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Gabriel comments on Causal Universes - LessWrong
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I'm... really shocked to hear this from you, so maybe I'm missing something:
Yes, you're destroying Universe A, but also creating Universe B. Given that "B" will not-exist if we don't travel, and "A" will not-exist if we DO travel, it seems morally neutral to make such an exchange - either way there is an equal set of people-who-won't-exist. It's only a bad thing if you have some reason to favor the status-quo of "A exists", or if you're concerned about the consent of the billions of people whose lives you alter (in which case you should be equally concerned about getting their consent before killing evil villains, fixing the environment, or creating FAI, neh?)
Once you're viewing it as an otherwise-equal exchange, it's just a matter of the specifics of those universes. It's generally given in time travel stories that, at least from the protagonist's view, "B" has a higher expected utility than "A", so it would seem that time travel is the right choice.
If we use phrases like "extinguished the world", then people will get bothered, because most people view that as a "bad thing", and then people would choose "A" instead, so it seems like a useful policy (in a world with time travel) to not really draw attention to this.
Values are not up for grabs. If they turn out to be asymmetrical and inelegant (like, for example, really caring more about people not getting killed than people getting born) then, well, they are asymmetrical and inelegant. Maybe the distinction between not-killing and creating is incoherent but I haven't yet seen an argument trying to demonstrate that without appeals to philosophical parsimony.
If you time travel, "Universe A" doesn't exist. If you don't, then "Universe B" doesn't exist.
They're BOTH universes which fail to exist if you chose the other one. No one dies - there's just a universe that doesn't exist because you didn't choose it.
If you time-travel, Universe A still existed once, and contrary to the preferences of the people there was then extinguished. The preferences of the people in not-yet-existent meta-future Universe B don't matter to me yet, because they may never exist.
Once Universe B is created, and if there was some way to restore Universe A, it'd be then that the preferences of the residents of the two universes (past and present) would weigh equally to my mind, having been equally real.
Universe A still used-to-exist , it just doesn't-exist-in-the-future. Universe B did NOT used-to-exist, and it will continue to not-exist-in-the-future unless you chose it.
In other words, both universes don't-exist-in-the-future if you don't chose them.
I suppose I'm lost on why one would consider "Universe A ceases to exist going forward" with "Universe A is destroyed". It feels like a really weird variant of the sunk cost fallacy, since Universe B failing to exist going forward isn't a big deal.
I can see arguments about time travel being complex, it's hard to predict the results, etc., but all else being equal it seems baffling to insist on A over B just because A happened to exist in the past.