I disagree, because past people had their chance to influence us and I am equipped to influence my descendants. If I don’t kick in for their values, or my descendants don’t kick in for mine, it means the people in the past failed; they don’t get extra control over me just because they hoped they would have it.
The closest thing I believe to this is that it’s good to empathize with past people, and not dismiss the things they cared about as locally absurd. In my opinion, engaging with Catholicism at all is adaptive for a higher fraction of Westerners in the 1600s than now, leaving aside the fact that its epistemic claims are false.
It’s also good to try to spend time with my aging relatives because I care about them, and because I want to model to my descendants how to care for me when I’m old, but again not for decision theoretic reasons that can be generalized from reasoning about future people.
I disagree, because past people had their chance to influence us and I am equipped to influence my descendants. If I don’t kick in for their values, or my descendants don’t kick in for mine, it means the people in the past failed; they don’t get extra control over me just because they hoped they would have it.
The closest thing I believe to this is that it’s good to empathize with past people, and not dismiss the things they cared about as locally absurd. In my opinion, engaging with Catholicism at all is adaptive for a higher fraction of Westerners in the 1600s than now, leaving aside the fact that its epistemic claims are false.
It’s also good to try to spend time with my aging relatives because I care about them, and because I want to model to my descendants how to care for me when I’m old, but again not for decision theoretic reasons that can be generalized from reasoning about future people.