[ epistemic status: feeling ignorant—unsure if I’m misinterpreting the claims, or disagreeing, or just surprised that this is presented as more settled and agreed than I expected. ]
First point of confusion: literally infinite, in the sense of moral-patient experiences? This implies that everything anyone can imagine (in our finite brains) happens, and an uncountable of unimaginable things also happens. Or do you mean more figuratively infinite—a very (VERY) large number of possible experiences, and a smaller-but-still large number of actual experiences.
Second point (or maybe should have been first): what’s your unit of measure for ethically-relevant “things”? I generally take it as distinct conscious experiences, but there are many other other justifiable views. How do you weight duplicates (in all relevant dimensions) in your counting of “infinite”?
And thirdly, even if there IS an infinite number of relevant experiences that one cares about, doesn’t any given being still make a finite number of decisions? And thus every moral actor is purely finite.
Regarding the first point: there’s a common confusion, which I’ll call the Infinite Monkeys Fallacy, which says that if X is a truly infinite set, then it must eventually/somewhere contain a∈X for all a. This is confusing because, while there is an Infinite Monkey Theorem (saying that, as the number of independent samples from a uniform distribution goes to infinity, the probability that any given string of samples goes to 1), its independence and support assumptions don’t generalize to infinite situations in general. A simple counterexample is that the set of all even numbers is infinite, yet never contains a single odd number. Infinite sets of parallel universes need not contain a single universe in which the Brooklyn Bridge is made of cheese. Nor does an infinite set of moral-patient experiences necessarily contain the experience of eating the Brooklyn Bridge. Even the pigeonhole principle doesn’t necessarily apply here, because identical moral-patient experiences can count separately—so an infinite(ly indexed) set of moral-patient experiences could even contain just one actual experience, copied ω times.
Regarding the third point: even if every moral agent (and their option space and their mind) is always finite, it’s still conceivable that a single binary decision—made over the course of, say, a week—could involve sophisticated and perhaps even “correct” reasoning that balances the interests of an infinite set of moral patients. There seem to be at least some clear-cut cases, like choosing to create an infinite heaven instead of an infinite hell. The question here is then what formal normative principles we could apply to judge (and guide) such reasoning in general.
Regarding the second point, I think the OP is agnostic on this point, referring to that unit of measure as “locations”, but letting it vary between individuals, observer-moments, spacetime locations, or possibly other notions. All you need to accept for the purpose of facing problems of infinite ethics is that it’s plausible that the set of morally relevant locations is infinite, whatever form they take.
I think “for the purpose of facing problems of infinite ethics” is my sticking point—I don’t seem to have that purpose. I don’t think infinities apply in reality, and certainly not in ethics of any real agent. It’s NOT plausible to me that morally relevant locations are infinite. And I’m unsure if that’s because I’m confused about what you’re talking about, or I’ve missed some argument about why I’m wrong on that topic.
I think it’s more the latter, although I’m not terribly convinced myself that you’re wrong. But the arguments you may or may not have missed are in the middle of OP’s section 1, with paragraphs starting “The causal way,” “The acausal way,” and “Perhaps you say.”
Personally, I am more open than most rationalists to the idea that there may be a way to escape heat death without actually violating Liouville’s theorem or other justifications for the Second Law. If so, that would make the set of future temporal locations infinite. Even if the amount of energy in the accessible universe is finite, and even if that implies the state-space of the universe is finite, and so its state trajectory must either terminate or repeat itself, maybe it would then repeat itself for 𝜔 many cycles, and so the question of which cycle of state space is entered first matters infinitely much.
[ epistemic status: feeling ignorant—unsure if I’m misinterpreting the claims, or disagreeing, or just surprised that this is presented as more settled and agreed than I expected. ]
First point of confusion: literally infinite, in the sense of moral-patient experiences? This implies that everything anyone can imagine (in our finite brains) happens, and an uncountable of unimaginable things also happens. Or do you mean more figuratively infinite—a very (VERY) large number of possible experiences, and a smaller-but-still large number of actual experiences.
Second point (or maybe should have been first): what’s your unit of measure for ethically-relevant “things”? I generally take it as distinct conscious experiences, but there are many other other justifiable views. How do you weight duplicates (in all relevant dimensions) in your counting of “infinite”?
And thirdly, even if there IS an infinite number of relevant experiences that one cares about, doesn’t any given being still make a finite number of decisions? And thus every moral actor is purely finite.
Regarding the first point: there’s a common confusion, which I’ll call the Infinite Monkeys Fallacy, which says that if X is a truly infinite set, then it must eventually/somewhere contain a∈X for all a. This is confusing because, while there is an Infinite Monkey Theorem (saying that, as the number of independent samples from a uniform distribution goes to infinity, the probability that any given string of samples goes to 1), its independence and support assumptions don’t generalize to infinite situations in general. A simple counterexample is that the set of all even numbers is infinite, yet never contains a single odd number. Infinite sets of parallel universes need not contain a single universe in which the Brooklyn Bridge is made of cheese. Nor does an infinite set of moral-patient experiences necessarily contain the experience of eating the Brooklyn Bridge. Even the pigeonhole principle doesn’t necessarily apply here, because identical moral-patient experiences can count separately—so an infinite(ly indexed) set of moral-patient experiences could even contain just one actual experience, copied ω times.
Regarding the third point: even if every moral agent (and their option space and their mind) is always finite, it’s still conceivable that a single binary decision—made over the course of, say, a week—could involve sophisticated and perhaps even “correct” reasoning that balances the interests of an infinite set of moral patients. There seem to be at least some clear-cut cases, like choosing to create an infinite heaven instead of an infinite hell. The question here is then what formal normative principles we could apply to judge (and guide) such reasoning in general.
Regarding the second point, I think the OP is agnostic on this point, referring to that unit of measure as “locations”, but letting it vary between individuals, observer-moments, spacetime locations, or possibly other notions. All you need to accept for the purpose of facing problems of infinite ethics is that it’s plausible that the set of morally relevant locations is infinite, whatever form they take.
I think “for the purpose of facing problems of infinite ethics” is my sticking point—I don’t seem to have that purpose. I don’t think infinities apply in reality, and certainly not in ethics of any real agent. It’s NOT plausible to me that morally relevant locations are infinite. And I’m unsure if that’s because I’m confused about what you’re talking about, or I’ve missed some argument about why I’m wrong on that topic.
I think it’s more the latter, although I’m not terribly convinced myself that you’re wrong. But the arguments you may or may not have missed are in the middle of OP’s section 1, with paragraphs starting “The causal way,” “The acausal way,” and “Perhaps you say.”
Personally, I am more open than most rationalists to the idea that there may be a way to escape heat death without actually violating Liouville’s theorem or other justifications for the Second Law. If so, that would make the set of future temporal locations infinite. Even if the amount of energy in the accessible universe is finite, and even if that implies the state-space of the universe is finite, and so its state trajectory must either terminate or repeat itself, maybe it would then repeat itself for 𝜔 many cycles, and so the question of which cycle of state space is entered first matters infinitely much.