Good question, I’ll try to answer with a little analogy :)
We shouldn’t discount the moral value of people in the future based on how far away in time they are because if two experiences are identical, it should’t matter morally when they happen. Discounting their moral value would mean that a person 1,000 years from now who experiences pain will have their suffering treated as less significant now just because it happens in the future.
Think about someone 1,000 years ago who stubs their toe. If they applied a discount to suffering in the far future, then someone’s much worse experience today—like breaking a bone—might be considered less bad than just stubbing a toe many years ago. That’s a bit absurd, so we shouldn’t treat future people using the same reasoning that would lead past people to care less about suffering that happens today.
Some people intuitively think that when we compare moral value across time there should be a discount rate like there is with money. But the reason there’s discounting with money is that you can earn interest on a dollar you save today! So money now is literally more valuable than money later. This doesn’t apply at all in the context of joy or pain.
You might also think that because we can’t know what will happen in the future we should discount due to uncertainty—but our current question is about how we should compare two events that we know will happen, so that’s not an argument for a moral discount rate (though uncertainty is a separate and important consideration!).
That’s why a lot of EAs think we shouldn’t treat joy as less good or pain as less bad just because it’s not happening right at this moment. Does that make sense?
I think it passed already because the “Bounty (closed)” tag was added a few hours ago.