(Note: this comment will probably draw heavily from The Precipice, because that’s by far the best argument I’ve heard against temporal discounting. I don’t have a copy of the book with me, so if this is close enough to that explanation you can just disqualify me :P)
In normal situations, it works well to discount things like money based off the time it takes to get them. After all, money is worth less as time goes on, due to inflation; something might happen to you, so you can’t collect the money later on; and there’s an inherent uncertainty in whether or not you’ll actually get the reward you’re promised, later. Human lives aren’t subject to inflation—pain and suffering are pain and suffering across time, whether or not there are more people.Something might happen to the world, and I agree that it’s important to discount based on that, but that discounting works out to be relatively small in the grand scheme of things. People in the long-term future are still inherently valuable because they’re people, and their collective value is very important—and thus it should be a major consideration for people living now.
There’s one thing I’ve been ignoring, and it’s something called “pure time preference,” essentially the inherent preference for having something earlier than later just because of its position in time. Pure time preference shouldn’t be applied to the long term future for one simple reason—if you tried to apply a reasonable discount rate based on it *back* to Ancient Rome, the consuls would conclude that one moment of suffering for one of their subjects was worth as much as the entire human race today suffering for their entire lives.
Basically, we should discount the moral value of people based on the catastrophe risk—the chance that the world ends in the time from now to then, and the gains we strove for won’t mean anything. (Which is a relatively small discount, all things considered, keeping substantial amounts of value in the longterm future—and gets directly reduced by working on existential risk) But it’s not fair to people in the future to discount based on anything else—like pure time preference, or inflation—because given no catastrophe until then, their lives, joys, pains, and suffering are worth just as much as people today, or people living in Ancient Rome.
Heavily relying on preexisting content is okay! I expect a good answer might just come from reviewing the existing literature and mashing together the content
(Note: this comment will probably draw heavily from The Precipice, because that’s by far the best argument I’ve heard against temporal discounting. I don’t have a copy of the book with me, so if this is close enough to that explanation you can just disqualify me :P)
In normal situations, it works well to discount things like money based off the time it takes to get them. After all, money is worth less as time goes on, due to inflation; something might happen to you, so you can’t collect the money later on; and there’s an inherent uncertainty in whether or not you’ll actually get the reward you’re promised, later. Human lives aren’t subject to inflation—pain and suffering are pain and suffering across time, whether or not there are more people.Something might happen to the world, and I agree that it’s important to discount based on that, but that discounting works out to be relatively small in the grand scheme of things. People in the long-term future are still inherently valuable because they’re people, and their collective value is very important—and thus it should be a major consideration for people living now.
There’s one thing I’ve been ignoring, and it’s something called “pure time preference,” essentially the inherent preference for having something earlier than later just because of its position in time. Pure time preference shouldn’t be applied to the long term future for one simple reason—if you tried to apply a reasonable discount rate based on it *back* to Ancient Rome, the consuls would conclude that one moment of suffering for one of their subjects was worth as much as the entire human race today suffering for their entire lives.
Basically, we should discount the moral value of people based on the catastrophe risk—the chance that the world ends in the time from now to then, and the gains we strove for won’t mean anything. (Which is a relatively small discount, all things considered, keeping substantial amounts of value in the longterm future—and gets directly reduced by working on existential risk) But it’s not fair to people in the future to discount based on anything else—like pure time preference, or inflation—because given no catastrophe until then, their lives, joys, pains, and suffering are worth just as much as people today, or people living in Ancient Rome.
Thanks for your submission!
Heavily relying on preexisting content is okay! I expect a good answer might just come from reviewing the existing literature and mashing together the content