do. So I think we disagree on that point. That said, I entirely endorse your argument about heuristics, and have argued elsewhere that even act utilitarians will do better if they reject extreme savings rates.
FYI the link doesn’t work for me either
Odd! Perhaps this one will work better.
That works!