Thank you for the reply, Toby. I agree that humanity have instrumental values to all sentient beings. And I am glad that you want to include animals when you say shaping the future.
This might work, though does have some surprising effects, such as that even after our extinction, the trajectory might not stay at zero
I wonder why you think this would be surprising? If humans are not the only beings who have intrinsic values, why is it surprising that there will be values left after humans go extinct?
It’s because I’m not intending the trajectories to be a measure of all value in the universe, only the value we affect through our choices. When humanity goes extinct, it no longer contributes intrinsic value through its own flourishing and it has no further choices which could have instrumental value, so you might expect its ongoing value to be zero. And it would be on many measures.
Setting up the measures so that it goes to zero at that point also greatly simplifies the analysis, and we need all the simplification we can get if we want to get a grasp on the value of the longterm future. (Note that this isn’t saying we should ignore effects of our actions on others, just that if there is a formal way of setting things up that recommends the same actions but is more analytically tractable, we should use that.)
Thank you for the reply, Toby. I agree that humanity have instrumental values to all sentient beings. And I am glad that you want to include animals when you say shaping the future.
I wonder why you think this would be surprising? If humans are not the only beings who have intrinsic values, why is it surprising that there will be values left after humans go extinct?
It’s because I’m not intending the trajectories to be a measure of all value in the universe, only the value we affect through our choices. When humanity goes extinct, it no longer contributes intrinsic value through its own flourishing and it has no further choices which could have instrumental value, so you might expect its ongoing value to be zero. And it would be on many measures.
Setting up the measures so that it goes to zero at that point also greatly simplifies the analysis, and we need all the simplification we can get if we want to get a grasp on the value of the longterm future. (Note that this isn’t saying we should ignore effects of our actions on others, just that if there is a formal way of setting things up that recommends the same actions but is more analytically tractable, we should use that.)