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Notes -
In light of William McCaskill (who I find to be a pretty likeable guy!) being on Econtalk this week, my wife and I were talking a bit about longtermism this week and we share the same intuition that it's just not compelling at all. Part of this is probably just that I'm not a utilitarian, but there's something more there too - it just doesn't resonate emotionally with me in any way. Likewise, I just don't care about what happens in faraway lands very much. I don't actually think those people in the far future or off in Ukraine lack moral value; I think they have the same moral value that I or my neighbors have. The thing is, I want to live in the kind of neighborhood (and family, and city, and nation, and so on) where concentric loyalties far outstrip this sort of longtermist view. I could probably draw up some utiltarianish explanation for why I think this, but again, I'm not a utilitarian and I'm not even an egalitarian. I'm comfortable relying on the moral intuition that my neighbor is approximately infinitely more important to me than someone living on the Mongolian steppe in 2738 without feeling any real need to justify that position. On the bright side, I'm reasonably confident that the steppesman would think the same of me if he ever became aware of the history of my part of the world.
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