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by cortesoft 208 days ago
Fair to disagree on that point, but I think the people who would find the EA supporters “morally questionable” feel that way for reasons that would apply to all rich people. I would be curious to hear what attributes EA supporters have that other rich people don’t.
1 comments
nl 208 days ago
I think the idea the future lives have value, and the value of those lives can outweigh the value of actual living people today is extremely immoral.

To quote[1]:

> In Astronomical Waste, Nick Bostrom makes a more extreme and more specific claim: that the number of human lives possible under space colonization is so great that the mere possibility of a hugely populated future, when considered in an “expected value” framework, dwarfs all other moral considerations.

[1] https://blog.givewell.org/2014/07/03/the-moral-value-of-the-...

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addaon 208 days ago
Isn't this just the Thanos argument, though? Given the huge number of possible future lives under space colonization, all of them ending inevitably in death and suffering, no amount of trying to improve those lives can ever has as much of a positive impact as just avoiding them by pushing for, say, nuclear self-annihilation now, because the somewhat larger suffering for a much, much smaller number of people is a higher "expected value"? I'm not really keen on moral arguments that end up arguing for nuclear war…
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cortesoft 208 days ago
> I think the idea the future lives have value, and the value of those lives can outweigh the value of actual living people today is extremely immoral.

This is an interesting take. So if we found out for certain that an action we are taking today is going to kill 100% of humans in 200 years, it would be immoral to consider that as a factor in making decisions? None of those people are living today, obviously, so that means we should not worry about their lives at all?

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nl 207 days ago
The extreme form of the argument ("don't worry about the future at all") isn't what I'm saying. It is also immoral to not consider the future.

But to put future lives on the same scale (as in to allow for the possibility of measuring one against the other) of current lives is immoral.

Future lives are important, but balancing them against current lives is immoral

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