Adding religion to the equation immensely complicates this topic, since most religions posit the continued existence of the soul after death. In this case you’re not really respecting the wishes of past people, per se, but merely people you can no longer see. When we talk about respecting the graves of the dead, I suspect it’s a little of this persisting: maybe they’re still there somewhere, watching. In this case, include their utility in relevant calculations, times the probability that they exist.
The main topic that I feel is missing from this discussion is consent. There are always reasonable boundaries to what any contract, with yourself or others, can force someone to do, and we now accept that even legally-binding promises such as marriage can’t bind our future selves unconditionally. Insofar as your future self is similar to your past self, your previous consent binds your future self, but even when contracts don’t have official get-out clauses there are practical things that will prevent them from mattering. Although you’re the same legal entity, I’d argue that in cases of Hollywood amnesia, for instance, the separation of past and future self is sufficient to make marriage vows morally dubious. It is only because of the similarity between 17! and 27!Austin that you can bind yourself to anything at all: I see no reason to generalise this obligation to your past self to your ancestors. They don’t get utility out of your actions, so the only reason to worry about their opinions is where there is a contract you’ve consented to. You didn’t consent to be created, so have no intrinsic obligations to your ancestors. Regarding whether your descendants are forced to fulfil a will: they have not consented to the contract, but can simply not take the money if they wish. If they take the money, they are consenting to reasonable requests in the will, although if the requests are clearly absurd (such as saving something that has already been destroyed) then the conditions will just be ignored. “The people in the past were roughly as intellectually capable as you are”: maybe in genetical potential, but not phenotypically, as shown in the Flynn effect. “The people in the past had similar modes of thought, similar hopes and dreams to you.” They were mostly farmers with very limited capacity for abstract thought. To the extent that their hopes and dreams are similar to mine, I see no reason to double-count them. Furthermore, they don’t have working knowledge of the current world, and giving them it would render them effectively different people, by your own arguments.
Adding religion to the equation immensely complicates this topic, since most religions posit the continued existence of the soul after death. In this case you’re not really respecting the wishes of past people, per se, but merely people you can no longer see. When we talk about respecting the graves of the dead, I suspect it’s a little of this persisting: maybe they’re still there somewhere, watching. In this case, include their utility in relevant calculations, times the probability that they exist.
The main topic that I feel is missing from this discussion is consent. There are always reasonable boundaries to what any contract, with yourself or others, can force someone to do, and we now accept that even legally-binding promises such as marriage can’t bind our future selves unconditionally. Insofar as your future self is similar to your past self, your previous consent binds your future self, but even when contracts don’t have official get-out clauses there are practical things that will prevent them from mattering. Although you’re the same legal entity, I’d argue that in cases of Hollywood amnesia, for instance, the separation of past and future self is sufficient to make marriage vows morally dubious. It is only because of the similarity between 17! and 27!Austin that you can bind yourself to anything at all: I see no reason to generalise this obligation to your past self to your ancestors. They don’t get utility out of your actions, so the only reason to worry about their opinions is where there is a contract you’ve consented to. You didn’t consent to be created, so have no intrinsic obligations to your ancestors.
Regarding whether your descendants are forced to fulfil a will: they have not consented to the contract, but can simply not take the money if they wish. If they take the money, they are consenting to reasonable requests in the will, although if the requests are clearly absurd (such as saving something that has already been destroyed) then the conditions will just be ignored.
“The people in the past were roughly as intellectually capable as you are”: maybe in genetical potential, but not phenotypically, as shown in the Flynn effect. “The people in the past had similar modes of thought, similar hopes and dreams to you.” They were mostly farmers with very limited capacity for abstract thought. To the extent that their hopes and dreams are similar to mine, I see no reason to double-count them. Furthermore, they don’t have working knowledge of the current world, and giving them it would render them effectively different people, by your own arguments.