Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…This reminded me pretty strongly of the nonidentity problem from Derek Parfit, who you once wrote a paper with about discounting rates. Do you want to describe the nonidentity problem? Derek Parfit, in his 1984 book, Reasons and Persons, had an example that, say, you would bury nuclear waste, and several generations from now, the waste would, say, kill millions of people. But the fact that you buried the waste would change the timings of subsequent conceptions. So the people who are being killed a million or, say, a thousand years from now, they wouldn’t have been born otherwise unless you had buried the waste. You could argue, “Well, I haven’t harmed anyone at all. By burying the waste, I caused them to be born.” They die of a terrible cancer when they’re 27 years old, but on net, this is still following the Pareto principle. I think I have an argument why that’s wrong, namely the case where you don’t commit the very harmful act. You might have different identities of people, but you’ll have a much greater aggregate of good in the more distant future. And it’s not about individual identities. So there’s something a little oddly collectivist about my argument, you might say. I guess many people have something like this intuition that, yeah, if you change the identities of people in the future, such that you can’t see any correspondence between them in the two different scenarios, then perhaps it doesn’t matter exactly what you do because there’s no significant person you can identify who’s worse off. Do you think this is a very strong counterargument to those views?…

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