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Nick_Tarleton comments on Survey Results - Less Wrong
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Such as?
It would seem to support the biblical condemnation of onanism.
"Potential entities" here doesn't mean "currently existing non-morally-significant entities that might give rise to morally significant entities", just "entities that don't exist yet". A much clearer phrasing would be something like "Does my utility function aggregate over all entities existing in spacetime, or only those existing now?" IMO, the latter is obviously wrong, either being dynamically inconsistent if "now" is defined indexically, or, if "now" is some specific time, implying that we should bind ourselves not to care about people born after that time even once they do exist.
Combinatorial explosion, for starters. There's a very large set of potential entities that may or may not exist, and most won't. Assigning value to these entities seems likely to lead to absurdity. If nothing else, it seems to quickly lead to some manner of obligation to see as many entities created as possible.
But not assigning value to potential entities implies that we should make a lot of changes. Ignoring global warming for one. Perhaps enslaving future generations?
I think it's arguable that global warming could impact plenty of people already alive today, and I'm not sure what you mean by enslaving future generations.
But yes, assigning no value at all to potential entities may also be problematic, but I'm not sure what a reasonable balance is.