Question: Why Shouldn’t We Discount the Lives of Future People?
Answer: Discounting the value of the future is a natural human thing to do, and there are contexts where it makes sense. If offered twenty dollars today or in ten years it makes sense to take it now. In ten years the money won’t buy as much. But it doesn’t make sense to value human lives this way. Here’s why.
Let’s say we weigh a future person’s life at one percent less for each year in the future they exist. That doesn’t seem so unreasonable, but the discounting compounds rapidly. If Caesar had done this he would have valued the life of one of his own more than the entire current population of Earth. Most people don’t think that would be fair. We shouldn’t discount the lives of future people for the same reason we would not want past people to have discounted us. We can’t get around this by tweaking that number either. For any discount rate we imagine we can go out far enough that we are committed to making an absurd tradeoff.
We also have no reason to treat a human life like a depreciating asset. The contexts where discounting is valid are cases where the value of something falls over time or uncertainty makes the benefit less likely. This is why we can rationally discount future monetary rewards. Money loses value over time, but a person’s life does not. There is no reason to think that your life would be worth less had you been born ten years later, and the same goes for future people. Discounting future lives commits to treating a human life as if it is something that loses value over time. Since it does not, it doesn’t make sense to discount them.
Question: Why Shouldn’t We Discount the Lives of Future People?
Answer: Discounting the value of the future is a natural human thing to do, and there are contexts where it makes sense. If offered twenty dollars today or in ten years it makes sense to take it now. In ten years the money won’t buy as much. But it doesn’t make sense to value human lives this way. Here’s why.
Let’s say we weigh a future person’s life at one percent less for each year in the future they exist. That doesn’t seem so unreasonable, but the discounting compounds rapidly. If Caesar had done this he would have valued the life of one of his own more than the entire current population of Earth. Most people don’t think that would be fair. We shouldn’t discount the lives of future people for the same reason we would not want past people to have discounted us. We can’t get around this by tweaking that number either. For any discount rate we imagine we can go out far enough that we are committed to making an absurd tradeoff.
We also have no reason to treat a human life like a depreciating asset. The contexts where discounting is valid are cases where the value of something falls over time or uncertainty makes the benefit less likely. This is why we can rationally discount future monetary rewards. Money loses value over time, but a person’s life does not. There is no reason to think that your life would be worth less had you been born ten years later, and the same goes for future people. Discounting future lives commits to treating a human life as if it is something that loses value over time. Since it does not, it doesn’t make sense to discount them.
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