Imagine you had a time machine. A little box that you could climb inside and use to explore past and future worlds. And so you set off to see what the future may bring. And you find a future of immense wonders: glittering domes, flying cars, and strange planets with iridescent moons. But not all is perfect. On a space station you find a child lost and separated from her family. Under a strange sun you find a soldier lying for days injured on a battlefield with no hope of help. In a virtual world you find an uploaded mind trapped alone in a blank empty cyberspace for centuries.
And imagine that your time machine comes equipped with a sonic doohickey and that you have the power to help these future strangers. Should you help them? Does it matter when they are? Does their distance from our here and now make any difference to their moral worth? Of course it does not matter. Of course you should help.
Now in real life we don’t have a time machine. So the future is distant and uncertain. And as such there are very many reasons to apply a discount rate and to lower the value we place on the future. We discount for the fact that the future will be richer than us and have resources we can only dream of. We discount for the uncertainty that our actions will have an impact as they are washed out over time. We discount for the fact that the world may end and perhaps there will be no future. We discount for ourselves if we know that we want things sooner rather than later.
But never should we discount the moral worth of future beings simply because they are in the future. There is just no case for it. Like none. I cannot think of one, philosophers around the world cannot think of one (the closest I have heard of is a rare mostly dismissed view that all beings that do not yet exist yet have zero moral worth), and I assume you cannot think of one either. People distanced in time are like us, individuals. Their tears, their helplessness, their pain and sorrow, their joy and laughter all matter. They matter.
Imagine you had a time machine. A little box that you could climb inside and use to explore past and future worlds. And so you set off to see what the future may bring. And you find a future of immense wonders: glittering domes, flying cars, and strange planets with iridescent moons. But not all is perfect. On a space station you find a child lost and separated from her family. Under a strange sun you find a soldier lying for days injured on a battlefield with no hope of help. In a virtual world you find an uploaded mind trapped alone in a blank empty cyberspace for centuries.
And imagine that your time machine comes equipped with a sonic doohickey and that you have the power to help these future strangers. Should you help them? Does it matter when they are? Does their distance from our here and now make any difference to their moral worth? Of course it does not matter. Of course you should help.
Now in real life we don’t have a time machine. So the future is distant and uncertain. And as such there are very many reasons to apply a discount rate and to lower the value we place on the future. We discount for the fact that the future will be richer than us and have resources we can only dream of. We discount for the uncertainty that our actions will have an impact as they are washed out over time. We discount for the fact that the world may end and perhaps there will be no future. We discount for ourselves if we know that we want things sooner rather than later.
But never should we discount the moral worth of future beings simply because they are in the future. There is just no case for it. Like none. I cannot think of one, philosophers around the world cannot think of one (the closest I have heard of is a rare mostly dismissed view that all beings that do not yet exist yet have zero moral worth), and I assume you cannot think of one either. People distanced in time are like us, individuals. Their tears, their helplessness, their pain and sorrow, their joy and laughter all matter. They matter.
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