Nick Bostrom's Infinite Ethics
is a worthwhile read, but if you don't have the time, I'll just point you to this bit from the abstract:
- Modern cosmology teaches that the world might well contain an infinite number of happy and sad people and other candidate value-bearing locations. Aggregative ethics implies that such a world contains an infinite amount of positive value and an infinite amount of negative value. You can affect only a finite amount of good or bad. In standard cardinal arithmetic, an infinite quantity is unchanged by the addition or subtraction of any finite quantity. So it appears you cannot change the value of the world.
Maybe you gawk at the quoted passage and
conclude that contemporary cosmologists are out to lunch. Or maybe you figure
Bostrom misrepresents or misconstrues what the majority of them actually believe. I
don't know, and it doesn't really matter anyway, because you don't have to
believe that sentient life sticking around forever is a foregone conclusion.
You just have to acknowledge that the finitude of sentience isn't exactly a
foregone conclusion either. The best available evidence for infinitude isn't
conclusive, but it's not dismissible either.
And even if you are unfazed by the expertise of cosmologists, to the point of remaining 100% confident that sentient life is destined to go extinct for good sometime in the future, I would say the Arithmetic Paralysis quandary outlined in the paper is fascinating enough in its own right to warrant theoretical pivots. Not everything needs to implicate Applied Ethics to be worthy of our mentation.
If you have a bona fide appetite for philosophy, toying with ideas that educe incredulous stares elsewhere should be a picnic.
"Nothing stifles intellectual curiosity like the craving for familiarity."
Me. Just now.
