On infinite ethics

Ethics is about decisions, and most of the discussions about the "difficulty" of infinite ethics only work if you ignore that.

(And so it's particularly frustrating that they didn't bother addressing our work pointing out why they are wrong: https://philpapers.org/rec/MANWIT-6 )

I can only reason about infinitely many universes if they're sufficiently similar to my own universe. But in that case I might as well just forget about the whole infinity thing since they're all independent and average out. If something is worth doing here on Earth then it's worth doing.

Also the whole "acasual" thing never made sense to me. What I do doesn't influence anything in another universe by definition, so other universes shouldn't influence my decision making at all.

> I don't think a single person would believe otherwise,

It depends. Saving "a hundred" or a "a thousand" lives seems "doable" by a normal person as a result of a conscious, "moral" act, saving "millions" devolves into messianism, and as such it's not the job of essays or of simple, logical human thinking to talk/write about it. I know that the author doesn't insist on that aspect but in real life quantitate differences turn into qualitative differences most of the time.

A few hot takes:

- I feel some analogous thinking with computational complexity. An action may have broad repercussions, but in big O thinking, as we approach infinity, only those factors with the most significant impact matter. Considering infinities is a useful lens when trying to reduce complexity to the most significant factors.

- That kind of analysis is typically only useful if you have the entire algorithm and all its variables mapped out. A big-O approach to the travelling salesman problem wouldn't be accurate if you didn't consider the travelling part. You'd say hey, only 1 destination is added at a time, so the impact of each new destination is linear, which is wildly incorrect.

- As long as a subject matter is subjective and people get to decide which variables belong and which can be ignored, and what impact a variable may have, the analysis will be incorrect, most likely wildly incorrect. Is there a universal method for deciding which factors are important?

"Should we bomb our neighbours and steal their chocolate, or buy their chocolate instead of making our own? Well, our main export is chocolate, so they are taking bread off our citizens tables. Infinite bombs = infinite bread." Obviously a few factors are missing - but which factors?

Obviously there's limits to the technique but I think it's an interesting lens to view ethical concerns through, but I don't see how (would like to better understand if?) it provides any insight into universal ethics or if there is such a thing because at the core of it all is a person who gets to decide what they think is and isn't important to factor into the calculation. Or maybe that's the point I missed.

Interesting in any case.

This formidable essay is beautiful and pure Kierkegaardian tragedy at the same time.

I feel how much the author wants to extend kindness to the infinite. Yet we live in a world so atomised and self-objectified that most of us fail to apply ethics to a few loved ones, to even one person, ourselves. Real ethics is finite, embodied, pragmatic, messy. It's the shit, piss, blood and mud of battlefields, caring for the old and dying, giving birth, honouring or betraying lovers, paying or cheating the tax man... and 80 years on this tiny rock, if we're lucky, is but a moment.

No wonder bright minds wish to escape, to be Luftmenchen soaring in the stratosphere of number theoretical grandiosity and the comfort of speculative theoretical physics. This is why we invented religions, and will continue to reinvent them in ever shifting guises.

If we care about ethics, love your neighbour as yourself. Not a hypothetical neighbour on planet Zarkphobble in the year 20123894, but that smelly homeless guy in a pool of vomit outside Costco you passed this morning. And for the rest of us, let's focus on doing less harm with the technology we create.