Good question! I think I understand where you are coming from but I don’t think we should do that. We are used to not really care or think about future people but I think there are other reasons behind it.
A very important one is that we don’t see future people or their problems, so we don’t sympathize with them like we do with the rest. We have to make an effort to picture them and their troubles. Like if we didn’t have enough in the here and now!
Another one is the odds of those futures. Any prediction is less likely to occur the further it is in the future.
And lastly, we have to take into consideration how the influence of any action diminish through time.
So it’s not the value of a person that changes if they haven’t been borned yet, but the chances of helping them. And when we decide how to use our resources we should have the two things in mind so we can calculate what is the “expected value” of every possible action and choose the one with the highest.
So why do many effective altruists want to focus in those causes if there is a discount caused by lower probabilities? Because they believe that there could be many many more people in the future than have ever existed so the value of helping them and saving them from existential risks is higher to the point of turning arround the results.
Of course that is really difficult to make good predictions and there is no concensus on how important is longtermism, but I think we should always take into account that most of the time our emotions and desires will favor short term things and won’t care about the issues they don’t see.
Good question! I think I understand where you are coming from but I don’t think we should do that. We are used to not really care or think about future people but I think there are other reasons behind it.
A very important one is that we don’t see future people or their problems, so we don’t sympathize with them like we do with the rest. We have to make an effort to picture them and their troubles. Like if we didn’t have enough in the here and now!
Another one is the odds of those futures. Any prediction is less likely to occur the further it is in the future.
And lastly, we have to take into consideration how the influence of any action diminish through time.
So it’s not the value of a person that changes if they haven’t been borned yet, but the chances of helping them. And when we decide how to use our resources we should have the two things in mind so we can calculate what is the “expected value” of every possible action and choose the one with the highest.
So why do many effective altruists want to focus in those causes if there is a discount caused by lower probabilities? Because they believe that there could be many many more people in the future than have ever existed so the value of helping them and saving them from existential risks is higher to the point of turning arround the results.
Of course that is really difficult to make good predictions and there is no concensus on how important is longtermism, but I think we should always take into account that most of the time our emotions and desires will favor short term things and won’t care about the issues they don’t see.
Thanks for your submission!