Do You Care About Hypothetical Persons?
July 30th, 2007 –
At the Transvision conference, I had a conversation with a respected transhumanist on the issue of existential risks and humanity’s future. He told me that he did not see existential risk as a big deal because of it threatening hypothetical persons in the future, but only because of threatening the currently living population. This is the first time ever that anyone told me directly that they use a discount rate of infinity when considering as-yet-to-be-born persons.
When environmentalists tell us to fight against global warming, and economists warn us about the insolvency of Social Security, an often used motivator is to tell us to think about the world we are handing off to our children. This may refer to one’s own children, but can be abstracted to ‘descendants’ - which includes other people’s children, the sum total continuation of the human and eventually posthuman race.
What is confusing is that this motivator seems to work a lot on some people and not at all on certain others. Despite the majority assigning some level of concern to hypothetical persons, at least their immediate children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren, a significant minority assigns them nothing. Having no crystal ball of where moral philosophy and consensus will go in the future, it is very difficult for us to consider from our current vantage point whether or not this tendency will be viewed in retrospect as an irrational bit of evolutionary baggage, or genuine moral wisdom.
If we do care about hypothetical persons, and want to care more, might we eventually be able to reprogram our minds to magnify this aspect of ourselves as beneficial? Will we begin to care more about the teraperson hypothetical collective in the Whirlpool Galaxy, 25 million years from today, than our next-door neighbor we’ll see when we walk out the door in ten minutes? This certainly seems to be what Nick Bostrom is suggesting in his Astronomical Waste paper:
“With very advanced technology, a very large population of people living happy lives could be sustained in the accessible region of the universe. For every year that development of such technologies and colonization of the universe is delayed, there is therefore an opportunity cost: a potential good, lives worth living, is not being realized. Given some plausible assumptions, this cost is extremely large. However, the lesson for utilitarians is not that we ought to maximize the pace of technological development, but rather that we ought to maximize its safety, i.e. the probability that colonization will eventually occur.”
Despite Bostrom’s persuasive paper, there are people that simply don’t care, because they only value lives as currently lived. As far as I can tell, there is nothing morally perverse about these people - they simply have a different angle on the moral issue. Is one “right” and the other “wrong”? Maybe, but ironically, it would require a hypothetical future person to give the answer with confidence.
You could also argue that since the people of the future will be the ones making the actual choices that lead to demise of the species (like releasing Gray Goo or evil AIs), it’s their problem, not ours.
We could abort such a future with our decisions (by wrecking things ourselves), but we can’t guarantee the safety of a future population. If we act responsibly enough to continue our own lives, that would seem to be all that’s required ethically. What they do with their lives is their responsibility.
Among the best discussions of our obligations to hypothetical persons are Derek Parfit’s Reasons & Persons (Part 4) and John Broome’s Weighing Lives.
Agreed. Broome’s was on the SIAI reading list, with Parfit’s accidentally missing. I’ve added it.
You may also want to read
http://www.philosophy.su.se/texter/moral_ga.pdf
by Gustaf Arrhenius, which examines quite a range of views in which future people may not count morally, and shows that while they appear somewhat tempting, they are considerably flawed.
While the SIAI may be rightly skeptical of the value of the bulk of moral philosophy, there are many papers around like this one (and those of Broome and Parfit mentioned above) which are of clear importance. Many, many orders of magnitude hinge on the question of whether future generations count equally to current ones and it is well worth the time to read what several very bright people have already written on the topic.
http://p068.ezboard.com/ftiibaoniumfrm7.showMessage?topicID=2.topic
I wrote my second post that is too big to put here.
Summary: I feel that the unborn have the exact same value as the born . That’s my feeling. As for my belief, it’s the same, but with a twist. Their intrinsic “because they’re human” value is the world’s worst denominator.
It’s a deep question. Personally, I put the intrinsic value of sentient “objects” way above the intrinsic value of non-sentient objects - no matter how beautiful or useful those non-sentient objects are. For nearly everyone today, we don’t feel a moral obligation to have as many children as possible solely on the basis that we will be converting more non-sentient objects (disorganized blobs of atoms) into sentient objects (people). The people of the future could be reasonably described as currently taking the form of “disorganized blobs of atoms”. The blobs are non-sentient, they don’t suffer, and they don’t even mind not being sentient. All that being said, I still place a very high value on all future sentients that *will* be created. But when I hold a lump of sand in my palm, I don’t feel sad or ashamed that I can’t convert it into a person. When push comes to shove, I wouldn’t sacrifice todays 6 billion people, in exchange for later converting a large blob into 6000 billion people. I may be in the minority, but that’s my feeling anyway.
