As to your second objection, I think that for many people the question of whether murdering people in order to save other people is a good idea is a separate moral question from which altruistic actions we should take to have the most positive impact. I am certainly not advocating murdering billions of people.
But whether saving present people or (in expectation) saving many more unborn future people is a better use of altruistic resources seems to be largely a matter of temperament. I have heard a few discussions of this and they never seem to make much sense to me. For me it is literally as simple as people being further away in time which is another dimension, not really any different than spatial dimensions, except that time flows in one direction and so we have much less information about it.
But uncertainty only calls into question whether or not we have impact in expectation, for me it has no bearing on the reality of this impact or the moral value of these lives. I cannot seem to comprehend why other people value future people less than present people, assuming you have equal ability to influence either. I would really like for there to be some rational solution, but it always feels like people are talking past each other in these types of discussions. If there is one child tortured today it cannot somehow be morally equivalent to ten children being tortured tomorrow. If I can ensure one person lives a life overflowing with joy today, I would be willing to forego this if I knew with certainty I could ensure one hundred people live lives overflowing with joy in one hundred years. I don’t feel like there is a time limit on morality, to be honest it still confuses me why exactly some people feel otherwise.
You also mentioned something about differing percentages of the population. Many of these questions don’t work in reality because there are a lot of flow-through effects, but if you ignore those, I also don’t see how 8,000 people today suffering lives of torture might be better than 8 early humans a couple hundred thousand years ago suffering lives of torture, even if that means it was 1 /1,000,000 of the population in the the first case (just a wild guess) and 1 / 1,000 of the population in the second case.
These questions might be complicated if you take the average view on population ethics instead of the total view, and I actually do give some credence to the average view, but I nonetheless think the amount of value created by averting X-risk is so huge that it probably outweighs this considerations, at least for the risk neutral.
I’m not actually talking about “a person being tortured today” versus “a person being tortured tomorrow”. I agree those are equivalent, from some hypothetical external viewpoint and assuming that various types of uncertainty are declared by fiat to be absent.
It’s about “a person who actually exists getting to continue their life that would otherwise be terminated” versus “a person being able to come to exist in the future versus not ever existing”. I have serious doubts that these are morally equivalent, and am inclined to believe that they are not even on a comparable scale. In particular, I think using the term “saving a life” for the latter is not only unjustified, but wilfully deceptive.
Even if there does turn out to be a strong argument for the two outcomes being comparable on some numerical scale, I expect to still strongly disfavour any use of terminology that equates them as this post does.
Ah, thanks for the clarification, this is very helpful. I made a few updates including changing the title of the piece and adding a note about this in the assumptions. Here is the assumption and footnote I added, which I think explains my views on this:
Whenever I say “lives saved” this is shorthand for “future lives saved from nonexistence.” This is not the same as saving existing lives, which may cause profound emotional pain for people left behind, and some may consider more tragic than future people never being born.[6]
Here is footnote 6, created for brevity of the main piece:
This post originally used the “term lives” saved without mentioning nonexistence, but JBlack on LessWrong pointed out that the term “lives saved” could be misleading in that it equates saving present lives with creating new future lives. While I take the total view and so feel these are relatively equivalent (if we exclude the flow-through effects, including the emotional pain caused to those left behind by the deceased), those who take other views such as the person-effecting view may feel very differently about this.
Here is a related assumption I added based on an EA Forum comment:
I assume a zero-discount rate for the value of future lives, meaning I assume the value of a life is not dependent on when that life occurs.
I hope this shows why I think the term is not unjustified, I certainly was not intending to be willfully deceptive and apologize if it seemed this way. I believe in the equal value of all conscious experience quite strongly, and this includes future people, so for me “lives saved” or “lives saved from nonexistence” carries the correct emotional tone and moral connotations from my point of view. I can definitely respect that other people may feel differently.
I am curious whether this clarifies our difference in intuitions, or if there is some other reason you see the ending of a life as worse than the non-existence of life.
