I toyed with this idea too. I imagined a world where people could remember their past lives, and maybe there was also some way of making this public (some way of linking facebook profiles of your current life with your previous lives?) This was partly interesting because of the implications it had for people’s attitudes to animal welfare. (Hindu vegetarianism appears to have been unusually driven by a desire to promote animal welfare, as opposed to some other religious dietary restrictions which originated from human health needs).
However I think I preferred the world mentioned earlier in the post, where the same consequentialist utilitarian framework causes your appearance to update. It means that the feedback loops are faster. And I think people care more about being good-looking than they do having a nice time in their next life (even if they had good reason to believe that the next life were real).
The appearance-oriented idea is also a great mechanism for highlighting the fact that in the real world virtue and appearance are different (despite the fact that films and other art sometimes seem, horrifically, to confuse the two)
I’d also love to see a fictional world with a moral system that was explictly a karmic-utilitarian moral system. That is, the consequences of actions for particular agents matter proportionally to the amount of utility previously generated by those agents.
I toyed with this idea too. I imagined a world where people could remember their past lives, and maybe there was also some way of making this public (some way of linking facebook profiles of your current life with your previous lives?) This was partly interesting because of the implications it had for people’s attitudes to animal welfare. (Hindu vegetarianism appears to have been unusually driven by a desire to promote animal welfare, as opposed to some other religious dietary restrictions which originated from human health needs).
However I think I preferred the world mentioned earlier in the post, where the same consequentialist utilitarian framework causes your appearance to update. It means that the feedback loops are faster. And I think people care more about being good-looking than they do having a nice time in their next life (even if they had good reason to believe that the next life were real).
The appearance-oriented idea is also a great mechanism for highlighting the fact that in the real world virtue and appearance are different (despite the fact that films and other art sometimes seem, horrifically, to confuse the two)
I’d also love to see a fictional world with a moral system that was explictly a karmic-utilitarian moral system. That is, the consequences of actions for particular agents matter proportionally to the amount of utility previously generated by those agents.