The value of a longtermist view depends on the control you believe that you can exert over the future. While you might find moral value in creating an actual future, a hypothetical future that you believe that you will not create has no moral significance for your present actions, in terms of number of lives present, circumstances present at that future time, or any other possible feature of it.
Put differently: to declare a possibility that your actions turn out to be necessary (or even sufficient) causes of future events, but without believing that those future events will necessarily occur after your actions, is too imply that the consequences of your actions lack moral significance to you. And that’s longtermism in a nutshell, just actions in pursuit of an implausible future.
How do you derive the credence you give to each moral view you hold, by the way, those numbers like 60%? What do those percentages mean to you? Are they a historical account of the frequency of your actual moral views arbitrarily occurring, one then another in some sequence, or are they a subjective experience of the amount of belief in each view that you hold during a particular instance of comparing different moral views, or something else? Are they a “belief in your beliefs”? Are you assigning probabilities to the outputs of your self-awareness?
The value of a longtermist view depends on the control you believe that you can exert over the future. While you might find moral value in creating an actual future, a hypothetical future that you believe that you will not create has no moral significance for your present actions, in terms of number of lives present, circumstances present at that future time, or any other possible feature of it.
Put differently: to declare a possibility that your actions turn out to be necessary (or even sufficient) causes of future events, but without believing that those future events will necessarily occur after your actions, is too imply that the consequences of your actions lack moral significance to you. And that’s longtermism in a nutshell, just actions in pursuit of an implausible future.
How do you derive the credence you give to each moral view you hold, by the way, those numbers like 60%? What do those percentages mean to you? Are they a historical account of the frequency of your actual moral views arbitrarily occurring, one then another in some sequence, or are they a subjective experience of the amount of belief in each view that you hold during a particular instance of comparing different moral views, or something else? Are they a “belief in your beliefs”? Are you assigning probabilities to the outputs of your self-awareness?