As to your second objection, I think that for many people the question of whether murdering people in order to save other people is a good idea is a separate moral question from which altruistic actions we should take to have the most positive impact. I am certainly not advocating murdering billions of people.
But whether saving present people or (in expectation) saving many more unborn future people is a better use of altruistic resources seems to be largely a matter of temperament. I have heard a few discussions of this and they never seem to make much sense to me. For me it is literally as simple as people being further away in time which is another dimension, not really any different than spatial dimensions, except that time flows in one direction and so we have much less information about it.
But uncertainty only calls into question whether or not we have impact in expectation, for me it has no bearing on the reality of this impact or the moral value of these lives. I cannot seem to comprehend why other people value future people less than present people, assuming you have equal ability to influence either. I would really like for there to be some rational solution, but it always feels like people are talking past each other in these types of discussions. If there is one child tortured today it cannot somehow be morally equivalent to ten children being tortured tomorrow. If I can ensure one person lives a life overflowing with joy today, I would be willing to forego this if I knew with certainty I could ensure one hundred people live lives overflowing with joy in one hundred years. I don’t feel like there is a time limit on morality, to be honest it still confuses me why exactly some people feel otherwise.
You also mentioned something about differing percentages of the population. Many of these questions don’t work in reality because there are a lot of flow-through effects, but if you ignore those, I also don’t see how 8,000 people today suffering lives of torture might be better than 8 early humans a couple hundred thousand years ago suffering lives of torture, even if that means it was 1 /1,000,000 of the population in the the first case (just a wild guess) and 1 / 1,000 of the population in the second case.
These questions might be complicated if you take the average view on population ethics instead of the total view, and I actually do give some credence to the average view, but I nonetheless think the amount of value created by averting X-risk is so huge that it probably outweighs this considerations, at least for the risk neutral.
I’m not actually talking about “a person being tortured today” versus “a person being tortured tomorrow”. I agree those are equivalent, from some hypothetical external viewpoint and assuming that various types of uncertainty are declared by fiat to be absent.
It’s about “a person who actually exists getting to continue their life that would otherwise be terminated” versus “a person being able to come to exist in the future versus not ever existing”. I have serious doubts that these are morally equivalent, and am inclined to believe that they are not even on a comparable scale. In particular, I think using the term “saving a life” for the latter is not only unjustified, but wilfully deceptive.
Even if there does turn out to be a strong argument for the two outcomes being comparable on some numerical scale, I expect to still strongly disfavour any use of terminology that equates them as this post does.
Ah, thanks for the clarification, this is very helpful. I made a few updates including changing the title of the piece and adding a note about this in the assumptions. Here is the assumption and footnote I added, which I think explains my views on this:
Whenever I say “lives saved” this is shorthand for “future lives saved from nonexistence.” This is not the same as saving existing lives, which may cause profound emotional pain for people left behind, and some may consider more tragic than future people never being born.[6]
Here is footnote 6, created for brevity of the main piece:
This post originally used the “term lives” saved without mentioning nonexistence, but JBlack on LessWrong pointed out that the term “lives saved” could be misleading in that it equates saving present lives with creating new future lives. While I take the total view and so feel these are relatively equivalent (if we exclude the flow-through effects, including the emotional pain caused to those left behind by the deceased), those who take other views such as the person-effecting view may feel very differently about this.
Here is a related assumption I added based on an EA Forum comment:
I assume a zero-discount rate for the value of future lives, meaning I assume the value of a life is not dependent on when that life occurs.
I hope this shows why I think the term is not unjustified, I certainly was not intending to be willfully deceptive and apologize if it seemed this way. I believe in the equal value of all conscious experience quite strongly, and this includes future people, so for me “lives saved” or “lives saved from nonexistence” carries the correct emotional tone and moral connotations from my point of view. I can definitely respect that other people may feel differently.
I am curious whether this clarifies our difference in intuitions, or if there is some other reason you see the ending of a life as worse than the non-existence of life.