I don’t necessarily disagree with your conclusion, but I don’t know how you can feel sure about weighing a chicken’s suffering vs a person.
But I definitely disagree with the initial conclusion, and I think it is because you don’t fear extreme suffering enough. If everyone behind the veil of ignorance knew what the worst suffering was, they would fear it more than they would value time at the beach.
Re: longtermism, I find the argument in Pinker’s latest book to be pretty compelling:
The optimal rate at which the discount the future is a problem that we face not just as individuals but as societies, as we decide how much public wealth we should spend benefit our older selves and future generations. Discount it we must. It’s not only that a current sacrifice would be in vain if an asteroid sends us the way of the dinosaurs. It’s also that our ignorance of what the future will bring, including advances in technology, grows exponentially the farther out we plan. It would have made little sense for our ancestors a century ago to have scrimped for our benefit—say, diverting money from schools and roads to a stockpile of iron lungs to prepare for a polio epidemic—given that we’re six times richer and have solved some of their problems while facing new ones they could not have dreamed of.
I agree with this argument for discount rates, but I think it is a practical rather than philosophical argument. That is, I don’t think it undermines the idea that if we were to avert extinction, all of the future lives thereby enabled should be given “full weight.”
I don’t necessarily disagree with your conclusion, but I don’t know how you can feel sure about weighing a chicken’s suffering vs a person.
But I definitely disagree with the initial conclusion, and I think it is because you don’t fear extreme suffering enough. If everyone behind the veil of ignorance knew what the worst suffering was, they would fear it more than they would value time at the beach.
Re: longtermism, I find the argument in Pinker’s latest book to be pretty compelling:
The optimal rate at which the discount the future is a problem that we face not just as individuals but as societies, as we decide how much public wealth we should spend benefit our older selves and future generations. Discount it we must. It’s not only that a current sacrifice would be in vain if an asteroid sends us the way of the dinosaurs. It’s also that our ignorance of what the future will bring, including advances in technology, grows exponentially the farther out we plan. It would have made little sense for our ancestors a century ago to have scrimped for our benefit—say, diverting money from schools and roads to a stockpile of iron lungs to prepare for a polio epidemic—given that we’re six times richer and have solved some of their problems while facing new ones they could not have dreamed of.
I agree with this argument for discount rates, but I think it is a practical rather than philosophical argument. That is, I don’t think it undermines the idea that if we were to avert extinction, all of the future lives thereby enabled should be given “full weight.”