“When push comes to shove, I wouldn’t sacrifice todays 6 billion people, in exchange for later converting a large blob into 6000 billion people. I may be in the minority, but that’s my feeling anyway.”
Er, that didn’t come out right. Obviously I didn’t mean to imply that anyone here would willingly sacrifice 6 billion people. Quite the contrary. It was for purely hypothetical purposes.
Eliezer has pointed out on Overcoming Bias that all possible persons already exist somewhere in the multiverse, which means that it’s wrong to say hypothetical future persons won’t exist if we don’t do X; rather, they’ll only have a diminished measure. What this means ethically is an interesting question.
In actuality, seems plausible to conceive that the future actually influences the past, not just the other way around. Just because one can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t already there. Maybe the future is already plotting the present and these questions are just a way to perceive our contemporary lack of perspective towards the future. : )
“In actuality, seems plausible to conceive that the future actually influences the past”
Why?
In the book “The Intelligent Universe” Martin Gardner proposes the speculative hypothesis that future beings could reorder the past using “Closed Time-Like Curves”. I find that a bit unlikely for this Universe - they couldn’t have done a better job?
I have a little pet idea, that’s still very undeveloped at this point. But it seems to me that with enough intelligence and powerful technology, it should be physically possible to actually converge two people into one person - quite literally. For a visualization, picture two different brains being “fused” into a single brain, a single person. So, have a continuous sytem where this particular cubic centimeter of nano-circuitry creates one person, and this one over here creates a different person. “Fuse” them into one person, and thus they both get to enjoy paradise with the rest of us. Eventually they are all fused into a single post-human person, but none of them ever “dies” in the process. Sounds like a sweet deal to me. Scale the operation so that trillions of different people are being created and fused constantly, then continually recycle the hardware for use again. An idefinite number of “people” would be able to enjoy the future with us. Fun for everybody!!!
Let’s git-r-done.
Another thing to keep in mind is the fact that the prospect of radical life extension might make people at least somewhat more compelled to maintain cognizance of potential x-risks. I realize this post is specifically about hypothetical persons, but it is definitely interesting to consider how longer lifespans might be influencing attitudes toward the future. I would be very interested, for instance, in seeing whether the current generation of, say, 40-year-olds is more concerned about long-term planning or the environment than their parents’ generation was.
In short, what I’m saying is, it isn’t JUST the hypothetical future persons that we must consider in planning for the future; for all we know, some of us might make it there too. If it is at least *vaguely* possible that life-extending treatments might be developed within the lifetimes of people alive today, it is more than worthwhile for people alive today to consider large-scale risk and its implication.
“a discount rate of zero”
I believe you meant to say a discount rate of infinity. A zero discount rate means valuing everyone equally. Mathematically, the (time) discount rate comes in in a weighting term (e^(-d*t)), where d is the discount rate.
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I want to echo Toby Ord’s recommendation of
http://www.philosophy.su.se/texter/moral_ga.pdf
It’s a good paper.
A consistent semantics quibble I have on this issue is the use of the word “person” because it assumes a speciest view in an otherwise species-neutral topic. I say “total” for the view that is neutral with respect to hypothetical individuals and “prior existence” for the non-neutral view, although prior existence only refers to one of a family of views Arrhenius discusses.
See also “Total Vs. Prior Existence” on Felicifia
http://felicifia.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=118
This also came up on a more philosophical post on my Human Extinction DailyKos series
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/7/14/152756/305
Oh, and I strongly support the total view, i.e. caring as much about potential individuals as about actual individuals.
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“all possible persons already exist somewhere in the multiverse”
I’m not convinced this is correct, and even if it is, I’m inclined to argue that it doesn’t matter for us, i.e. I would still recommend the same actions either way, unless these other persons/individuals were causally connected to us, eg via wormholing.
[…] 10% or 20% of the population rather than 99% or 100%. And if you care about the long-term future of humankind as a whole, killing a billion and killing everyone makes a hell of a lot of difference. […]
Anne,
I also think that life extension is important in connecting the priorities of those concerned about current people with reducing existential risk.
However, it seems that many people discount additional years of life (at least in the abstract, and probably in a time-inconsistent fashion), so that living a billion excellent years if vastly less than a billion times as valuable as living for 100. I suspect this comes out of an evaluative framework that judges a life as a narrative gestalt rather than the sum of experiences over time.
Re (Carl Shulman): “living a billion excellent years if vastly less than a billion times as valuable as living for 100″
I believe you mean “vastly less than ten million times…”