An objection to the non-identity problem: shouldn’t disregarding the welfare of non-existent people preclude most interventions on child mortality and education?
One objection against favoring the long-term future is that we don’t have duties towards people who still don’t exist. However, I believe that, when someone presents a claim like that, probably what they want to state is that we should discount future benefits (for some reason), or that we don’t have a duty towards people who will only exist in the far future. But it turns out that such a claim apparently proves too much; it proves that, for instance, we have no obligation to invest on reducing the mortality of infants less than one year old in the next two years
The most effective interventions in saving lives often do so by saving young children. Now, imagine you deploy an intervention similar to those of Against Malaria Foundation—i.e., distributing bednets to reduce contagion. At the beggining, you spend months studying, then preparing, then you go to the field and distribute bednets, and then one or two years later you evaluate how many malaria cases were prevented in comparison to a baseline. It turns out that most cases of averted deaths (and disabilities and years of life gained) correspond to kids who had not yet been conceived when you started studying.
Similarly, if someone starts advocating an effective basic education reform today, they will only succeed in enacting it in some years—thus we can expect that most of the positive effects will happen many years later.
(Actually, for anyone born in the last few years, we can expect that most of their positive impact will affect people who are not born yet. If there’s any value in positivel influencing these children, most of it will happen to people who are not yet born)
This means that, at the beggining of this project, most of the impact corresponded to people who didn’t exist yet—so you were under no moral obligation to help them.
It’s also a significant problem for near-term animal welfare work, since the lifespan of broiler chickens is so short, almost certainly any possible current action will only benefit future chickens.
An objection to the non-identity problem: shouldn’t disregarding the welfare of non-existent people preclude most interventions on child mortality and education?
One objection against favoring the long-term future is that we don’t have duties towards people who still don’t exist. However, I believe that, when someone presents a claim like that, probably what they want to state is that we should discount future benefits (for some reason), or that we don’t have a duty towards people who will only exist in the far future. But it turns out that such a claim apparently proves too much; it proves that, for instance, we have no obligation to invest on reducing the mortality of infants less than one year old in the next two years
The most effective interventions in saving lives often do so by saving young children. Now, imagine you deploy an intervention similar to those of Against Malaria Foundation—i.e., distributing bednets to reduce contagion. At the beggining, you spend months studying, then preparing, then you go to the field and distribute bednets, and then one or two years later you evaluate how many malaria cases were prevented in comparison to a baseline. It turns out that most cases of averted deaths (and disabilities and years of life gained) correspond to kids who had not yet been conceived when you started studying.
Similarly, if someone starts advocating an effective basic education reform today, they will only succeed in enacting it in some years—thus we can expect that most of the positive effects will happen many years later.
(Actually, for anyone born in the last few years, we can expect that most of their positive impact will affect people who are not born yet. If there’s any value in positivel influencing these children, most of it will happen to people who are not yet born)
This means that, at the beggining of this project, most of the impact corresponded to people who didn’t exist yet—so you were under no moral obligation to help them.
It’s also a significant problem for near-term animal welfare work, since the lifespan of broiler chickens is so short, almost certainly any possible current action will only benefit future chickens.