Making the Babyeaters/SuperHappy posts into an audio story might draw new people to the site.

Where did time travel come from? That's not part of my argument, or the context of the discussion about why murder is wrong; the time travel argument is just point out what non-causality might take the form of. The fact that murder is wrong is a moral judgement, which means it belongs to the realm of human experience.

If the question is whether changing the time stream is morally wrong because it kills people, the supposition is that we live in a non-causal world, which makes all of the arguments useless, since I'm not interested in defining morality in a universe that I have no reason to believe exists.

I'm not protecting anyone over anyone else, I'm protecting someone over not-someone. Someone (ie. non-murdered person) is protected, and the outcome that leads to dead person is avoided.

Experientially, we view "me in 10 seconds" as the same as "me now." Because of this, the traditional arguments hold, at least to the extent that we believe that our impression of continuous living is not just a neat trick of our mind unconnected to reality. And if we don't believe this, we fail the rationality test in many more severe ways than not understanding morality. (Why would I not jump off buildings, just because future me will die?)

You're probably right about it contradicting. Though, about the moral-epistemology bit, I think there may be a sort of anthropic-bias type argument that creatures can only implement a morality that they can practically compute to begin with.

I think it summarizes to "time travel is too improbable and unpredictable to worry about [preserving the interests of yous affected by it]".

In fairness there are potential issues here with signalling and culture. Although people might profess to believe X, in reality X just might be a more common type of cached knowledge, or X might be something that they say because they think it is socially useful, or as a permutation of those two they might have conditioned themselves to believe in X. Or, perhaps they interpret the meaning of "X" differently than others do, but they really mean the same thing underneath.

I think there should be a distinction between types of intuitions, or at least two different poles on a broad spectrum. I think we should consider the extreme of one pole to be truly internalized knowledge that's an extremely core part of that persons personality, and the other extreme to be an extremely shallow belief that's produced by lazy introspection or by no introspection at all, just the automatic repetition of cultural means.

I think that the first type of intuition would be extremely similar. I also think that the first type of intuition is what really matters and probably what controls our actions. I think the second type of intuition probably effects behavior to a limited degree, but I don't think that it would be all that significant. I think these things because humans cooperate with each other so easily, and because there are a great many concepts that translate easily across cultures. Even with some the strangest sounding foreign philosophies that I've encountered, I emphasize with a little, and I think that's because those philosophies have origins common to all people.

The fact that all humans are extremely biologically similar is also a big factor in my thought process.

I think we need to limit the set of morally relevant future versions to versions that would be created without interference, because otherwise we split ourselves too thinly among speculative futures that almost never happen. Given that, it makes sense to want to protect the existence of the unmodified future self over the modified one.

Suppose I destroy the timeline, and create an identical one. Have I committed a moral evil? No, because nothing has been lost.

Suppose I destroy the timeline, and restart from an earlier point. Have I committed a moral evil? Very much yes. What was lost? To give only one person's example from Flight of the Navigator out of a planet of billions, out of a whole universe, the younger brother who was left behind had spent years - of personal growth, of creating value and memories - helping his parents with their quixotic search. And then bonding with the new younger "older" brother, rejoicing with his parents, marvelling at the space ship. And then he was erased.

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"

My morality has a significant "status quo bias" in this sense. I don't feel bad about not bringing into being people who don't currently exist, which is why I'm not on a long-term crusade to increase the population as much as possible. Meanwhile I do feel bad about ending the existence of people who do exist, even if it's quick and painless.

More generally, I care about the process by which we get to some world-state, not just the desirability of the world-state. Even if B is better than A, getting from A to B requires a lot of deaths.

Because our morality is based on our experiential process. We see ourselves as the same person. Because of this, we want to be protected from violence in the future, even if the future person is not "really" the same as the present me.