Even simpler counterexample: Josh’s view would preclude climate change as being important at all. Josh probably does not believe climate change is irrelevant just because it will mostly harm people in a few decades.
I suspect what’s unarticulated is that Josh doesn’t believe in lives in the far future, but hasn’t explained why lives 1000 years from now are less important than lives 100 years from now. I sympathize because I have the same intuition. But it’s probably wrong.
I have a similar intuition, but I think for me it isn’t that I think far future lives should be discounted. Rather, it’s that I think the uncertainty on basically everything is so large at that time scale (more than 1k years in the future) that it feels like the whole exercise is kind of a joke. To be clear: I’m not saying this take is right, but at a gut level I feel it very strongly.
I anticipate the response being “climate change is already causing suffering now,” which is true, even though the same people would agree that the worst effects are decades in the future and mostly borne by future generations.
Even simpler counterexample: Josh’s view would preclude climate change as being important at all. Josh probably does not believe climate change is irrelevant just because it will mostly harm people in a few decades.
I suspect what’s unarticulated is that Josh doesn’t believe in lives in the far future, but hasn’t explained why lives 1000 years from now are less important than lives 100 years from now. I sympathize because I have the same intuition. But it’s probably wrong.
I have a similar intuition, but I think for me it isn’t that I think far future lives should be discounted. Rather, it’s that I think the uncertainty on basically everything is so large at that time scale (more than 1k years in the future) that it feels like the whole exercise is kind of a joke. To be clear: I’m not saying this take is right, but at a gut level I feel it very strongly.
I anticipate the response being “climate change is already causing suffering now,” which is true, even though the same people would agree that the worst effects are decades in the future and mostly borne by future generations.