Even with healthy moral uncertainty, I think we should attach very little weight to moral theories that give future people’s utility negligible moral weight. For the kinds of reasons that suggest we can attach them less weight don’t go any way to suggesting that we can ignore them. To do this they’d have to show that future people’s moral weight was (more than!) inversely proportional to their temporal distance from us. But the reasons they give tend to show that we have special obligations to people in our generation, and say nothing about our obligations to people living in the year 3000AD vs people living in the year 30,000AD. [Maybe i’m missing an argument here?!] Thus any plausible moral theory will such that the calculation will be dominated by very long term effects, and long term effects will dominate our decision making process.
This is a nice idea but I worry it won’t work.
Even with healthy moral uncertainty, I think we should attach very little weight to moral theories that give future people’s utility negligible moral weight. For the kinds of reasons that suggest we can attach them less weight don’t go any way to suggesting that we can ignore them. To do this they’d have to show that future people’s moral weight was (more than!) inversely proportional to their temporal distance from us. But the reasons they give tend to show that we have special obligations to people in our generation, and say nothing about our obligations to people living in the year 3000AD vs people living in the year 30,000AD. [Maybe i’m missing an argument here?!] Thus any plausible moral theory will such that the calculation will be dominated by very long term effects, and long term effects will dominate our decision making process.