Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…You have this neat example of what if people were able to travel close to the speed of light and how this even sharpens the counterintuitiveness of using a discount rate. Do you want to describe that example? If one accepts Einstein’s theories of relativity — which do seem to be true, albeit incomplete — as you approach the speed of light, the whole universe, to you, becomes like a frozen block of space time that, in a sense, you can watch or observe from the outside. In that sense, time can be thought of as a kind of illusion, and simply all of the things are happening at once. From that perspective, you would wonder, “Well, why is time such a special dimension?” But another way to put the point is to imagine we’re sending astronauts up into space, and we’re sending them away at speeds approaching the speed of light. They will, if they return, return in the much more distant future, but to them, only a small amount of time has passed. So should we take less care to preserve the well-being and lives of those astronauts simply because we’re shipping them away at higher speeds? Again, it seems like an absurd conclusion. The notion that when you have large benefits for people that matter at the macro level, that you should apply something like a zero rate of discount to well-being — not to financial flows, but actual well-being — I think that’s the correct moral position. As far as I know, there’s almost no moral philosophers who support discounting purely the welfare of people in the future. But then a lot of people throughout society, I guess influenced by economics, don’t share that view. What do you think’s going on there? Is this potentially one of the biggest moral mistakes that we’re making, and philosophers should be shouting about this much more?…

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