When considering the relevant lives, this includes all humans, animals and future people. We generally do not discount the lives of future people intrinsically at all.
This longtermist claim is common but not absolute in EA, and I’m brushing over mutliple population ethics questions here. (e.g. severals EA might hold person-affecting views)
I don’t think this is a longtermist claim, nor does it preclude person-affecting views.
You can still value future people equally as present people, and not discount them at all insofar as they are sure to exist. If they are less likely to exist, you could discount them by this 1 - probability, in an expected value computation. OK, the math of this does get challenging for the person-affecting-view-er, insofar as they cannot just consider their impact on the sum of this value. They only care about improving the welfare holding the number of people constant but not the component of the effect of their choice that occurs through changing the expected number of people in existence.
I actually think total-population-ethics-ers would do that probability discounting too; however, they would value their impact on the number of people likely to exist.
I don’t think this is a longtermist claim, nor does it preclude person-affecting views.
You can still value future people equally as present people, and not discount them at all insofar as they are sure to exist. If they are less likely to exist, you could discount them by this 1 - probability, in an expected value computation. OK, the math of this does get challenging for the person-affecting-view-er, insofar as they cannot just consider their impact on the sum of this value. They only care about improving the welfare holding the number of people constant but not the component of the effect of their choice that occurs through changing the expected number of people in existence.
I actually think total-population-ethics-ers would do that probability discounting too; however, they would value their impact on the number of people likely to exist.