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.

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.

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.

Why?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I believe you mean “vastly less than ten million times…”