It would be interesting if person-affecting arguments lead one to pass on reducing abortion, because while you care about currently existing babies, by the time any intervention you might support today will have any effect, they will have already been born or not, and hence too late to help. There will be a new cohort in need of help, of course, but you don’t care about them until they’re conceived, so won’t be interested in working to help them now.
More generally, you would neglect any intervention that only affects people under the age of X if it will take longer than X years to implement the intervention.
However, if such an initiative was started by longtermists, person-affecting-view-ists might join it half way through. This suggests an interesting way for longtermists to leverage* the help of people with person-affecting views! (It is possible you might think it was immoral to exploit their temporal inconsistency in this way however).
This is assuming that death isn’t bad, though, right? In a sense, the fetus exists in the whole of the outcome, past, present and future together, regardless of what we do, and then it becomes a question of whether or not a longer life can be better on such an account for a fetus (and whether or not fetuses should count). New_EA did write:
I think the world ending would be bad because 7 billion people would die
EDIT: Ah, did you mean we’d always be too late? On a wide person-affecting view, the future ones could still matter.
Plausibly, feotuses will not be morally relevant on such a view as they won’t exist whatever we choose to do.
It would be interesting if person-affecting arguments lead one to pass on reducing abortion, because while you care about currently existing babies, by the time any intervention you might support today will have any effect, they will have already been born or not, and hence too late to help. There will be a new cohort in need of help, of course, but you don’t care about them until they’re conceived, so won’t be interested in working to help them now.
More generally, you would neglect any intervention that only affects people under the age of X if it will take longer than X years to implement the intervention.
However, if such an initiative was started by longtermists, person-affecting-view-ists might join it half way through. This suggests an interesting way for longtermists to leverage* the help of people with person-affecting views! (It is possible you might think it was immoral to exploit their temporal inconsistency in this way however).
This is assuming that death isn’t bad, though, right? In a sense, the fetus exists in the whole of the outcome, past, present and future together, regardless of what we do, and then it becomes a question of whether or not a longer life can be better on such an account for a fetus (and whether or not fetuses should count). New_EA did write:
EDIT: Ah, did you mean we’d always be too late? On a wide person-affecting view, the future ones could still matter.