My point didn’t relate to “major”—I wanted to point out that you care about what happens after you die, and therefore that your utility function is not uniformly 0 after you die. Yes, your utility function is no longer implemented by anything in the universe after you die—you aren’t there to care in person—but the function you implement now has terms for times after your death—you care now.
I would agree that I care now about things which have obvious implications for what will happen later, and that I would not care, or care very differently, about otherwise-similar things that lacked equivalent implications.
Beyond that, since my utility function can neither be observed directly, nor measured in any meaningful sense when I’m not alive to act on it, this is a distinction without a difference.
My point didn’t relate to “major”—I wanted to point out that you care about what happens after you die, and therefore that your utility function is not uniformly 0 after you die. Yes, your utility function is no longer implemented by anything in the universe after you die—you aren’t there to care in person—but the function you implement now has terms for times after your death—you care now.
I would agree that I care now about things which have obvious implications for what will happen later, and that I would not care, or care very differently, about otherwise-similar things that lacked equivalent implications.
Beyond that, since my utility function can neither be observed directly, nor measured in any meaningful sense when I’m not alive to act on it, this is a distinction without a difference.