There are many different ways of carving up the set of “effects” according to the reasoning above, which favor different strategies. For example: I might say that I’m confident that an AMF donation saves lives, and I’m clueless about its long-term effects overall. Yet I could just as well say I’m confident that there’s some nontrivially likely possible world containing an astronomical number of happy lives, which the donation makes less likely via potentially increasing x-risk, and I’m clueless about all the other effects overall. So, at least without an argument that some decomposition of the effects is normatively privileged over others, Option 3 won’t give us much action guidance.
Wouldn’t you also say that the donation makes these happy lives more likely on some elements of your representor via potentially increasing x-risk? So then they’re neither made determinately better off nor determinately worse off in expectation, and we can (maybe) ignore them.
Maybe you need some account of transworld identity (or counterparts) to match these lives across possible worlds, though.
Maybe you need some account of transworld identity (or counterparts) to match these lives across possible worlds
That’s the concern, yeah. When I said ”some nontrivially likely possible world containing an astronomical number of happy lives”, I should have said these were happy experience-moments, which (1) by definition only exist in the given possible world, and (2) seem to be the things I ultimately morally care about, not transworld persons.[1] Likewise each of the experience-moments of the lives directly saved by the AMF donation only exist in a given possible world.
Against option 3, you write:
Wouldn’t you also say that the donation makes these happy lives more likely on some elements of your representor via potentially increasing x-risk? So then they’re neither made determinately better off nor determinately worse off in expectation, and we can (maybe) ignore them.
Maybe you need some account of transworld identity (or counterparts) to match these lives across possible worlds, though.
That’s the concern, yeah. When I said ”some nontrivially likely possible world containing an astronomical number of happy lives”, I should have said these were happy experience-moments, which (1) by definition only exist in the given possible world, and (2) seem to be the things I ultimately morally care about, not transworld persons.[1] Likewise each of the experience-moments of the lives directly saved by the AMF donation only exist in a given possible world.
(Or spacetime regions.)