Some actions’ future consequences are much easier to extrapolate out into the future than others. If I double-park and block someone else’s car in so they can’t leave, it’s pretty predictable that if they get back to their car before I do they will be delayed and annoyed. The long-term effects of this on their life ten years later are far less predictable: like the effects of a flap of a butterfly’s wing on the evolution of the weather, they could be good, bad, or negligible. However. if I instead kill them, they will very predictably still be dead ten years later.
Similarly, human-extinction risks have consequences that are unusually easy to propagate out into the distant future; if we go extinct, then we will stay extinct (well, unless some aliens come along and decide to de-extinct us from our genetic and biochemical records).
So yes, it’s necessary to discount for the moral consequences of uncertainty due to computational and data limitations, and in many cases that leads to discounting the future, but not by a simple fixed exponential temporal discounting rate.
Some actions’ future consequences are much easier to extrapolate out into the future than others. If I double-park and block someone else’s car in so they can’t leave, it’s pretty predictable that if they get back to their car before I do they will be delayed and annoyed. The long-term effects of this on their life ten years later are far less predictable: like the effects of a flap of a butterfly’s wing on the evolution of the weather, they could be good, bad, or negligible. However. if I instead kill them, they will very predictably still be dead ten years later.
Similarly, human-extinction risks have consequences that are unusually easy to propagate out into the distant future; if we go extinct, then we will stay extinct (well, unless some aliens come along and decide to de-extinct us from our genetic and biochemical records).
So yes, it’s necessary to discount for the moral consequences of uncertainty due to computational and data limitations, and in many cases that leads to discounting the future, but not by a simple fixed exponential temporal discounting rate.