I completely understand your intuition but don’t entirely agree; this comment might seem like quibbling: Having access to astronomical resources is one way to have a huge good impact, but I’m not sure we know enough about moral philosophy or even about what an acausal economy/ecology might look like to be sure that the difference between a non-astronomical possible world and an astronomical possible world is a huge difference. (For what it’s worth, my primary intuition here is “the multiverse is more good-decision-theory-limited/insight-limited than resource-limited”. I’d like to expand on this in a blog post or something later.) Obviously we should provisionally assume that the difference is huge, but I can see non-fuzzy lines of reasoning that suggest that the difference might not be much.
Because we might be wrong about the relative utility of non-astronomical possible worlds it seems like when describing our fundamental driving motivations we should choose language that is as agnostic as possible, in order to have a strong conceptual foundation that isn’t too contingent on our provisional best guess models. E.g., take the principle of decision theory that says we should focus more on worlds that plausibly seem much larger even if it might be less probable that we’re in those worlds: the underlying, non-conclusion-contingent reasons that drive us to take considerations and perspectives such as that one into account are the things we should be putting effort into explaining to others and making clear to ourselves.
I completely understand your intuition but don’t entirely agree; this comment might seem like quibbling: Having access to astronomical resources is one way to have a huge good impact, but I’m not sure we know enough about moral philosophy or even about what an acausal economy/ecology might look like to be sure that the difference between a non-astronomical possible world and an astronomical possible world is a huge difference. (For what it’s worth, my primary intuition here is “the multiverse is more good-decision-theory-limited/insight-limited than resource-limited”. I’d like to expand on this in a blog post or something later.) Obviously we should provisionally assume that the difference is huge, but I can see non-fuzzy lines of reasoning that suggest that the difference might not be much.
Because we might be wrong about the relative utility of non-astronomical possible worlds it seems like when describing our fundamental driving motivations we should choose language that is as agnostic as possible, in order to have a strong conceptual foundation that isn’t too contingent on our provisional best guess models. E.g., take the principle of decision theory that says we should focus more on worlds that plausibly seem much larger even if it might be less probable that we’re in those worlds: the underlying, non-conclusion-contingent reasons that drive us to take considerations and perspectives such as that one into account are the things we should be putting effort into explaining to others and making clear to ourselves.