My submission below is over the word limit by 243 words. I hope it can make up for its lack of brevity with some additional depth.
“Shouldn’t we discount the moral value of people in the future based on how far away they will exist into the future?”
Why do you think so?
“Well, it seems like we care about the future, but there are so many problems here and now. Shouldn’t we work on those first?”
Not if we accept that morality ought to be an impartial affair. If we have agreed that there should be no spacial discount rate, racial discount rate, or species discount rate, then we should be inclined to reject a temporal discount rate.
But perhaps you are partial to partiality, maybe we do have special obligations to certain people. However, we should still be suspicious of discounting moral value based on distance in time. A modest discount rate of 1% per year would imply that the life of Pamba, King of the Hattians, is worth 53,569,849,000,000,000,000 lives today. I do not know what the name of that number is, but I think we can agree that no person is worth that many lives.
“Fine,” you may reply, “but couldn’t there be other reasons we would want to discount the moral value of future people? Can we really say that anything we can do today will affect future people, even in-expectation? And don’t the benefits of interventions now compound into the future? If I build a hospital today, it will serve far more people than it would have if I built it in 200 years!”
We should be wary of this reply. I will only address the first concern directly but think the second is roughly analogous.
Let us say we can choose to bury nuclear waste in either
near P1 City, which is prone to earthquakes, but which seismologists say will not experience another earthquake for 2,000 years, after which, it will likely experience an earthquake
or we can bury it near P2 City, where earthquakes never occur
Given the long half-life on nuclear waste, we can be sure that an earthquake 2,000 or so years from now will cause the population of P1 to experience some kind of catastrophe which would have been averted by burying the nuclear waste near P2.
Suppose further that if we choose (1) the people in P2 will be pleased because their property values will not go down, but regardless of whether or not we choose (1), the present people in P1 will be just as well-off. It seems wrong that a small benefit to the people in P2 could justify a catastrophe we anticipated by choosing (1) just because it would happen much later.
We can still ‘discount’ the effects of improbable events in proportion to their improbability, but, we should not expect improbability and distance in time to correlate more than very roughly. Taking probability into account is something we already do in expected value calculations and does not amount to discounting the moral value of people based on their distance from us in time.
In the same vein, the compounding benefits of some interventions do give us a reason to favor the early implementation of interventions over the later implementations of it, but not all interventions, even among those affecting the near future, have compounding benefits. So, would we really be discounting the moral value of future people by taking this into account, or like with probability, is there some other heuristic at play?
My submission below is over the word limit by 243 words. I hope it can make up for its lack of brevity with some additional depth.
“Shouldn’t we discount the moral value of people in the future based on how far away they will exist into the future?”
Why do you think so?
“Well, it seems like we care about the future, but there are so many problems here and now. Shouldn’t we work on those first?”
Not if we accept that morality ought to be an impartial affair. If we have agreed that there should be no spacial discount rate, racial discount rate, or species discount rate, then we should be inclined to reject a temporal discount rate.
But perhaps you are partial to partiality, maybe we do have special obligations to certain people. However, we should still be suspicious of discounting moral value based on distance in time. A modest discount rate of 1% per year would imply that the life of Pamba, King of the Hattians, is worth 53,569,849,000,000,000,000 lives today. I do not know what the name of that number is, but I think we can agree that no person is worth that many lives.
“Fine,” you may reply, “but couldn’t there be other reasons we would want to discount the moral value of future people? Can we really say that anything we can do today will affect future people, even in-expectation? And don’t the benefits of interventions now compound into the future? If I build a hospital today, it will serve far more people than it would have if I built it in 200 years!”
We should be wary of this reply. I will only address the first concern directly but think the second is roughly analogous.
Let us say we can choose to bury nuclear waste in either
near P1 City, which is prone to earthquakes, but which seismologists say will not experience another earthquake for 2,000 years, after which, it will likely experience an earthquake
or we can bury it near P2 City, where earthquakes never occur
Given the long half-life on nuclear waste, we can be sure that an earthquake 2,000 or so years from now will cause the population of P1 to experience some kind of catastrophe which would have been averted by burying the nuclear waste near P2.
Suppose further that if we choose (1) the people in P2 will be pleased because their property values will not go down, but regardless of whether or not we choose (1), the present people in P1 will be just as well-off. It seems wrong that a small benefit to the people in P2 could justify a catastrophe we anticipated by choosing (1) just because it would happen much later.
We can still ‘discount’ the effects of improbable events in proportion to their improbability, but, we should not expect improbability and distance in time to correlate more than very roughly. Taking probability into account is something we already do in expected value calculations and does not amount to discounting the moral value of people based on their distance from us in time.
In the same vein, the compounding benefits of some interventions do give us a reason to favor the early implementation of interventions over the later implementations of it, but not all interventions, even among those affecting the near future, have compounding benefits. So, would we really be discounting the moral value of future people by taking this into account, or like with probability, is there some other heuristic at play?