Agreed—upon reflection, this was what wrote my bottom line, and yes, this seemed like essentially the only viable way of approaching longtermism, according to my intuitions. This also seems to match the moral intuitions of many people I have spoken with, given the various issues with the alternatives. And I didn’t try to claim that 50% specifically was justified by anything—as you pointed out, almost any balance of shortermism and longtermism could be an outcome of what many humans actually embrace, but as I argued, if we are roughly utilitarian in each context with those weights, the different options lead to very similar conclusions in most contexts.
Given that if we are willing to be utilitarian by weighting across these two preferences, I believe that any one such weighting will lead to a coherent preference ordering—which is valuable if we don’t want to be Dutch booked, among other things. But I don’t think that it’s in some way more correct to start with “time-impartial utilitarianism is the correct objective morality,” and ignore actual human intuitions about what we care about, which you seem to imply is the single coherent longtermist position, while my approach is only justified by preventing analysis paralysis—but perhaps I misunderstood.
Agreed—upon reflection, this was what wrote my bottom line, and yes, this seemed like essentially the only viable way of approaching longtermism, according to my intuitions. This also seems to match the moral intuitions of many people I have spoken with, given the various issues with the alternatives. And I didn’t try to claim that 50% specifically was justified by anything—as you pointed out, almost any balance of shortermism and longtermism could be an outcome of what many humans actually embrace, but as I argued, if we are roughly utilitarian in each context with those weights, the different options lead to very similar conclusions in most contexts.
Given that if we are willing to be utilitarian by weighting across these two preferences, I believe that any one such weighting will lead to a coherent preference ordering—which is valuable if we don’t want to be Dutch booked, among other things. But I don’t think that it’s in some way more correct to start with “time-impartial utilitarianism is the correct objective morality,” and ignore actual human intuitions about what we care about, which you seem to imply is the single coherent longtermist position, while my approach is only justified by preventing analysis paralysis—but perhaps I misunderstood.